President Barack Obama has long fought to minimize his association with his mentor during his teens, known communist Frank Marshall Davis.
In his book “Dreams From My Father,” the future president refused to refer to his mentor as anything other than “Frank.” In the audiobook version of “Dreams,” Obama went further and excised all references to “Frank.”
However, thanks to the Internet, things are seldom buried forever. In this clip from 1995, the future president is on his book tour at the Cambridge Public Library. He’s not only open about just who “Frank” is, he talks about how the man “schooled” him on how racist white people were.
The clip below shows Obama’s stunning admission.
As he goes into his reading, he explains that the portion is about “me having a conversation with a close friend of my maternal grandfather, a close friend of gramps, a black man from Kansas, named Frank, actually at the time a fairly well-known poet named Frank Marshall Davis, who had moved to Hawaii and lived there.
“And so I have a discussion with him about the kinds of frustrations I’m having, and he sorts of schools me that I should get used to these frustrations,” Obama said.
The passage itself isn’t exactly free from controversial material. In it, Obama described how his worldview as a teenager held that “any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning,” inasmuch as they were all racist.
He also equates calling someone who held this worldview “paranoid” equivalent to calling him the n-word.
Frank Marshall Davis, of course, was a former member of the Communist Party USA who managed to earn a 600-page dossier of his activities from the FBI as well as a place on the bureau’s “security index,” essentially meaning he could have been arrested at any time.
Marshall’s poetry included one lovely passage where he called Jesus the n-word, as well. (H/T Red Flag News)
While Obama’s managed to keep his association with Frank Marshall Davis out of the spotlight for long enough to earn himself both election and re-election, one wonders how many Americans would have voted for Obama if this had been public knowledge in 2008.
Of course, this all was public knowledge, if you knew where to look. The media certainly did, but didn’t bother to inform us.
We’re all paying the price now.
Here’s the full video of Obama’s speech: