• 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 (1905-1987) was a black poet and writer (he wrote for the Honolulu Record, a Communist newspaper), and a known member of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Accuracy in Media editor Cliff Kincaid has done important investigative work detailing Davis' Communist ties.

Davis' good friend Paul Robeson, who himself was a dedicated Stalinist, persuaded him in 1948 to move to Honoloulu, Hawaii. In 1950 Edward Berman, a member of the NAACP's Honolulu branch, testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee (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 of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii (CSALTH), which, along with HUAC, also charged that Davis was affiliated with a number of communist-front organizations. 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 and took the Fifth Amendment when asked about his Communist Party membership.

In the 1970s Davis met a teenage Barack Obama and his family, who also lived in Hawaii. Davis soon became the young man's mentor and advisor.

In his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, 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." Says Obama, "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 you [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 deriding traditional Christianity. In some of these compositions, Davis 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," includes the following lines:

Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam
Why did you send me 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?