givemeabr8 10/21/2008 10:06:00 PM
FRANK MARSALL DAVIS COMMUNIST AND MENTOR OF BARACK OBAMA
Frank Marshall Davis: Who Am I?
"[A] Poet Named Frank Who Lived In A Dilapidated House In A Run-Down Section Of Waikiki. He Had Enjoyed Some Modest Notoriety Once, Was A Contemporary Of Richard Wright And Langston Hughes During His Years In Chicago�." (Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father, 1995, p. 76)
"Frank,' You See, Was None Other Than Frank Marshall Davis - A Notorious Member Of The Communist Party�'" (Carter L. Clews, Op-Ed, "Identity Thrall," The Washington Times, 7/30/08)
Facts About Me and Barack
"Takara Has Written Extensively About A Nearly Forgotten Historical Figure, Frank Marshall Davis, A Black Poet, Newspaper Columnist And Labor Activist, Who Moved To The Islands In 1948. In The '70s, A By-Then-Elderly Davis Was A Friend Of Barack Obama's Grandfather And Would Proffer Advice To A Young Barry, As He Was Called Then." (John Heckathorn, "What The Heck?" Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 6/29/08)
What Barack Says About Me
Obama: "What had Frank called college? An advanced degree in compromise." (Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father, 1995, p. 97)
This from a Newsweek article by Jon Mecham;
"As he had grown older, Obama had struggled to see himself as a black man, though his experience was far from that of the typical African-American. Hawaii helped; there, his grandfather had introduced him to one of the most intriguing mentors of his youth, Frank Marshall Davis. Davis had been a leading black activist and writer of the 1930s and 1940s�a contemporary and friend of Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. Davis grew up in Kansas, where he was nearly lynched by a group of schoolchildren at the age of 5. He took up a career as a journalist and poet with a strong voice for racial justice, working in Chicago before moving to Hawaii with his second wife, who was white. His political activism, especially his writings on civil-rights and labor issues, prompted a McCarthyite denunciation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Davis was an eccentric but engaging figure by the time Obama met him in the 1970s. "I was intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes," wrote Obama. It was around this time that Obama started his own course of reading black literature�Wright, Hughes, Du Bois and Baldwin. "It was almost as if Obama had wandered into a museum," says Dr. Kathryn Takara, a Hawaii-based political scientist who first met Davis at the same time and is now writing a biography of the poet-activist. "It was an electrically charged intellectual atmosphere, with culture all around. There was always music and news, and the TV was never off. The house was full of books and records, old albums and old furniture. He had a porch that was almost on the sidewalk and you could sit out there and hear the jazz from the living room. People would walk up and he invited conversation. There was always something going on." It was Davis who delivered one of the most enduring lessons of Obama's teenage years. After his grandparents argued about a black panhandler who scared his grandmother, Obama visited the poet, shared some whiskey, and recounted the story. When Davis told him his grandmother was right to be scared, that "black people have a reason to hate," Obama realized how distant he was from his closest family. "The earth shook under my feet, ready to crack open at any moment," he wrote. "I stopped, trying to steady myself, and knew for the first time that I was utterly alone."
"The story of the rest of his life�a story that is, obviously, still unfolding�is how Obama, now necessarily self-sufficient and wary, always surrounded himself with those with whom he felt secure�though he knew, and knows, that any one of those people might eventually disappoint him. In Chicago he found his way to the Trinity United Church of Christ, and to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. When Wright's "God Damn America" clips emerged earlier this year, Obama's friend Jim Wallis sent him a note of condolence. Late one night, Wallis received an e-mail in reply, something like: "God has his purposes." "I was quite astounded," says Wallis, the left-leaning evangelical writer, activist and founder of Sojourners. "Here's a 46-year-old, which for me at 59 seems young, and he says something like that. This is not what politicians think and do. Politicians want always to be predictive and controlling."
"Obama's reply to Wallis reflected a kind of Lincoln-esque fatalism. It is a sad but inescapable fact of life that people�in Obama's case, people close to you�often fail you. Wright, obviously, was far from the first man to disappoint Obama.
"Dwight Hopkins, a professor of theology at the University of Chicago and a member of Trinity, believes that Obama was drawn to Wright as a father figure. If Trinity was the large, extended family Obama never had�"people are walking around talking, shaking hands, saying, 'How's your child?', 'How's the cancer?' " Hopkins says�then Wright was the paterfamilias."
