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| Frank Marshall Davis & Barack Obama | : Like father, like son |
By Rusty Weiss and Cliff Kincaid
AIM.org
July 17, 2012
The morning after Election Day, 2008, The New York Times proclaimed
that Barack Obama’s victory had swept “away the last racial barrier in
American politics.” However, as the President’s first term draws to a
close, a case can be made that the historic election was anything but
post-racial; rather, it has been the most racially polarizing presidency
in modern times.
This is not a surprise, however, to those familiar with Obama’s
background and thinking on racial matters, nor to those who have studied
the role played by Communist Frank Marshall Davis in raising him as a
young man in Hawaii during his critical coming of age period. Davis was
not only a slavish follower of Joseph Stalin, but a black racist who saw
sinister white plots in the foreign policies of the United States and
other Western nations.
Davis, a poet and writer, had written a controversial poem, “Christ
is a Dixie Nigger,” dismissing the object of the Christian faith as
“another New White Hope.”
Obama’s own book, Dreams from My Father, talks about asking
“Frank” for advice when his white grandmother had been accosted by a
black panhandler. Davis told Obama that his grandmother was right to be
scared and that “She understands that black people have reason to hate.”
Paul Kengor’s new book, The Communist. Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, examines the Davis mentality and ideology which shaped Obama in more detail. As Kengor’s book documents, Davis:
- Considered American racism a “disease” that “Red Russia” had solved
- Wrote in a column on July 20, 1946, that the Soviet Union had, “in less than a generation,” abolished “discrimination and racism”
- Wrote that “the only people” Winston Churchill cared about were “the white people of the British empire”
- Labeled the Marshall Plan for Western Europe after World War II a form of white imperialism, designed to “help maintain European empires at the expense of exploited dark colonial peoples”
- Considered anti-communism a form of racism
Some of this information about Davis was available in 2008, when
Accuracy in Media disclosed the fact that Obama’s mentor “Frank” in his
book, Dreams from My Father, was actually Frank Marshall Davis. We noted that, by Obama’s own account,
Davis had subjected the young man to racial advice and
diatribes. However, the Kengor book draws upon many of Davis’s columns,
published in Communist papers in Chicago and Hawaii, where these views
were put into print. Hence, it expands our understanding of Davis—and
therefore Obama. What’s more, Kengor looks at Davis’s views in terms of
Obama’s policies as President.
