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To: Travis McGee

Who was Obama’s mentor in Hawaii? Can you give name and cites as to his CPUSA or other party membership?

Quentin Young, mentioned in this article, was a longtime identified member of the CPUSA in Chicago, and headed a front known as the Medical Committee for Human Rights, and now heads a phone booth operation known roughly as Physicians for Health Care Reform.

He may have claimed to have left the Party, but the Party never LEFT him.

To be with Dohrn and Ayres is very important, and Alice Palmer needs to be reexamined re Obama. There were a lot of leftist groups in Chicago during Mayor Washington’s time and Obama may have been a member of one of them (later on).


10 posted on 02/24/2008 8:43:01 PM PST by MadMax, the Grinning Reaper (Madmax, the Grinning Reaper)
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To: Max Friedman

When Obama was in high school in Hawaii his mentor was Frank Marshal Davis, a Communist who told 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.”

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/


12 posted on 02/24/2008 8:44:53 PM PST by Travis McGee (---www.EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com---)
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To: Max Friedman; Travis McGee
The "mentor" was Frank Marshall Davis, a poet and writer who died in 1987. Obama apparently mentioned "Frank" in his book and Cliff Kincaid was able to weave together the facts to determine that "Frank" was Frank Davis Marshall. (See Obama’s Communist Mentor).

Davis reportedly was influenced to move to Hawaii by Paul Robeson (CPUSA), who he knew in Chicago. [source]. I've read much of Robeson's FBI files and don't remember ever seeing Frank Davis. The labor movement was big in Hawaii about that time (with Jack Hall) but I haven't seen any evidence that Davis was active in that. Davis also married a white woman so I wonder if that might have not been some of the attraction of Obama, dealing with interracial biases.

Below are some more acquaintances mentioned in a book review:


Livin' the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet. By Frank Marshall Davis. Ed. by John Edgar Tidwell. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992, xxxii, 373 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-299-13500-4.)

Frank Marshall Davis (1905-1987) was a political activist, editor of African-American newspapers, and author of four volumes of poetry. He developed a considerable reputation in Chicago and Atlanta in the 1930s and 1940s, before moving to Hawaii and obscurity in 1948. There was a brief flurry of fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s when this "mystery man," as he was labeled, was taken as a father figure by black nationalists. The publication of his autobiography five years after his death is, in a sense, part of the recent effort to recover some of the "lost" figures of African American literature, history, and culture. He himself largely completed the book in 1973 but could never interest a publisher in it.

Livin' the Blues is as much a social history of early twentieth-century black America as it is a life story. Davis vividly describes the worlds of business, politics, sports, music, literature, and the military. He knew, or knew much about, such figures as Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, Oscar DePriest, and Angelo Herndon and Ben Davis, Jr., of the Communist party. In addition to being a journalist, he worked as a publicist at various times for the major political parties, taught the nation's first history of jazz course, and was active in left-wing literary organizations.

One of the noteworthy aspects of such an active public life is that both Davis and John Edgar Tidwell, the book's editor, define Davis repeatedly as a loner with a racial inferiority complex. They insist on this perhaps because the text itself does not clearly lead to such a conclusion. There is no question that Davis encountered discrimination growing up in Arkansas City, Kansas. He generally seemed to get along well with white children and teachers, however. More important in some ways is that he was exposed to central aspects of black culture, including religion and secular music, especially blues and jazz. This dichotomy of hostility and enrichment is evident throughout his story. But it is his individuality, assertiveness, social and political engagement, and wit, rather than his isolation and inferiority, that are most obvious.

The emphasis on the negative aspects may be based on the need to justify the decision to move not only off the mainland but out of the mainstream of political action at the very moment the civil rights movement took off. Both Davis and Tidwell are at pains to insist that this is not the case, but in fact Davis chose to live in a place he called a kind of racial paradise at the time that the battle he had been urging so courageously for so long had finally begun. In the end, despite Davis's candid style and Tidwell's admirable editorial efforts, it is on these political and moral grounds that Frank Marshall Davis remains one of the "mystery men" of African-American history.


41 posted on 02/24/2008 11:42:44 PM PST by calcowgirl ("Liberalism is just Communism sold by the drink." P. J. O'Rourke)
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