The Anti-Communist Film Festival: Frank Marshall Davis, Barack Obama’s Communist Mentor

    Next year, we are holding an Anti-Communist Film Festival. We also hope to have speakers and panels on communism and film. One project I’d like to pitch is a screenplay based on Paul Kengor’s book The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor.

    It’s a story that too many people still don’t talk about. For roughly ten years of his life, from the time he was nine until he went to college, Obama’s mentor was a man named Frank Marshall Davis. This is one of the most important facts in understanding how Obama’s mind works, yet the media still refuses to explore Davis’s life and its crucial influence on Obama. “Such is the scandalous neglect that we have seen in the media’s coverage of Barack Obama,” Paul Kengor writes in The Communist. “No president has been influenced by a figure so politically troubling.” 

    The Communist is a sober and scholarly look at Davis and should be made into a film. Maybe Higher Ground Productions, the new Hollywood production company the Obamas just launched in collaboration with Netflix, could produce it. It can screen as a double-feature with The Devil’s Triangle.

    Barack Obama met Frank Marshall Davis in 1970. Obama was nine, a kid who had been abandoned by his father. For the next 10 years, Davis would be a friend, mentor, professor, and father figure to Obama. 

    Frank Marshall Davis was a journalist and a member of the Communist Party. Davis was born in Kansas in 1905. Interested in journalism from a young age, he moved to Chicago in 1927 to write for the black press. Davis joined the Communist Party in Chicago in the early 1940s. CPUSA members at the time swore an oath to “ensure the triumph of Soviet power in the United States,” and Davis soon had a 600-page FBI file. In 1946, he became the founding editor-in-chief of The Chicago Star, a Party-line newspaper. Davis shared the op-ed page with the likes of Howard Fast, a “Stalin Prize” winner, and Sen. Claude “Red” Pepper, who sponsored a bill to nationalize healthcare in the United States.

    Davis left the Star in 1948 for Hawaii, where he would write for the Party-line organ there, The Honolulu Record. Kengor: “His politics remained so radical that the FBI had him under continued surveillance. The federal government actually placed Davis on the Security Index, meaning that in the event of a war between the United States and USSR, Barack Obama’s mentor could be placed under immediate arrest.”

    Davis and Obama met in 1970. They were introduced by Obama’s maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham. Obama’s father had abandoned the family, and Dunham thought Davis would be a good influence on young Obama. In his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama notes that Davis dispensed wisdom on topics such as race, women, and jazz. “I was intrigued by old Frank,” writes Obama, “with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.”

    In Dreams from My Father, Obama repeatedly talks about Davis. However, as Kengor notes, in the 2005 audio version of Dreams, “Frank” is totally missing—he’s been airbrushed out of Obama’s story. Also, in Dreams, Obama never uses Marshall’s full name, only referring to him as ”Old Frank.”

    Recently, there has been manic, obsessive coverage in the media about the current conservative upheaval, with a war breaking out between different wings. The media has lost no time scrutinizing people like Nick Fuentes and organizations like the Heritage Foundation. This is how it should be. It’s an important story. Yet there is no interest in unmasking ANTIFA, or in investigating Barack Obama’s role in Russiagate, an attempt to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump.

    There is also, after all these years, an attempt to smother any questions about Frank Marshall Davis. Imagine how the media would react if J.D. Vance’s grandfather had introduced him to a man who swore allegiance to the Nazi party, a man who had expressed his enthusiasm for fascism in lectures and editorials over more than five decades. Think of the programming on CNN if it were revealed that Vance had attended a Nazi Party conference in the 1980s, as Obama attended socialist conferences during that decade.

    Now imagine that Vance had attempted to erase this man from his biography. Jon Stewart would roast “Herr Vance,” complete with clips from Apt Pupil. Joe Scarborough, Abby Philip and Jonathan Capehart would get the vapors. Oliver Stone would not be able to launch production soon enough on a film about “J.D. Vance and the Nazification of the Republican Party.” 

    Obama has yet to be questioned about “Old Frank.” We need to make a movie about that.

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