A former close friend and associate of Frank Marshall Davis has authored a book confirming his Communist activities, anti-Christian views, and involvement in bizarre sex practices and “erotica.” But Kathryn Waddell Takara’s book, Frank Marshall Davis. The Fire and the Phoenix, fails to add any more detail to the nature of his relationship with President Obama.
It has been known for over four years that Davis, a member of the Communist Party, was the mysterious “Frank” from Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, and that he influenced the young Obama before he went off to college. Davis was Obama’s mentor for eight years of his young life in Hawaii.
Takara, a former associate professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, is one of those who confirmed four years ago that “Frank” was indeed Frank Marshall Davis. She says she first met Davis in 1972. He died in 1987.
The original identification of Frank Marshall Davis was discovered by blogger Trevor Loudon in a speech by a writer for a Communist Party publication.
Interestingly, a former United Nations official is quoted on the back cover of Takara’s book as saying, “…the reader may well find parallels between Takara’s portrayal of Davis’s struggle for identity in the 1930’s and 40’s and that of President Barack Obama as revealed in his book, Dreams from My Father…”
Despite his bitterness for the United States and support for the Soviet Union, Davis had many opportunities in the U.S. and attended college, where he studied journalism. However, he used his writing talents to function mostly as a writer and propagandist for Communist Party newspapers in Chicago and Hawaii. He also wrote “poetry” for the communist cause.
Takara’s book, published in March of this year, seems like an attempt to capitalize on Davis’s notoriety without spilling any more secrets about his relationship to a young Barack Obama during the latter’s growing-up years in Hawaii. It appears that Takara owns the publishing house, Pacific Raven Press.
She is a radical herself, having written such “freedom poems” as “Mumia Abu Jamal: Knight for Justice,” honoring the cop-killer, and “Angela Davis,” paying tribute to the former Communist Party vice presidential candidate.
Without naming Obama in her book, she refers to Davis attracting “a great variety of people” to his home, including “young radicals” and even “revolutionaries.”
But while she fails to explore the Davis-Obama relationship, what she confirms or discloses about Davis provides more reason to question his influence over the future U.S. President.
Davis, Takara confirms, was an atheist whose writing and poetry were geared toward discrediting Christianity. Davis in fact became “anti-Christian,” she says, and wrote a poem speaking of Christ irreverently as a “nigger.”
We had covered this facet of Davis’s writing back in 2008, noting that one Davis poem, “Christ is a Dixie Nigger,” dismisses Christ as “another New White Hope.” Takara says Davis and others used writing “to attack and expose white America” and that their articles and poems about Christianity were “mocking and blasphemous.”
According to the book, Davis, who was black, told her that he left the Christian church because, “It seemed the more I prayed, the more it seemed like God was white and created the world for whites.” Even though he married a white woman, he told Obama that blacks had a “reason to hate” whites.
On the matter of involvement in the Communist Party, which Davis refused to talk about before a congressional committee, Takara writes, “…it seems that Frank did join the [Communist] party for a short time, although on other occasions he strongly denied it.” In other words, he lied about his membership in the party.
Evidence shows that Davis was under FBI surveillance for 19 years because of his communist activities. Takara pretends not to be familiar with the facts that have been developed over the last several years, as revealed in his 600-page FBI file, although she does admit that the FBI “kept an eye on Davis” after he moved from Chicago to Hawaii.
She doesn’t dispute that his pornographic novel, Sex Rebel: Black, was “largely autobiographical,” even though it was written under the pseudonym of Bob Greene, and that “sex and drinking” became “liberating” for Davis. She notes that in the novel, Davis became active in the “swinging” lifestyle of multiple partners, sex parties, “non-conventional” sexual practices, and “other orgies within and crossing the color line.” Davis, Takara says, believed in “using the politics of journalism and sex to effect political and social change.”
The Sex Rebel book refers to the couple Bob and Doris and their sexual activities. “She does not mind sharing Bob with other African American women and men, but she prefers to be present, responsible, and in control for providing pleasure and variety to her husband,” Takara notes.
She writes that Davis was “bold and courageous to write about another taboo subject, lesbians, before the women’s movement.”
She confirms that his interest in photography included taking photos of nude women, and that Davis believed “that many white women and men both secretly and openly harbored desires to have sexual contact with an educated and large African-American man.”
Davis is the subject of a film, Dreams from My Real Father, which asserts that Davis took pornographic photos of Obama’s mother, who was white, and had sex with her. Some of these photographs are included in the film, which asserts that Davis was Obama’s real father.
Obama’s book refers to “Frank” being a drinker and offering advice on various matters, including race relations and college, but makes no references to his sexual lifestyle. Obama, however, has become known as the “Gay President” because of his promotion of alternative lifestyles, including homosexuality in the military.
Takara says that she wrote her book “because I knew and respected Frank Davis and because I believe that he and his work deserve widespread dissemination.” But she apparently does not believe that the Davis relationship with Obama should be more widely publicized or scrutinized.
The members of the liberal media agree with the need to cover these things up, as demonstrated by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank’s recent article attacking those investigating the Obama-Davis relationship and dismissing Davis as merely an “author” without any controversial connections of any kind.
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.