40 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyretracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago.” (Cliff Kincaid, “Obama’s
Communist Mentor,” Accuracy in Media, February 18, 2008) Obama’s association with a
prominent Communist furnished the basis for the charge made against Obama by Allen Keyes
during the Senate campaign of 2004 that he was a “hard-core academic Marxist.” Frank Marshall
Davis was publicly identified as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Obama was
almost like a son to Davis, listening to his poetry and hanging on each word of his advice. Davis,
along with some other older black men, appear to have constituted a sort of CPUSA cell or sleeper
cell in Hawaii. Obama was taken to visit them in his early teens by his grandfather, Stanley
Dunham. Davis was a part of this now-informal group.
Frank Marshall Davis was mentioned in the 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive
Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii as a CPUSA member. The House Un-
American Activities Committee (HUAC) accused Davis of involvement in several communist-front
organizations. The identification of Obama’s “Frank” as Frank Marshall Davis is confirmed by
Trevor Loudon, a New Zealand libertarian activist, researcher and blogger in a posting of March
- Obama writes that he knew “a poet named Frank” who was a purveyor of “hard-earned
knowledge,” and advice. Frank had had “some modest notoriety once,” and was “a contemporary of
Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago...,” Frank was now “pushing
eighty.” Obama was impressed that “Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self” gave him advice
before he left Hawaii for Occidental College in 1979, when Obama was 18.
Davis has been seen by some critics as a precursor to Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. There is
at least one book-length study of Davis entitled Black Moods: Collected Poems of Frank Marshall
Davis by John Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas. In his review of Tidwell’s
study published in the summer/fall 2003 issue of African-American Review, James A. Miller of
George Washington University comments: “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 membership.” Tidwell is an expert on the life and writings of Davis.
The decrepit intellectual periphery of the CPUSA has been notably stirred up by Obama’s
candidacy, doubtless in part because of Davis. Professor Horne, who is a contributing editor of the
Communist Party journal Political Affairs, mentioned the Obama-David connection in March 2007
at the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University; Horne’s
talk was entitled “Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party.” Davis also figures
prominently in The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African-American Poetry, 1930-1946 by
James Edward Smethurst, associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of
Massachusetts-Amherst. Here Davis appears as a black writer who remained loyal to the CPUSA
even after Stalin’s infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact with Hitler, at a time when other black
intellectuals like Richard Wright broke with the CPUSA line. For Frank Marshall Davis,
communism was the god that did not fail. But what was Frank’s understanding of communism?
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 opportunity and the American way and all that s**t.” Davis also
complained about foot problems, the result of “trying to force African feet into European shoes,”
Obama wrote. Horne gloated that the Obama-Davis connection will emerge as a theme of wide
study in the near future. Horne says that Obama’s giving credit to Davis will be important in
history. “At some point in the future, a teacher will add to her syllabus Barack’s memoir and