Obama's Communist Mentor
AIM Column | By Cliff Kincaid | February 18, 2008
Is "coalition politics" at work in Obama's rise to power?
In his biography of Barack Obama, David Mendell writes about Obama's life
as
a "secret smoker" and how he "went to great lengths to conceal the habit."
But what about Obama's secret political life? It turns out that Obama's
childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a communist.
In his books, Obama admits attending "socialist conferences" and coming
into
contact with Marxist literature. But he ridicules the charge of being a
"hard-core academic Marxist," which was made by his colorful and outspoken
2004 U.S. Senate opponent, Republican Alan Keyes.
However, through Frank Marshall Davis, Obama had an admitted relation****p
with someone who was publicly identified as a member of the Communist
Party
USA (CPUSA). The record shows that Obama was in Hawaii from 1971-1979,
where, at some point in time, he developed a close relation****p, almost
like
a son, with Davis, listening to his "poetry" and getting advice on his
career path. But Obama, in his book, Dreams From My Father, refers to him
repeatedly as just "Frank."
The reason is apparent: Davis was a known communist who belonged to a
party
subservient to the Soviet Union. In fact, the 1951 re****t of the
Commission
on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii
identified him as a CPUSA member. What's more, anti-communist
congressional
committees, including the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC),
accused Davis of involvement in several communist-front organizations.
Trevor Loudon, a New Zealand-based libertarian activist, researcher and
blogger, noted evidence that "Frank" was Frank Marshall Davis in a posting
in March of 2007.
Obama's communist connection adds to mounting public concern about a
candidate who has come out of virtually nowhere, with a brief U.S. Senate
legislative record, to become the Democratic Party frontrunner for the
U.S.
presidency. In the latest Real Clear Politics poll average, Obama beats
Republican John McCain by almost four percentage points.
AIM recently disclosed that Obama has well-do***ented socialist
connections,
which help explain why he sponsored a "Global Poverty Act" designed to
send
hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. foreign aid to the rest of the
world, in order to meet U.N. demands. The bill has passed the House and a
Senate committee, and awaits full Senate action.
But the Communist Party connection through Davis is even more ominous.
Decades ago, the CPUSA had tens of thousands of members, some of them
covert
agents who had penetrated the U.S. Government. It received secret
subsidies
from the old Soviet Union.
You won't find any of this discussed in the David Mendell book, Obama:
From
Promise to Power. It is typical of the superficial biographies of Obama
now
on the market. Secret smoking seems to be Obama's most controversial
activity. At best, Mendell and the liberal media describe Obama as
"left-leaning."
But you will find it briefly discussed, sort of, in Obama's own book,
Dreams
From My Father. He writes about "a poet named Frank," who visited them in
Hawaii, read poetry, and was full of "hard-earned knowledge" and advice.
Who
was Frank? Obama only says that he had "some modest notoriety once," was
"a
contem****ary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during his years in
Chicago..." but was now "pu****ng eighty." He writes about "Frank and his
old
Black Power da****ki self" giving him advice before he left for Occidental
College in 1979 at the age of 18.
This "Frank" is none other than Frank Marshall Davis, the black communist
writer now considered by some to be in the same category of prominence as
Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. In the summer/fall 2003 issue of African
American Review, James A. Miller of George Wa****ngton University reviews a
book by John Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas, about
Davis's career, and notes, "In Davis's case, his political commitments led
him to join the American Communist Party during the middle of World War
II-even though he never publicly admitted his Party member****p." Tidwell
is
an expert on the life and writings of Davis.
Is it possible that Obama did not know who Davis was when he wrote his
book,
Dreams From My Father, first published in 1995? That's not plausible since
Obama refers to him as a contem****ary of Richard Wright and Langston
Hughes
and says he saw a book of his black poetry.
The communists knew who "Frank" was, and they know who Obama is. In fact,
one academic who travels in communist circles understands the significance
of the Davis-Obama relation****p.
Professor Gerald Horne, a contributing editor of the Communist Party
journal
Political Affairs, talked about it during a speech last March at the
reception of the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library at
New
York University. The remarks are posted online under the headline,
"Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party."
