In 1924, Damas was sent to Martinique to attend the Lycée Victor Schoelcher (a secondary school), where he would meet his lifelong friend and collaborator Aimé Césaire.

While he studied law under guidance from his parents, his diverse array of courses in other topics like anthropology, history, and literature sparked his interest in radical politics.

Though Pigments was eventually banned by the French government as a "threat to the security of the state", before its removal, it was translated and distributed across several countries and continents.

He also served as the contributing editor of Présence Africaine, one of the most respected journals of Black studies, and as senior adviser and UNESCO delegate for the Society of African Culture.

His poems, which sometimes experimented with typography and with the sound of words, were astonishingly modern for their time, and they seemed to anticipate the black poetry, both English and French, of a much later timeframe.