Before Wright and Ayers There Was “Frank”

Update 5:12 PM, 10/7/08: After reading this article, please see comments from Frank Marshall Davis' son Mark.

Despite attempts by the Obama campaign to disparage research into Obama’s obscured past as “swiftboating,” new troubling associations emerge daily raising questions as to why Obama consistently surrounded himself with Anti-American anarchists.

It has gradually come to light that Barack Obama has had a number of long-term “problematic associations with anarchists” that have served to shape and mold his present character. One of his earliest and perhaps most important mentors was a man named Frank Marshall Davis.

Gerald Horne, a Communist Party historian and contributing editor of the Marxist online publication, Political Affairs magazine, wrote in “Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party,” that in Dreams From My Father, Obama names a mysterious “Frank” as an early mentor who was a “decisive-influence” in helping to mold his present African-American identity.

Although, Obama failed to provide Frank’s last name in his book, it has since been established by the Obama campaign that “Frank” was the African-American poet and journalist Frank Marshall Davis, who moved from Chicago to Honolulu in 1948 “at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson.” Robeson was a famous African-American actor, civil rights activist, and a member of the American Communist Party. It would appear that Davis, also a member of the American Communist Party, had considerable influence on Obama; an influence which continued through several formative years. Additionally, it has been suggested by Horne that Obama’s move to Chicago was an attempt to retrace the steps of Davis.

Obama’s recollections of “Frank” in Dreams From My Father was that of a black male role model introduced to him by his grandfather, Stanley Dunhan. Davis, who died in 1987, shows up as “Frank” in several places in Obama’s book primarily because he gave Obama a great deal of advice on life and on race-relations.

In mid September, The O’Reilly Factor interviewed, David Fredosso, author of The Case Against Barack Obama. Fredosso told O’Reilly that according to congressional testimony Davis came to Hawaii from Chicago to help the communists take over the NAACP. According to Obama’s admission in his book, Davis gave Obama advice to “never quite fully trust white people,” and “not to become a race-traitor when he goes to college.”

Joshua Muravchik in writing “Obama's Leftism” for the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, points out that Davis was a long-term Communist party member who remaned active “also when it officially dissolved and went underground in the 1950's.”

Muravchik quotes Obama’s own words about his selection of associates, and points out that to Obama and his colleagues and mentors, the term “community organizer” was a euphemism for professional radical!

“ . . .to avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets . . ."

Accuracy in Media has an explosive article by Cliff Kincaid, written in February 2008, “Obama’s Communist Mentor.” The article attempts to answer the dangerous question, Is “coalition politics” at work in Obama’s rise to power?

John Edgar Tidwell, the editor of books by Davis, confirmed that Davis was a communist. Kincaid wrote:

In addition to Tidwell's book, Black Moods: Collected Poems of Frank Marshall Davis, confirming Davis's Communist Party membership, another book, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946, names Davis as one of several black poets who continued to publish in CPUSA-supported publications after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact. . . Dr. Kathryn Takara, a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who also confirms that Davis is the "Frank" in Obama's book, did her dissertation on Davis and spent much time with him between 1972 until he passed away in 1987. . .

Kincaid also refers to the work of Trevour Loudon, of New Zealand, who has been analyzing the political forces behind Obama’s meteoric rise from obscurity. Loudon refers to a letter to the CPUSA from a supporter, Frank Chapman, “hailing the Illinois senator’s victory in the Iowa caucuses.”

"Obama's victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle," Chapman wrote. "Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This is the old revolutionary ‘mole,' not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through."

Townhall Columnist Frank J. Gaffney Jr. wrote “A World Without America,” which also points to the work of Cliff Kincaid in identifying Davis, who was under FBI surveillance for nineteen years, as a “high-level operative in a Soviet-sponsored network in Hawaii,” which “the communists had targeted…largely because of its strategic location and importance to the U.S. defense effort.”

Kincaid describes Davis as a “propagandist, racial agitator and recruiter for the Communist Party of the USA.”

Intriguing comments appear on numerous blogs and message boards about Davis’ connections to the Washington Post chairman, the late Katharine Graham, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (the labor union that “subsidized” the Honolulu Record, which Davis wrote for), the American Committee for Foreign Born, and about Davis’ drug use and lurid sexual exploits prior to becoming Obama’s mentor. One particular comment points to a pornographic novel Sex Rebel: Black (Memoirs of a Gourmet Gash) supposedly written by Davis under a pseudonym, Bob Green.

A new biography of Barack Obama The Dream Begins: How Hawaii Shaped Barack Obama, by journalists Stu Glauberman and Jerry Burris, purports to “fully explore” Obama’s friendship with Davis.

The book is the first to fully explore Obama's friendship with African- American poet and activist Frank Marshall Davis, who has been demonized as a "Communist" by some, but lionized in Hawaii as an ardent defender of social justice for ethnic union workers and blue-collar laborers. It was Davis who helped shape Obama's ideals of racial equality, which would later prompt him to become a community organizer.

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