AP: Writer offered a young Barack Obama advice on life
By SUDHIN THANAWALA
HONOLULU (AP) — At key moments in his adolescence, Barack Obama could not turn to a father he hardly knew. Instead, he looked to a left-leaning black journalist and poet for advice on living in a world of black and white.
Frank Marshall Davis had his opinions. He once argued that the public schools of his youth prepared neither blacks nor whites for "life in a multiracial, democratic nation." He called hypocrisy "a national trait of American whites." Advocating civil rights amid segregation, Davis wrote in 1949: "I refuse to settle for anything less than all the rights which are due me under the Constitution." The depth of the influence Davis had on the presumptive Democratic nominee is a question. While Davis' leftist politics could allow the candidate's critics to group Davis with Obama friends and acquaintances with allegedly anti-American views, those who knew Davis and his work say his activism was aimed squarely at social injustice.
Obama's father was a black man from Kenya and his mother a white Kansas woman. They separated when Obama was 2, and he saw his father just once after they divorced two years later. Raised with the help of his white grandparents, Obama attended school in his native Hawaii with few African-American peers. He struggled to find mentors in his search for a black identity. His white grandfather, Stanley Dunham, was friends with Davis — both had roots reaching back to Kansas and had families of mixed races — and the black writer took an interest in Obama.
"Our grandfather ... thought (Frank) was a point of connection, a bridge if you will, to the larger African-American experience for my brother," Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama's half-sister, said during a recent interview. Although Davis does not appear to have been a constant figure in his early life, Obama in his 1995 memoir, "Dreams from My Father," presents Davis — referred to in the book only as Frank — as an important influence who gave him advice about race and college.
A longtime journalist, Davis (1905-1987) was among a group of prominent black writers pushing for equal rights in the 1930s and '40s, before the civil rights movement gained momentum. He published several volumes of poetry and served as executive editor of the Associated Negro Press, a wire service for black newspapers, before leaving the mainland for Hawaii in 1948. "Frank was part of a group of black vanguard intellectuals," said Kathryn Takara, a professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation about Davis. "The people that he came into contact with throughout his life, like Richard Wright and Margaret Walker, were very significant."...
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g-kOchVDYR0fDD0zy_-CtMIgYKaQD92A8KT00
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