Page 2 - Florida Sentinel 1-31-20

Feature
Langston Hughes/Griff Davis Exhibit On Display At The Florida Museum Of Photographic Arts In Tampa
BY KENYA WOODARD Sentinel Feature Writer
Growing up, Dorothy Davis knew renowned writer and poet, Langston Hughes as a close friend to her father, Griff Davis, a writer and photographer.
It wasn’t until Hughes’ death in 1967 when Davis learned that he was a giant in the literary world.
“I didn’t know who he was...until I read his obitu- ary,” she said.
She would learn even more after her father’s death in 1993, when she became ex- ecutor of his estate. It was while going through thou- sands of pictures and docu- ments that she would find
letters exchanged between the two men spanning decades.
Twenty-seven years later, several of those letters and pictures are now on display at the Florida Museum of Pho- tographic Arts in a new ex- hibit “Griff Davis and Langston Hughes, Letters and Photographs 1947 – 1967: A Global Friendship.”
Langston Hughes and Griff Davis crossed paths in 1947 in a classroom at Atlanta University. Griff was a for- mer GI-turned-student; Hughes, a creative writing lecturer. What began as a mentorship evolved into a friendship that was sustained by regular correspondence. It was Hughes who wrote to
Writer and photographer, Griff Davis with his friend, renowned writer and poet Langston Hughes.
Ebony Magazine founder and publisher John H. Johnson and recommended he hire Griff Davis as a writer and photographer.
The move would launch his career as an international journalist and his work also would appear in Life Maga- zine, The New York Times, and the Black Star Photo Agency, among publications. Davis later entered the U. S. Foreign Service, serving as a diplomat in Africa.
In their letters, Hughes and Davis shared every- thing: travels, current events, ups and downs. They contain small, mundane details like Hughes notifying Griff that he has mail waiting for him when he returns. And big happenings, like Griff’s de- tails of his travels in Liberia.
The letters also reveal a side of Hughes that’s not commonly known, Dorothy said.
For example, Hughes took in boarders – including Griff while he was in gradu- ate school at Columbia Uni- versity – to help pay the mortgage on his Harlem home that he shared with his aunt and uncle.
“You can relate to him,” she said. “In one letter, (Hughes) says ‘I can’t pay the people who work for me’”.
Dorothy said organizing Griff’s papers taught her more about her father.
“I got to know the full 360 degrees of him,” she said.
The exhibit marks the first time many of these photos are being shown.
At least two – a portrait of Hughes sitting at his type- writer and another of he and author, Arna Bontemps – are very familiar as they were used as covers for the books, The Ways of White Folks and Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925–1967,
respectively.
When not on assignment,
Griff would photograph Langston interviewing the numerous luminaries and celebrities who stopped by his home, including jazz great, Dizzy Gillespie.
In 1949, Griff traveled to Africa and for the next three years filed stories and photo- graphs as the African Inde- pendence Movements began sweeping the continent. He wrote about Ethiopian Em- peror Haile Selassie and snapped a picture of then- Vice President Richard Nixon in Ghana talking with civil rights activists, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King at an Independence Day event.
Because Martin Luther King, Jr., was already a con- troversial figure in the United States, the photo was never published in that country, Dorothy said.
Hughes reached out to Griff while he was in Africa, asking him to refer African writers for literary and news projects he was working on, Dorothy said.
Langston Hughes
championed narratives and perspectives about the Black experience throughout the di- aspora, she said.
“He was just a regular per- son who happened to have a wonderful skill,” she said. “He loved Black people.”
If You Go
The exhibit, “Griff Davis and Langston Hughes, Letters and Pho- tographs 1947 – 1967: A Global Friendship,” will be on display until April 19 at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, 400 N. Ashley Dr. Visit www. fmopa.org for times and to purchase tickets.
PAGE 2-A FLORIDA SENTINEL BULLETIN PUBLISHED EVERY TUESDAY AND FRIDAY FRIDAY, JANUARY 31, 2020