Obama Mentor Frank Marshall Davis Took the Fifth Amendment When Asked About His Communist Party Membership

Senator Barack Obama’s childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a communist. But he took the Fifth Amendment when asked about it during Senate hearings into the “Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States.” The transcript of his appearance is included in this report.

The record shows that Obama was in Hawaii from 1971-1979, where, at some point in time, he developed a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis, listening to his “poetry” and getting advice on his career path.

But Obama, in his book, Dreams From My Father, refers to him repeatedly as just “Frank.” The 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii identified Davis as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

In the summer/fall 2003 issue of African American Review, James A. Miller of George Washington University reviews a book by John Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas, about Davis’s career, and notes, “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.

Is it possible that Obama did not know who Davis was when he wrote his book, Dreams From My Father, first published in 1995? That’s not plausible since Obama refers to him as a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes and says he saw a book of his black poetry.

In addition to Tidwell’s book, Black Moods: Collected Poems of Frank Marshall Davis, confirming Davis’s Communist Party membership, another book, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946, names Davis as one of several black poets who continued to publish in CPUSA-supported publications after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact.

While blacks such as Richard Wright left the CPUSA, it is not clear if or when Davis ever left the party.

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 shit.”

For the full transcript of this article visit usasurvival.org.