Horne, a history professor at the University of Houston, noted that Davis,
who moved to Honolulu from Kansas in 1948 "at the suggestion of his good
friend Paul Robeson," came into contact with Barack Obama and his family
and
became the young man's mentor, influencing Obama's sense of identity and
career moves. Robeson, of course, was the well-known black actor and
singer
who served as a member of the CPUSA and apologist for the old Soviet
Union.
Davis had known Robeson from his time in Chicago.
As Horne describes it, Davis "befriended" a "Euro-American family" that
had
"migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family
eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who
goes
by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually
decamped to Chicago."
It was in Chicago that Obama became a "community organizer" and came into
contact with more far-left political forces, including the Democratic
Socialists of America, which maintains close ties to European socialist
groups and parties through the Socialist International (SI), and two
former
members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), William Ayers and
Carl Davidson.
The SDS laid siege to college campuses across America in the 1960s, mostly
in order to protest the Vietnam War, and spawned the terrorist Weather
Underground organization. Ayers was a member of the terrorist group and
turned himself in to authorities in 1981. He is now a college professor
and
served with Obama on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago. Davidson is
now
a figure in the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism,
an
offshoot of the old Moscow-controlled CPUSA, and helped organize the 2002
rally where Obama came out against the Iraq War.
Both communism and socialism trace their roots to Karl Marx, co-author of
the Communist Manifesto, who endorsed the first meeting of the Socialist
International, then called the "First International." According to Pierre
Mauroy, president of the SI from 1992-1996, "It was he [Marx] who formally
launched it, gave the inaugural address and devised its structure..."
Apparently unaware that Davis had been publicly named as a CPUSA member,
Horne said only that Davis "was certainly in the orbit of the CP
[Communist
Party]-if not a member..."
In addition to Tidwell's book, Black Moods: Collected Poems of Frank
Marshall Davis, confirming Davis's Communist Party member****p, 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-sup****ted publications after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression
pact. The author, James Edward Smethurst, associate professor of
Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, says
that
Davis, however, would later claim that he was "deeply troubled" by the
pact.
While blacks such as Richard Wright left the CPUSA, it is not clear if or
when Davis ever left the party.
However, Obama writes in Dreams From My Father that he saw "Frank" only a
few days before he left Hawaii for college, and that Davis seemed just as
radical as ever. Davis called college "An advanced degree in compromise"
and
warned Obama not to forget his "people" and not to "start believing what
they tell you about equal op****tunity and the American way and all that s
hit." Davis also complained about foot problems, the result of "trying to
force African feet into European shoes," Obama wrote.
For his part, Horne says that Obama's giving of credit to Davis will be
im****tant in history. "At some point in the future, a teacher will add to
her syllabus Barack's memoir and instruct her students to read it
alongside
Frank Marshall Davis' equally affecting memoir, Living the Blues and when
that day comes, I'm sure a future student will not only examine critically
the Frankenstein monsters that US imperialism created in order to subdue
Communist parties but will also be moved to come to this historic and
wonderful archive in order to gain insight on what has befallen this
complex
and intriguing planet on which we reside," he said.
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.
In an analysis posted online, she notes that Davis, who was a columnist
for
the Honolulu Record, brought "an acute sense of race relations and class
struggle throughout America and the world" and that he openly discussed
subjects such as American imperialism, colonialism and exploitation. She
described him as a "socialist realist" who attacked the work of the House
Un-American Activities Committee.
Davis, in his own writings, had said that Robeson and Harry Bridges, the
head of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and a
secret
member of the CPUSA, had suggested that he take a job as a columnist with
the Honolulu Record "and see if I could do something for them." The ILWU
was
organizing workers there and Robeson's contacts were "passed on" to Davis,
Takara writes.
Takara says that Davis "espoused freedom, radicalism, solidarity, labor
unions, due process, peace, affirmative action, civil rights, Negro
History
week, and true Democracy to fight imperialism, colonialism, and white
supremacy. He urged coalition politics."
Is "coalition politics" at work in Obama's rise to power?
Trevor Loudon, the New Zealand-based blogger who has been analyzing the
political forces behind Obama and specializes in studying the impact of
Marxist and leftist political organizations, notes that Frank Chapman, a
CPUSA sup****ter, has written a letter to the party newspaper 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."
Let's challenge the liberal media to re****t on this. Will they have the
honesty and integrity to do so?
Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Re****t and can be reached at
cliff.kincaid@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:cliff.kincaid@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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