Last week, a video surfaced of Barack Obama explicitly and openly identifying the “poet named Frank” (as Obama refers to him in his autobiography Dreams From My Father) as Frank Marshall Davis. If there was any remaining doubt that his friend and mentor was indeed the card carrying Communist Frank Marshall DAvis, there should no longer be.
The footage is said to have been recorded on September 20, 1995, with the program originally airing on Channel 37 Cambridge Municipal Television as an episode of the show, “The Author Series.”
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In his remarks, Obama never identifies Davis as a communist or even a leftist. But the remarks do reflect the significant influence that Davis had over his young life as he was growing up in Hawaii. Obama talks about how Davis “schools” him on the subject of race relations. The term implies a teacher-student relationship the two of them had, confirming what we had reported back in 2008, that Davis had functioned as Obama’s “mentor.”
It’s important to understand what Obama is saying here. Getting ready to read directly from his book, Dreams from My Father, Obama talks about the passages ending with “me having a conversation with a close friend of my maternal grandfather, a close friend of gramps, a black man from Kansas, named Frank, actually at the time a fairly well-known poet named Frank Marshall Davis, who had moved to Hawaii and lived there, and so I have a discussion with him about the kinds of frustrations I’m having, and he sorts of schools me that I should get used to these frustrations…”
Long story short – Obama was admitting that a card-carrying Communist – a man for whom he had great respect – had “schooled” him on white racism – among many other things.
Obama in his book recounts how, just prior to heading off to Occidental College in 1979, he spent some time with “Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self.” Obama writes that “Frank” told him that college was merely “an advanced degree in compromise,” and cautioned him not to “start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that sh–.” Davis also told Obama: “What I’m trying to tell you is your [white] grandma’s right to be scared…. She understands that black people have a reason to hate. That’s just how it is. For your sake, I wish it were otherwise. But it’s not. So you might as well get used to it.”
Davis penned many poems during his lifetime. One of them, titled “To the Red Army,” hailed the Soviet revolution and condemned the “rich industrialists” in Washington DC and London who allegedly wanted Hitler and the Nazis to “wipe Communism from the globe.”
Davis also wrote poems mocking traditional Christianity. In some of those compositions, he called Christ “a Dixie Nigger” who was nothing more than “another New White Hope”; he derided Christians as hypocrites “who buy righteousness like groceries”; and he spoke of Africans being killed with a “Christian gun” by missionaries following “the religion of Sweet Jesus,” rather than by a spear.
Another Davis poem, “Peace Quiz for America,” condemns “Uncle Sam” for having sent him to fight “against Axis foes in the death-kissed foxholes of New Guinea and Europe, without shielding my back from the sniping Dixie lynchers in the jungles of Texas and Florida.”
In 1968 Davis, under the pseudonym Bob Green, authored the book Sex Rebel: Black (Memoirs of a Gash Gourmet), an explict, pornographic autobiography published in San Diego by Greenleaf Classics. Emphasizing that “all incidents I have described here [in the book] have been taken from actual experiences,” Davis openly acknowledged that he lived the life of a sexual swinger:
“I admit, however, that my sex syndrome may be more complex than that of many swingers and swappers…. Under certain circumstances I am bi-sexual…. I’m also a voyeur and exhibitionist. Occasionally I am mildly interested in sado-masochism.”
Further, the book described sexual encounters which the fictional Greene and his wife had experienced with underage children of both sexes
Twenty years later, in celebration of National Poetry Month, Obama would advise America’s school children to read the poetry of Walt Whitman to understand America.
Now that he’s the president of a country that has not yet been fully transformed – it’s easy see why he snubbed his childhood mentor – who was after all, once a fairly well known poet.
Author Paul Kengor outlined Davis’ essentials values in The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor:
- Advocated wealth redistribution from (in his words) greedy “corporations” to “health insurance” and “public works projects”;
- Favored taxpayer funding of universal health care;
- Supported government stimulus and trumpeted the public sector over the private sector;
- Dismissed traditional notions of American exceptionalism and framed the U.S. not as selflessly serving the post-World War II planet but instead as selfishly flaunting its so-called “mountainous ego” and “racist-imperialist-colonialist” ambitions;
- Sought political support from the “social justice”-oriented Religious Left;
- Viewed the Catholic Church as an obstacle to his vision for the state;
- Vilified the “tentacles of big business,” bankers, big oil, “excess profits,” corporate fat cats and their “fat contracts,” “millionaires,” “rich men,” and the wealthy;
- Attacked “GOP” tax cuts that “spare the rich” and benefit “millionaires” only;
- Singled out the “corporate executive” for not paying his “fair share”;
- Used slogans such as “change” and “forward.”