"Much has been written about the "Africentrism" of Trinity: the African-American Last Supper that hangs in the church lobby and the kente cloth that drapes its altar. But Wright's ideas about Africa were more than decorative. Wright taught that African- Americans should be proud of their African heritage, of the stories of slavery and freedom handed down by their grandparents and great-grandparents. He also preached that people should feel a financial and social responsibility to their brothers and sisters in Africa, especially those without food and water, those with chronic or incurable disease, those without any education.
"There were other churches Obama could have joined when he moved to Chicago after law school. The Rev. James Meeks runs the Salem Baptist Church of Chicago, 10 blocks away from Trinity�another huge African-American church on the South Side where the Rev. Jesse Jackson has made frequent appearances. But no other Chicago church would have given Obama such a strong connection to Africa. "Here's what Meeks can't offer," says Wallis. "Barack has an African father and I'm speculating that the connection to Africa might have appealed to him."
"In an interview with NEWSWEEK's Lisa Miller, Obama characterized his relationship with Wright this way: "He was my pastor. And he was a friend." He disputes the characterization of "spiritual adviser": "I cannot recall a time where he and I sat down and talked about theology or we had long discussions about my faith. If I met with him, it was after church to have chicken with the family and we would have talked stories about the family. But he certainly strengthened my faith."
"How close were they, really? The Rev. Obery Hendricks, a good friend of Wright's, says the two men were not that intimate. "He wasn't buddies with him," says Hendricks, author of "The Politics of Jesus" and a professor at New York Theological Seminary. "[Wright] has some close people, and Obama wasn't one of them."
"The Rev. Stephen Gray is the conference minister of the Indiana-Kentucky conference for the United Church of Christ. In meetings with Wright when Obama was in the Senate, Gray twice recalls Wright's leaving the room to take a call on his cell phone from Obama. "All I can tell you is there was a big smile on Jeremiah's face as he ended those conversations," Gray remembers. " 'That was our senator,' he said. We asked him, 'What kind of a fellow is he?' 'Well, I trained him. He's a pretty good fella'."
"That anecdote foreshadowed the grandiosity that led to Wright's fall from grace with Obama during the presidential campaign, when the minister went to the National Press Club in the wake of the release of clips of controversial sermons. At the Washington luncheon, Wright treated the media to a racially charged stemwinder in which he defended some of his most controversial statements. Obama had tried to stand by Wright, initially refusing to repudiate him, but the National Press Club was too much.
"The origins of the clash are generational. "Their racial politics are very different," says Hendricks. "Barack, because of his experience, didn't have the same perspective, the same level of resentment as so many in Jeremiah's generation. And so Jeremiah comes from another era, closer to my own, when segregation was still the law of the land. He still carries that, his outrage at those injustices. Barack, of course, is sensitive to that, but he did not experience it."
"Wright's friends talk about how difficult things have been since Obama's repudiation. "One of the pains is�remember, Barack grew up without a father," Hendricks adds. "To jettison your pastor, it's like being abandoned all over again." But there is a lesson here for those who underestimate Obama. He tried to save Wright, standing by him until it became untenable. And when he struck, he struck, and the turbulent pastor was cast out.
"In his earlier days in Chicago politics and in the legislature in Springfield, some people thought Obama talked a bit too much about his Harvard Law degree. But Harvard is essential to understanding Obama. "From what he had learned about his dad, he was overidealistic, not practical, and that ended up in his not achieving anything effectively," says Jerry Kellman, Obama's community-organizing boss in Chicago. "Law school was a means to a kind of security. He spoke of it [his decision to apply to law school] in terms of what it meant in terms of him being effective."
"It was not just law school that Obama was interested in�it was Harvard Law School. "If he was going to go to law school, he was going to go to the best law school," says Kellman. "It was very utilitarian: 'If I'm going to do this, this is where I'm going to form the right relationships'." That he was matching his father�and, by winning the Law Review presidency, surpassing him�is in keeping with the arc of Obama's life. He knew what he wanted: political stardom, not highbrow legal celebrity. Shortly after the Law Review election, David Wilkins, one of his professors, told him that he would be happy to talk about which Supreme Court justice Obama would like to clerk for. "He said to me, 'Professor Wilkins, thank you, but I'm not very interested'," Wilkins remembers. "And he said something like, 'I'm going to use these 15 minutes of fame to get a book contract' � and then he said, 'I'm going to go back to Chicago, continue the work I was doing beforehand, and then I want to run for elected office'."
Time for the people to stand up to the marxist movement taking place in our country. This has been on slow burn since the sixties and now the activist from that time have moved into "respectable positions" in order to take the power away for our Constitution.
