"Poetry & Popular Culture" interviews son of poet Frank Marshall Davis

"My father's fondest dream"
Setting the record straight on Frank Marshall Davis

Reporting for the Iowa City Press-Citizen newspaper back in April 2008, I wrote about one of Barack Obama's early influences, the poet and journalist Frank Marshall Davis who appears as "Frank" in Obama's autobiography Dreams from My Father. In the late 1940s, the FBI harassed Davis (and everyone else, it seems) for being a suspected commie. This past February, right-wing writers, including Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media, or AIM, began resurrecting this paranoia in order to expose what they call Obama's "carefully concealed communist and foreign connections." These reports have called Davis (1905-1987) "a Communist pawn of Moscow" and "Obama's Communist Mentor."

I recently had a chance to catch up with Mark Davis, son of Frank Marshall Davis, who retired from a career in the U.S. Air Force in 1993. Mark has recently started a blog to counter what he calls the disinformation campaign being conducted by AIM. (See http://my. barackobama.com /page/community/blog/Kaleokualoha).

Here are some excerpts from our conversation.

MC: When did you first learn about Obama's relationship with your father?

MD: I believe it was only this past May, when my lovely significant other advised me that he was mentioned in Obama's book. She also mentioned that my father's background was becoming an issue. I went online and discovered thousands of hits connected to AIM's disinformation campaign.

MC: What did you think when you read "Dreams from My Father"?

MD: Obama's portrayal of my father corresponds quite closely with my own memories. I believe it actually reinforces the point that Obama did not consider him to be his mentor but merely a colorful character who provided some useful (and not-so-useful) advice. Obama recognized that despite (or due to) his wealth of experience, my father was "incurable" of his notion that the glass ceiling for African-Americans may be permanent. This is the central question of race relations. When writing "Dreams," Obama seems to have recognized that the glass ceiling was an anachronism.

It's unfortunate that my father didn't live long enough to see race lose so much value as a factor of success. While it may be true that African-Americans will always be perceived as black, or even as "niggers" to some, race is increasingly irrelevant to success in America. For an increasing share of America, racial prejudice is disappearing. Like MLK Jr., my father's fondest dream—that we could all be judged exclusively by the content of our character—may be at hand.

MC: What made you decide to personally fight back against Kincaid and AIM?

MD: When Kincaid claimed that Obama "developed a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis," I said "Whoa!" Kincaid also absurdly claimed that my father's "values, passed on to Obama, were those of a communist agent who pledged allegiance to Stalin." I knew I needed to immerse myself in this fight to defend my family honor. From my background as an Intelligence Officer, I could see him mimicking a full-blown Soviet KGB "active measures" disinformation campaign.

For Kincaid, my father seems to be just "collateral damage" in a war against Obama. Although I may not have been as supportive of my family as I could have been while on active duty, I'll be damned if I allow the Kincaid Brigade to demonize my father in this dishonest campaign against Barack Obama—or anyone else.

MC: Your blog is run through barackobama.com. Why did you locate it there, and is it an endorsement of Obama as well as a defense of your father?

MD: An Obama blog seemed most appropriate because not only was Obama a friend of my father but also the enemy of my father's self-declared enemy. AIM deliberately is misrepresenting their relationship as a scandal when there was no wrongdoing, and deliberately misrepresenting Obama's reference to him as just "Frank" (without further identification in Dreams) as a "cover-up" of their imagined scandal.

I abhor such injustice, especially when committed in the name of "fairness, balance, and accuracy in news reporting." Although such defamation can no longer directly hurt my father (may he R.I.P.), it is intended to injure Obama.

I feel it's my responsibility, as an officer and a gentleman, to protect both of their reputations against this disinformation campaign. I want to protect Obama not only to repay the trust and regard he displayed for my father but also to help ensure that these lies don't hurt the campaign of the best candidate for President of the U.S. My.barackobama.com provided a ready-made media vehicle to neutralize those lies.

MC: Were you aware, growing up, that the F.B.I. was assigned to investigate your father in the late 1940s?

MD: I was vaguely aware that he was investigated because of his past activism, but I don't recall him ever providing much detail. The vast majority of his activism was in the civil rights struggle. As a teenager, I recall his delight with King's "I Have A Dream" speech and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We had little discussion of international events other than the Vietnam War, where he encouraged me, for school projects, to research the underlying reasons beyond its media portrayal.

The fact that he did not try to indoctrinate me in any Marxist ideology, although I lived with him until the age of 18, makes me absolutely positive that he did not do so with Obama.

MC: What do you think of your father's poetry now?

MD: I have never been much of a poetry buff (perhaps due to a recessive gene?), but reading his work since the controversy reinforces my determination to disprove Kincaid's misrepresentation of his character.

