Friday, April 17, 2009

Frank Marshall Davis

As a youth in Hawaii, Barack Obama was introduced by his grandfather to an old black intellectual, a poet. “Frank”, Obama calls him in his memoir. No last name.

Curious if anyone had done the detective work to find out who this “Frank” was (I mean, a poet!) I found, indeed, Gerald Horne in his pre-election hitpiece, The Obama Nation, had fingered Frank Marshall Davis, an old communist, as the poet in the memoir. While rebutting some of Horne’s insinuations the Obama campaign acknowledged Davis the poet.

Now I want to read his stuff. Looks like a couple collections have been published recently - Black Moods: Collected Poems (2002) and Writings of Frank Marshall Davis: A Voice of the Black Press (2007).

3 comments:

Kaleokualoha said...

You may also find quite interesting my documentation of the right-wing disinformation campaign that attempted to smear Obama by misrepresenting the Davis-Obama relationship.

Please visit my blog (http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/Kaleokualoha). Frank Marshall Davis was my father.

Jason Gusmann said...

dude, that's so ridiculous. so, now, because i met allen ginsberg once does that mean i'm now a gay man? (not that there's anything wrong with that)

Glenn Ingersoll said...

What, Jason, you're calling out wingnut talking points as illogical & ridiculous? You could get repetitive stress doing that.

Oh, and Mark, thanks for the link to your blog.