FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS

• Communist writer and poet (1905-1987)
• Friend of Paul Robeson
• Mentor to a young Barack Obama in the 1970s
• Dedicated supporter of the Soviet Union and enemy of America

Frank Marshall Davis was born in Arkansas City, Kansas on December 31, 1905. For periods of time during the 1920s, he attended Friends University and later Kansas State Agricultural College, studying industrial journalism but never compiling enough credits to graduate. Also during the Twenties, Davis began to write poetry. In 1927 he moved to Chicago and worked for the Chicago Evening Bulletin and the Chicago Whip, both African-American newspapers. He also spent some time working for the Indiana-based Gary American.

In 1931, Davis relocated to Atlanta to become managing editor of the Atlanta Daily World, a semi-weekly black newspaper. Davis dramatically increased the publication's sales and profitability, turning it into the nation's first successful black daily.

1934 Davis returned to Chicago, where he served as executive editor of the Associated Negro Press (ANP), a news service for black newspapers. He would remain with ANP until 1947.

During his tenure with ANP, Davis was occasionally asked by the FBI to assess the character of applicants for government jobs in Washington, DC. Davis deliberately lied to his questioners, as he would explain decades later in a 1987 interview:

“I often had the FBI contacting me at the Associated Negro Press. They ... wanted to find out whether such-and-such a person who had applied for a job in Washington was 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 ... a risk, and he was no good, and so I, I used to work this in the reverse, and if a person ... was officially militant, I would praise them the highest. I would say he is completely in favor of the Constitution [and] he supports the entire Constitution and so forth, so it would have just things. I hoped it would have just the opposite effect on the FBI.”

Throughout the Thirties, Davis continued to write and publish poems. When the Chicago socialite Frances Norton Manning became aware of Davis' work, she introduced him to the publisher Norman Forgue, whose Black Cat Press produced Davis's first book, Black Man's Verse, in the summer of 1935.

In 1936 Davis was listed as a contributing editor to the Spokesman, the official organ of the Youth Section of the National Negro Congress, which the U.S. government had identified as a Communist-front organization.

The FBI first began tracking Davis in 1944, after having identified him as member of the Communist Party's Dorie Miller Club in Chicago. Over a nineteen-year span (1944-63), the Bureau compiled a 601-page file on Davis. One document therein suggests that Davis's Communist Party USA (CPUSA) affiliations had begun as early as 1931. Moreover, the FBI listed Davis in its security index, meaning that he could be arrested or detained in the event of a national emergency.

In early 1945, the FBI identified Davis as a member of the Carver Second Ward West of the Communist Political Association. The following year, the Bureau identified him as a member of the Carver Club of the Communist Party. Davis' wife, meanwhile, was a member of the Paul Robeson Club of the Communist Party of Chicago.

From 1944-47, Davis served as vice chairman of the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee. He then spent a year as a national board member of the Civil Rights Congress, a Communist front.

From 1946-48, Davis attended Communist Party Cultural Club meetings in Chicago. During this period, he also taught a course at Chicago's Abraham Lincoln High School, which was run by the CPUSA and had been cited by the U.S. government as a subversive organization and a Communist front.

Additional Communist-front organizations with which Davis was affiliated in the Forties were: the Chicago Committee for Spanish Freedom, American Youth for Democracy (which was the youth wing of the CPUSA), the National Association for Constitutional Liberties, the League of American Writers, and the National Negro Congress. Also in the mid- to late 1940s, Davis was affiliated with the Communist-line publication Chicago Star.

In 1947 Davis was a signatory to a petition urging Congress to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), branding the latter as an “undemocratic” entity whose work would inevitably result in “the ultimate suppression of all traditional American civil liberties.”

In 1948 Davis published his most ambitious poetry collection, entitled 47th Street: Poems, chronicling life on Chicago's South Side.

In April 1948 Davis was listed as a member of the Citizens' Committee to Aid Packing-House Workers, a Chicago-based organization dominated by the CPUSA.

Also in 1948, Davis’ good friend Paul Robeson, who himself was a dedicated Stalinist, persuaded Davis to move to Honoloulu, Hawaii.

Beginning in May 1949, Davis wrote the column “Frankly Speaking” for the Honolulu Record, the International Longshore & Warehouse Union's communist-line newspaper. (During WWII, the Record's editor and its largest shareholder both worked as informants for Mao Zedong in Yenan, China.)

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 the National 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 Record until 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."

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.

In the very early 1970s Davis met a young Barack Obama, whose mother had sent the boy to live with his grandparents in Hawaii. Obama's grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham, arranged for Davis to become the boy's mentor and advisor. From approximately 1971-79, Davis had considerable influence on the young Obama, particularly during the last four of those years. (Notably, Davis once sat on a union-publicity committee with Chicago Sun-Times reporter Vernon Jarrett, father-in-law of Valerie Jarrett, the latter of whom would later become a close confidante and advisor to President Barack Obama).

In the early Seventies, Davis sold marijuana and cocaine from a hot-dog cart which he operated near his home in Waikiki. Though Davis was generally content to live in Hawaii, he lamented in his posthumously published (1992) memoir, Livin the Blues, that: “There are not enough [black] souls here to wield political or economic power. There is no ghetto, hence no potential Black Power.”

In his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama writes about Davis but does not reveal the latter’s full name, identifying him only as "a poet named Frank" -- a man with much "hard-earned knowledge" who had known "some modest notoriety once" and was "a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago," but was now "pushing eighty." (Several sources -- including Professor Gerald Horne, Dr. Kathryn Takara, and libertarian writer Trevor Loudon -- have confirmed that Obama’s “Frank” was indeed Frank Marshall Davis.)

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.”

Davis died of a heart attack in Honolulu in July 1987.