And now, a bizarre new video has surfaced of Frank Marshall Davis boasting about how he had steered the FBI away from the truth in order to hurt “Uncle Toms” and promote “militants”:
INTERVIEWER 1: You had some few later dealings with the FBI throughout your life, yeah?
FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve had the FBI, but I, I often had the FBI contacting me in, at the Associated Negro Press. They were going, they wanted to find out whether such and such a person who had applied for a job in Washington was a, a good risk. So I had determined that if this brother who applied for this job in Washington was an Uncle Tom, then I would tell the FBI that this person was no, was a risk, and he was no good. And so I, I used to work this in the reverse, and if a person had, was officially a militant, I would praise them the highest. I would say he is completely in favor of the Constitution of the, he supports the entire Constitution and so forth, so it would have just the, I hoped it would have just the opposite effect on the FBI.
INTERVIEWER 1: OK we’ll, we’ll stop right there on this one. Maybe it’ll be a good note to call it off.
According to Kengor, during the Cold War, the FBI placed Davis on its security index –
which meant that if an armed conflict occurred between the U.S. and Soviet Union, the feds would’ve viewed Davis as a prime suspect for treason.
Davis was known to the FBI to be a Stalinist agent working in the United States – part of a well established communist network operating on the Hawaiian islands.
According to Davis’ FBI file, his column in the Record “constantly followed the CP [Communist Party] line” and was “devoted to unrelenting and unmitigated complaints of racial discrimination in the United States.” Added the FBI file: “Davis has revealed himself to be a bitter opponent of capitalism and a staunch defender of … prominent Communists and Communist sympathizers.” Specifically, his weekly columns expressed support for theNational Lawyers Guild, Soviet Russia’s foreign policy in Southeast Asia, U.S. recognition of Communist China, the airing of black Americans’ grievances before the United Nations, American disarmament, and the acquittal of Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Moreover, Davis opposed the Smith Act of 1940, a federal statute that set criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government.
Davis would continue writing for the Recorduntil May 1957.
In the late 1940s, Davis attempted to lead a hostile CPUSA takeover of the NAACP. In 1950 Edward Berman, a member of the NAACP’s Honolulu branch, testified to HUAC that Davis had “sneaked” into local NAACP meetings to “propagandize” the organization’s members about America’s “racial problems,” with “the avowed intent and purpose of converting it into a front for the Stalinist line.”
Davis was identified unequivocally as a CPUSA member in a 1951 report by the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii (CSALTH), which, like HUAC, charged that Davis was affiliated with a number of Communist-front organizations.
In May 1953 Davis was elected president of the Hawaii Civil Rights Congress, an affiliate of the Civil Rights Congress (which, as noted above, had already been cited by the U.S. government as a subversive organization).
Also in the early Fifties, Davis chaired the defense committee for the “Honolulu Seven,” a group of Communists who were charged with Smith Act violations and were convicted in 1953 of advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence.
According to Max Friedman, a former undercover member of several Communist-controlled “anti-war” groups, Davis testified in 1956 before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (which was investigating “the scope of Soviet activity in the United States”) and invoked his Fifth Amendment right when asked about his Communist Party membership.
According to the FBI, Davis in 1957 “championed the policies of Soviet Russia.”
In 1959 an FBI source who was close to Davis reported that Davis had been having conflict with his comrades at the ILWU and the Honolulu Record, because Davis was a “haole [Caucasian] hater.”
That a man like Frank Marshall Davis could be good friends with Obama’s white grandfather suggests only one thing. That Obama’s white grandfather was an ardent fellow traveler.
Why the FBI would be contacting Frank Marshall Davis for advice on new hires in Washington DC, is anyone’s guess. Was he a trusted informant by this time?
Considering his background (Read Kengor’s The Communist) it’s hard to believe this could be the case.
One HOPES that Davis was trying to prop himself up as some kind of left-wing hero – a once *in-demand* double agent who foiled the white power structure and stuff.
Creepy old shit.
Oh yeah – this Caucasian-hater was our president’s MENTOR.
Nice Deb 
