Barack Obama's Marxist Mentor

The US far left is divided on whether to support Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

While both have cultivated a moderate image in recent times, both undoubtedly come from the left.

Clinton's youthful Marxist ties have been well documented, but it appears that even Obama has some socialist influence in his background.

Certainly the Hawaiian based East West Centre where Obama's Kenyan father and American met is a well known centre of leftist thought.

Now the Communist Party USA is claiming Barack Obama as its spiritual heir.

US academic Gerald Horne, a member of the editorial board of the CPUSA's theoretical journal, Political Affairs wrote this piece in its latest online version.

Horne is commenting on the alleged leftist views of US ethnic minorities.

When these sources are explored, I think scholars of the future will be struck by, for example, the response in Honolulu when tens of thousands of workers went on strike when labor and CP leaders were convicted of Smith Act violations in 1953 – a response totally unlike the response on the mainland. Of course 98% of these workers were of Asian-Pacific ancestry, which suggests that scholars have also been derelict in analyzing why these workers were less anti-communist than their Euro-American counterparts.


In any case, deploring these convictions in Hawaii was an African-American poet and journalist by the name of Frank Marshall Davis, who was certainly in the orbit of the CP – if not a member – and who was born in Kansas and spent a good deal of his adult life in Chicago, before decamping to Honolulu in 1948 at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson.

Eventually, he befriended another family – a Euro-American family – that had migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago.

In his best selling memoir ‘Dreams of my Father’, the author speaks warmly of an older black poet, he identifies simply as "Frank" as being a decisive influence in helping him to find his present identity as an African-American, a people who have been the least anticommunist and the most left-leaning of any constituency in this nation –

At some point in the future, a teacher will add to her syllabus Barack’s memoir and instruct her students to read it alongside Frank Marshall Davis’ equally affecting memoir, "Living the Blues"...

According to African American Review of Summer/Fall 2003;

In Davis's case, his political commitments led him to join the American Communist Party during the middle of World War II--even though he never publicly admitted his Party membership.

Will the CPUSA back Barack?