He taught and ministered in Richmond, Virginia, and became a popular author and speaker, going on several speaking tours around the United States and Canada.

The history professor John T. Kneebone writes that while Davis later said he had degrees from Guadalupe College (AM and DD), these were "probably honorary".

[1][2][3] He married Elizabeth Eloise Smith, a teacher at Baker Street,[4] on September 8, 1893; the couple had six children, three of whom survived into adulthood.

Davis sought to attract the same readers that had given Paul Laurence Dunbar success around the same era with 'Weh Down Souf; its cover was drawn by William Ludwell Sheppard.

[2] Davis had fallen ill by 1910 and—though he went to Hot Springs, Arkansas, in hope of relief—he died on October 25, 1913, of chronic nephritis.

The two dialect poems included in John Edward Bruce's Anthology of Negro Poetry were both written by Davis.

[2] Around two-thirds[3] of his poems were written in African-American Vernacular English and a profile by the scholar Jean Wagner noted that it was hard to tell whether he was "completely sincere or [...] set out to win easy popularity from an audience whose demands were slight."

It went on to describe him as the most conformist contemporary African-American poet and as writing with "scarcely any other concern than to flatter the white majority."

"[9] His work, both in publications and speeches, has been described as similar to Booker T. Washington's in adopting a "conciliatory" attitude to race relations.

His profile in The Virginia Magazine argues that he was "as race proud and militant as a public utterance by a southern black man could be" in his era.