What is the serial monitor actually doing?

Projects General Guidance
6

NewSoftwareSerial is SoftwareSerial in the new 1.0 IDE and included.

Just be sure: your LED display is controlled by a UART interface? You don't mix up SPI and UART, do you?

If you wanna put the TX line high during startup of the display move Serial.begin() down after that startup happened.

  pinMode(1,OUTPUT);
  digitalWrite(1, HIGH); //set high as per the data sheet recommendation to mitigate spurious data
  delay(1000);
  Serial.begin(9600);