Kansas-born Frank Marshall Davis was 6 feet, 1 inch the day he graduated high school but, according to his memoir, he felt 1 foot, 6.

It wasn’t family who made him feel small. Davis’ mother and grandmother were positive influences, says John Edgar Tidwell, a Kansas University English professor.

It wasn’t his church. And it wasn’t the Arkansas City library, through which he read his way with that greed peculiar to minds that are hungry both for knowledge and repose.

No, his sense of shriveled stature came from aspects of life other than home, church and library. Perhaps part of the shriveling came at age 5 when he was, he writes, “personally selected for a lynching.”

“Both daily papers must have carried another Southern social note about this popular pastime of that era, and a couple of third graders decided to stage their own junior necktie party.”

The white boys jumped him in a vacant lot, held him down, slipped a rope over his head. Only a white man’s sudden appearance stopped any further tightening of the noose.

Eventually, Davis would go off to Kansas State College today Kansas State University for a couple of years. A freshman English teacher gave him and his classmates the option of writing an essay or a poem and, says Tidwell, “Davis sought the easy way out.” He wrote a poem.

The teacher liked it and after class asked him whether he had more. He said yes, then dashed off to the library to write them.

Tidwell has just edited a collection of Davis’ poems titled “Black Moods: Collected Poems.” In it, he tackles a charge that’s Davis is only capable of bitterness and bombast in his poetry. Tidwell points to poems of love, satire and social engagement.

The trouble is, Davis is unforgettable when he’s fierce. In the first poem “I Am the American Negro,” published in 1937, Davis warns readers what’s to come:

Fairy words a Pollyana mind

Do not roam these pages.

Inside

There are coarse victuals

A couch of rough boards

Companions who seldom smile

Yet it is the soul’s abode

Of a Negro dreamer

For being black

In my America

Is no rendezvous

With Venus

The poem “Giles Johnson, Ph.D.” is also tart, but with a comic twist:

Giles Johnson

had four college degrees

knew the whyfore of this

the wherefore of that

could orate in Latin

or cuss in Greek

and having learned such things

he died of starvation

because he wouldn’t teach

and he couldn’t porter.

Davis was not hard-edged in person. He masked his feelings behind a poker face.

Tidwell said, “People often didn’t know what Davis was thinking by looking at his facial expressions or listening to his tone of voice.”

Not when it came to personal matters, anyway.

When it came to his journalism, it was a different story.

Davis brought the Atlanta World, a black newspaper, from twice-a-week publication to success as a daily. He edited news releases and wrote columns for the Associated Negro Press in Chicago. Between 1946 and 1948, he helped establish a labor newspaper in Chicago. He gave political speeches.

Then, in 1948, after three years of political activities and FBI monitoring, he moved to Hawaii with his wife, Helen Canfield, a socialite he crossed racial lines to marry. There they had five children, Davis first becoming a father at age 44.

A few lines from a poem titled “To Helen” indicate his softer side:

I shall make you part of me,

My darling,

Fundamental as heart

Primary as mind

And to you I shall become

As the blood in your veins

So that neither you nor I

Could survive

The mutilation of leaving.

They divorced after 24 years. Near the end of his life, he would write words about his memories of love:

When you are gone

I talk low with ghosts

And none of us

Has very much to say

Davis lived long enough to be celebrated by some of the radical black poets of the 1970s. That pleased him even though his ideal a completely integrated America was not theirs.

The blues of Frank Marshall Davis were not the blues of self-pity or mourning, says Tidwell, but of tempered strength.

I was a weaver of jagged words

A warbler of garbled tunes

A singer of savage songs

I was bitter

Yes

Bitter and sorely sad

For when I wrote

I dipped my pen

In the crazy heart

Of mad America

Roger Martin is a research writer and editor for the Kansas University Center for Research and editor of Explore, KU’s research magazine Web site, which can be found at www.research.ku.edu. Martin’s e-mail address is rmartin@kucr.ku.edu.