In Barack Obama’s “Dreams from my Father”, there’s a minor character named Frank who Obama identifies as an 80 year old Black poet who he met as a teenager in Hawaii through his grandfather. While Obama’s recollections about Frank are affectionate, they are also patronizing: “It made me smile, thinking back on Frank and his old Black Power, dashiki self. In some ways he was as incurable as my mother, as certain in his faith, living in the same sixties time warp that Hawaii had created.”

It turns out that Frank is Frank Marshall Davis, a life-long member of the Communist Party. From the wiki on Davis:

Davis used his newspaper platform to call for integration of the sports world, and he began to engage himself with community organizing efforts, starting a Chicago labor newspaper, The Star, toward the end of World War II. In 1945, he taught one of the first jazz history courses in the United States, at the Abraham Lincoln School[10] in Chicago.

In 1948, Davis and his second wife, who had married in 1946, moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, at the suggestion of Davis’s friend Paul Robeson. During this time Hawaii was going through a non-violent revolution between colored labor workers and the white elite known as the Democratic Revolution. There, Davis operated a small wholesale paper business, Oahu Papers, which mysteriously burned to the ground in March 1951. In 1959, he started another similar firm, the Paradise Paper Company.

Davis also wrote a weekly column, called “Frank-ly Speaking”, for the Honolulu Record, a labor paper published by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) headed by Harry Bridges.[11]Davis’ first column noted he was a member of the national executive board of the Civil Rights Congress,[12] cited as a Communist subversive organization by President Harry S. Truman’s Attorney General Tom Clark.[13] The paper had been founded in 1948 by Koji Ariyoshi , and closed in 1958. Davis’s early columns covered labor issues, but he broadened his scope to write about cultural and political issues, especially racism. He also included the history of blues and jazz in his columns.

You can find all sorts of attempts in the rightwing blogosphere to turn Obama into some kind of Manchurian Candidate based on his grandfather’s friendship with Frank Marshall Davis and his supposed tutelage at the red poet’s knees. But it would appear that Obama and Frank were a world apart based on this excerpt from Obama’s memoir. He is just about to start his freshman year at Occidental College and Frank is warning him about how he would be indoctrinated to serve the ruling class in college rather than the Black community. Frank had the gift of prophecy, it would appear.

The only thing that Frank gets wrong is Obama occupying a “corner office”. It turned out that he landed the grand prize, the oval office. His ambition, his Machiavellian skills, his shrewdness and his chameleon qualities propelled him into an office where he could exercise real power as opposed to just merely being a “well-trained nigger”, to use Frank’s words.

Dreams from my Father, page 97:

What had Frank called college? An advanced degree in compromise. I thought back to the last time I had seen the old poet, a few days before I left Hawaii. We had made small talk for a while; he complained about his feet, the corns and bone spurs that he insisted were a direct result of trying to force African feet into European shoes. Finally he asked me what I expected to get out of college. I told him that I didn’t know. He shook his big, hoary head.

“Well,” he said, “that’s the problem, isn’t it? You don’t know. You’re just like the rest of those young cats out here. All you know is that college is the next thing you are supposed to do. And the people who are young enough to know better, who fought all those years for your right to go to college—they’re just so happy to see you in there that they won’t tell you the truth. The real price of admission.”

“And what’s that?”

“Leaving your race at the door,” he said. “Leaving your people behind.” He studied me over the top of his reading glasses. You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained. They’ll train you to want you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They’ll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you that you’re a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they’ll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you’re a nigger just the same.”