Benjamin J. Davis was an African American journalist, attorney, activist, and politician, the best-known black American Communist from the mid 1930s until his death three decades later. His chief goal throughout his adult life was to gain equality for African Americans; his career as both writer and activist--including six years as an openly Communist member of the New York City Council, from 1943 to 1949, and nearly four years in a federal prison, from 1951 to 1955--was devoted single-mindedly to this end.

Benjamin Jefferson Davis Jr. was born on 8 September 1903 and spent the first six years of his life in rural Dawson, Georgia, two hundred miles southwest of Atlanta. He was one of five children born to Benjamin Davis Sr. and Willa Porter Davis, although only Ben Jr. and a sister survived beyond infancy. In 1909, when he was six, the family moved to Atlanta. There Ben Davis Sr., a national figure...