Frank Marshall Davis was born on December 31, 1905, in Arkansas City, Kansas. His parents divorced, and Davis grew up living with his mother and stepfather, and with his maternal grandparents. He graduated from Arkansas City High School. In 1923, at age 17, he attended Friends University. From 1924 to 1927, and again in 1929, he attended Kansas State Agricultural College, now Kansas State University.

When Davis entered Kansas State, twenty-five other African-American students were enrolled. Kansas was segregated by custom, if not by law. Davis studied industrial journalism. He began to write poems as the result of a class assignment, and was encouraged by an English literature instructor to continue his poetry writing. Davis pledged Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity in 1925. He left college before getting a degree.

In 1927, Davis moved to Chicago, a destination of tens of thousands of African Americans during the Great Migration. He worked variously for the Chicago Evening Bulletin, the Chicago Whip, and the Gary American, all African American newspapers. He also wrote free-lance articles and short stories for African American magazines. During this time Davis began to write poetry seriously, including his first long poem, entitled Chicago's Congo, Sonata for an Orchestra.

In 1931 Davis moved to Atlanta to become an editor of a twice-weekly paper. Later that year he became the paper's managing editor. In 1932 the paper, renamed as the Atlanta Daily World became the nation's first successful black daily newspaper. Davis continued to write and publish poems, which came to the attention of Chicago socialite Frances Norton Manning. She introduced him to Norman Forgue, the publisher of Black Cat Press. In the summer of 1935, Forgue published Davis' first book, Black Man's Verse.

In 1935, Davis returned to Chicago to take the position of managing editor of the Associated Negro Press (ANP), a news service founded in 1919 for black newspapers. Eventually, Davis became executive editor of the ANP. He held the position until 1947. While in Chicago, Davis also started a photography club, worked for numerous political parties, and participated in the League of American Writers. Davis was an avid photographer, Davis wrote that his photography consisted in large part of nudes because "the female body fascinates me, both aesthetically and emotionally." He said that when photographing, he focused on "contours" and the "wide range of tones".

Davis, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and others were part of the South Side Writers Group, which met regularly beginning in 1936 to critique each other's work. They were part of what became known as the Black Chicago Renaissance.

Davis was an American journalist, poet, political & labor movement activist, businessman, and also worked as a sports reporter, in particular covering the rivalry between African-American boxer Joe Louis and the German Max Schmeling. He and other writers portrayed their confrontation as democracy and equality vs. fascism. Davis used his journalism to call for integration of the sports world. He believed that sports was a field in which men could break the color bar, and was a way to reach out to a working class. During the Great Depression, Davis participated in the federal Federal Writers' Project, under the Works Progress Administration and part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1937 he received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, funded by the president of Sears Roebuck, who became a major philanthropist.

He began to work on community organizing, starting a Chicago labor newspaper, The Star, toward the end of World War II. The paper's goal was to "promote a policy of cooperation and unity between Russia and the United States" seeking to "avoid the red-baiting tendencies of the mainstream press." In 1947, the Spokane Daily Chronicle of Washington state described the paper as "a red weekly", saying that it "has most of the markings of a Communist front publication." After World War II, Americans became suspicious of the Soviet Union, a former ally, after it extended its control over Eastern Europe, and fears were raised about the influence of Communism in the US.

In 1945, Davis taught one of the first jazz history courses in the United States, at the Abraham Lincoln School in Chicago. In 1948, with the encouragement of authors such as Richard Wright and Margaret Walker, Davis published a collection of poems, entitled 47th Street: Poems. The collection chronicled the varied life of African Americans on Chicago's South Side. Davis had been a strong supporter of the work of Richard Wright, describing his Uncle Tom's Children as "the most absorbing fiction penned by a Negro since George Schuyler's Black No More" (1931).

After Wright published articles explaining his break with communism, the two writers fell out. In his memoir Livin' the Blues (1992), Davis described Wright's essays on this theme as "an act of treason in the fight for our rights and aided only the racists who were constantly seeking any means to destroy cooperation between Reds and Blacks."

Davis promoted the ideal of a "raceless" society, based on his belief that race as a biological or social construct was illogical and a fallacy. Davis was a member of the Civil Rights Congress in 1947–1948, and was vice chair of the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee from 1944 to 1947. He was a supporter of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party.

In Livin' the Blues, Davis wrote of the period 1935 to 1948, "I worked with all kinds of groups. I made no distinction between those labeled Communist, Socialist or merely liberal. My sole criterion was this: Are you with me in my determination to wipe out white supremacy?" Some libraries removed his books, and he was the subject of FBI investigations in the 1940s and 1950s.

In 1948, Davis and his second wife, whom he had married in 1946, moved to Honolulu, Hawaii. In a 1974 interview with Black World/Negro Digest, Davis said they had been attracted to the place because of a magazine article his wife had read. In Hawaii, Davis wrote a weekly column, called "Frank-ly Speaking," for the Honolulu Record, a labor paper published by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Davis's early columns covered labor issues, but he broadened his scope to write about cultural and political issues, especially racism. He also explored the history of blues and jazz in his columns. Davis published little poetry between 1948 and 1978, when his final volume, Awakening, and Other Poems, was published.

In 1968, Davis wrote a pornographic novel, titled Sex Rebel: Black, publishing it under the pseudonym Bob Greene. It was published by William Hamling's Greenleaf Publishing Company.

In 1973, Davis visited Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., to deliver a poetry reading, marking the first time in 25 years that he had visited the U.S. mainland. His work began to be published in anthologies as there was a revival of interest in black writers due to the civil rights movement and increasing activism.

Davis joined the Omega Chapter on July 26, 1987.