In addition to being "the premier actress of all nineteenth-century black performers on the dramatic stage",[1] Davis was proclaimed by Marcus Garvey to be the "greatest woman of the Negro race today".

Within six months her mother had remarried to an influential Baltimorean, George A. Hackett, a member of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

[8] He worked to defeat the 1859 Jacobs bill that was crafted to enslave the children of free African Americans and deport their parents from the state of Maryland.

In 1878, while still in her late teens, she became the first African-American woman to be employed by the Office of the Recorder of Deeds[10] in Washington, D.C.; she worked as a copyist under George A. Sheridan.

In 1881, noted abolitionist, civil rights activist, and Davis' family friend Frederick Douglass was appointed Recorder of Deeds.

During the summer of 1883, Davis (under the management of James Monroe Trotter and William H. Dupree) made a tour of Boston, Worcester, and New Bedford, Massachusetts; Providence and Newport, Rhode Island; Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut; and New York City and Albany.

[15] In 1893 Davis started her own company in Chicago, traveled to the Caribbean, and collaborated on writing Our Old Kentucky Home with distinguished journalist and future Garveyite John Edward Bruce.

[16] Throughout her entire career, Davis only performed in four full-length productions: Damon and Pythias (1884), Dessalines (1893), Our Old Kentucky Home (1898), and Henri Christophe (1912).

[18] While traveling in the Caribbean, Davis learned of the work of Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant to the United States who founded a Pan-African movement.

She established UNIA-ACL divisions in Cuba, Guadeloupe, St. Thomas, Virgin Islands; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica.

In that same year she was a member of a committee that delivered petitions to U.S. President Calvin Coolidge seeking Garvey's exoneration on mail fraud charges.

In her acceptance speech, Gage said about Davis:She was well aware that the classical canon was by and about white people and she embraced the work of contemporary Black playwrights attempting to write new epic plays.