A slightly different version of this interview appeared in the Press-Citizen on 31 August 2008.

Obama's Bitter Muse: Frank M. Davis

The following article—by yours truly—first appeared in the Iowa City Press-Citizen and The Des Moines Register on Wednesday, April 30, 2008. For a while, it was available online as well, but since those links have now expired, I'm making it available here.


Obama's Bitter Muse: Frank M. Davis

I was a weaver of jagged words
A warbler of garbled tunes
A singer of savage songs
I was bitter
Yes
Bitter and sorely sad
For when I wrote
I dipped my pen
In the crazy heart
Of mad America

—Frank Marshall Davis

Of the potential father figures in Barack Obama’s autobiography "Dreams from My Father," one of the first—and most mysterious—is a poet whom we only ever know as “Frank.”

"Dreams from My Father" credits Frank with being the sole older black man in Hawaii to take seriously the teenage Obama’s search for identity, and the poet thus becomes a major touchstone in Obama’s life. Nearly every time Obama reflects on his role models, the memory of Frank comes up.

When Obama first meets him, Frank is nearly 80 years old and living “in a dilapidated house in a run-down section of Waikiki.” The man with “a big, dewlapped face and an ill-kempt gray Afro that made him look like an old, shaggy-maned lion” read poetry to Obama, shared whiskey, and sometimes asked for help writing dirty limericks. And in that house “with its wobbly porch and low-pitched roof,” the two men separated by 60 years in age talked about the reality of racism in America. Those discussions—filled with Frank’s anger, warnings, and bitter realism—stay with Obama through the book.

“That’s the way it is,” Obama remembers Frank saying, “You might as well get used to it.”

‘Negative Capability’

It’s a strange withholding, in a book as candid as "Dreams from My Father," that Obama doesn’t reveal Frank’s full name, much less anything from his past. For Frank was in fact a real, published poet, and knowing more about him might help illuminate who Obama is now and his relationship to the past. It might also help explain Obama’s nigh-poetic capacity for “negative capability”—the term John Keats coined in 1817 to describe someone’s ability to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

“Frank” is Frank Marshall Davis, a poet, journalist, and activist.

Davis was born in Kansas in 1905 and died in Hawaii in 1987. He published four books of poems that are now collected and published by the University of Illinois Press as "Black Moods" (2002). Davis began writing poetry just after the Harlem Renaissance, but unlike Langston Hughes (also a Midwesterner), Davis didn’t move East. He worked as a journalist in Chicago’s Harlem, known as Bronzeville—the same south-side neighborhood Obama would represent as an Illinois state senator. Apparently, Davis felt equally at home writing poems as he did articles about bootlegging and Bronzeville politics.

Davis, who went on to edit the first successful daily black newspaper in U.S. history, also wrote an autobiography, "Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet" (1992). That autobiography begins with a harrowing story of how Davis was lynched by a group of white boys when he was 5. The bitterness stemming from that event hangs over the book, just as Frank’s bitterness echoes through Obama’s.

For Davis, there is no evading the impediment of Jim Crow violence and prejudice, and, because of this, "Livin’ the Blues" becomes something of an anti-Horatio Alger tale. At the same time, though, in the amount of spirit, music, humor, resilience, and creativity that Davis records in the face of racist impediments, Livin’ the Blues in some ways out-Algers Alger.

‘A Solitary Rebel’

Interestingly, anti-Obama crusaders know more about Davis (whom they call “Obama’s communist mentor”) than Obama’s own political party does. Like many individuals interested in combating American racism in the 1930s and 40s, Davis worked with people affiliated with the Communist Party. He was never a card-carrying member himself; in fact, in "Livin’ the Blues" he calls himself “a solitary rebel” who avoided joining any organization at all.

Nevertheless, the FBI assigned agents to track and harass Davis and his white wife when the two moved to Hawaii in 1949.

More interesting than Davis’ association with supposed communists is the fact that his life doesn’t, in fact, fit into the categories by which either the right or the left tend to operate. Davis, for example, was a Republican who voted against Roosevelt throughout the 1930s. He spoke as a heterosexual black man on behalf of gay rights. He openly linked Jewish and black experiences of oppression and raged against America’s hypocrisy as it fought Nazi Germany while maintaining a race-based caste system at home.

A Republican with Communist friends?

A journalist who wrote poetry?

Bitterness tempered by hope?

On the surface, it’s easy to see what Davis and Obama have in common; both were born in Kansas, both have families with mixed race marriages, both lived in Hawaii. That Obama would later represent the part of Chicago that Davis wrote about years before is suggestive as well.

Davis certainly was one role model for the young Obama. But Davis—even, or especially, in the specific bitterness he comes to represent in "Dreams from My Father"—may be Obama’s muse as well.