Writings of Frank Marshall Davis

Writings of Frank Marshall Davis
Author: Frank Marshall Davis
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2009-09-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781604733846

Writings of Frank Marshall Davis: A Voice of the Black Press edited by John Edgar Tidwell Frank Marshall Davis (1905-1987) was a central figure in the black press, working as reporter and editor for the Atlanta World, the Associated Negro Press, the Chicago Star, and the Honolulu Record. Writings of Frank Marshall Davis presents a selection of Davis's nonfiction, providing an unprecedented insight into one journalist's ability to reset the terms of public conversation and frame the news to open up debate among African Americans and all Americans. During the middle of the twentieth century, Davis set forth a radical vision that challenged the status quo. His commentary on race relations, music, literature, and American culture was precise, impassioned, and engaged. At the height of World War II, Davis boldly questioned the nature of America's potential postwar relations and what they meant for African Americans and the nation. His work frequently challenged the usefulness of race as a social construct, and he eventually disavowed the idea of race altogether. Throughout his career, he championed the struggles of African Americans for equal rights and laboring people seeking fair wages and other benefits. Writings of Frank Marshall Davis reveals a writer in touch with the most salient issues defining his era and his desire to insert them into the public sphere. John Edgar Tidwell provides an introduction and contextual notes on each major subject area Davis explored. John Edgar Tidwell is an associate professor of English at the University of Kansas.

Livin' the Blues

Livin' the Blues
Author: Frank Marshall Davis
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2003-04-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780299135041

Frank Marshall Davis was a prominent poet, journalist, jazz critic, and civil rights activist on the Chicago and Atlanta scene from the 1920s through 1940s. He was an intimate of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and an influential editor at the Chicago Evening Bulletin, the Chicago Whip, the Chicago Star, and the Atlanta World. He renounced his writing career in 1948 and moved to Hawaii, forgotten until the Black Arts Movement rediscovered him in the 1960s. Because of his early self-exile from the literary limelight, Davis's life and work have been shrouded in mystery. Livin' the Blues offers us a chance to rediscover this talented poet and writer and stands as an important example of black autobiography, similar in form, style, and message to those of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. "Both a social commentary and intellectual exploration into African American life in the twentieth century."—Charles Vincent, Atlanta History

The Communist

The Communist
Author: Paul Kengor
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2012-07-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1451698151

“I admire Russia for wiping out an economic system which permitted a handful of rich to exploit and beat gold from the millions of plain people… As one who believes in freedom and democracy for all, I honor the Red nation.” —FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS, 1947 In his memoir, Barack Obama omits the full name of his mentor, simply calling him “Frank.” Now, the truth is out: Never has a figure as deeply troubling and controversial as Frank Marshall Davis had such an impact on the development of an American president. Although other radical influences on Obama, from Jeremiah Wright to Bill Ayers, have been scrutinized, the public knows little about Davis, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, cited by the Associated Press as an “important influence” on Obama, one whom he “looked to” not merely for “advice on living” but as a “father” figure. Aided by access to explosive declassified FBI files, Soviet archives, and Davis’s original newspaper columns, Paul Kengor explores how Obama sought out Davis and how Davis found in Obama an impressionable young man, one susceptible to Davis’s worldview that opposed American policy and traditional values while praising communist regimes. Kengor sees remnants of this worldview in Obama’s early life and even, ultimately, his presidency. Is Obama working to fulfill the dreams of Frank Marshall Davis? That question has been impossible to answer, since Davis’s writings and relationship with Obama have either been deliberately obscured or dismissed as irrelevant. With Paul Kengor’s The Communist, Americans can finally weigh the evidence and decide for themselves.

Black Moods

Black Moods
Author: Frank Marshall Davis
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2024-02-12
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0252055527

Black Moods collects for the first time all of Frank Marshall Davis’s extant published poems as well as his previously unpublished work. From sharp-edged sketches of Southside Chicago’s urban landscape to the prismatic world that lay beneath Hawaii’s placid surface, Davis’s muscular poems blend social, cultural, and political concerns--always shaped by his promise to “try to be as direct as good blues.” John Edgar Tidwell’s introduction examines both Davis’s poetry and his politics, presenting a subtle portrait of a complex writer devoted to exposing discriminatory practices and reaffirming the humanity of the common people.

Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black Radicalism

Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black Radicalism
Author: James Zeigler
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2015-08-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 149680239X

During the early years of the Cold War, racial segregation in the American South became an embarrassing liability to the international reputation of the United States. For America to present itself as a model of democracy in contrast to the Soviet Union's totalitarianism, Jim Crow needed to end. While the discourse of anticommunism added the leverage of national security to the moral claims of the civil rights movement, the proliferation of Red Scare rhetoric also imposed limits on the socioeconomic changes necessary for real equality. Describing the ways anticommunism impaired the struggle for civil rights, James Zeigler reconstructs how Red Scare rhetoric during the Cold War assisted the black freedom struggle's demands for equal rights but labeled “un-American” calls for reparations. To track the power of this volatile discourse, Zeigler investigates how radical black artists and intellectuals managed to answer anticommunism with critiques of Cold War culture. Stubbornly addressed to an American public schooled in Red Scare hyperbole, black radicalism insisted that antiracist politics require a leftist critique of capitalism. Zeigler examines publicity campaigns against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s alleged Communist Party loyalties and the import of the Cold War in his oratory. He documents a Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored anthology of ex-Communist testimonials. He takes on the protest essays of Richard Wright and C. L. R. James, as well as Frank Marshall Davis's leftist journalism. The uncanny return of Red Scare invective in reaction to President Obama's election further substantiates anticommunism's lasting rhetorical power as Zeigler discusses conspiracy theories that claim Davis groomed President Obama to become a secret Communist. Long after playing a role in the demise of Jim Crow, the Cold War Red Scare still contributes to the persistence of racism in America.

Dupes

Dupes
Author: Paul Kengor
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 614
Release: 2023-06-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1684516110

In this startling, intensively researched book, bestselling historian Paul Kengor shines light on a deeply troubling aspect of American history: the prominent role of the "dupe." From the Bolshevik Revolution through the Cold War and right up to the present, many progressives have unwittingly aided some of America's most dangerous opponents. Based on never-before-published FBI files, Soviet archives, and other primary sources, Dupes exposes the legions of liberals who have furthered the objectives of America's adversaries. Kengor shows not only how such dupes contributed to history's most destructive ideology—Communism, which claimed at least 100 million lives—but also why they are so relevant to today's politics.

Rethinking Social Realism

Rethinking Social Realism
Author: Stacy I. Morgan
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780820325798

The social realist movement, with its focus on proletarian themes and its strong ties to New Deal programs and leftist politics, has long been considered a depression-era phenomenon that ended with the start of World War II. This study explores how and why African American writers and visual artists sustained an engagement with the themes and aesthetics of social realism into the early cold war-era--far longer than a majority of their white counterparts. Stacy I. Morgan recalls the social realist atmosphere in which certain African American artists and writers were immersed and shows how black social realism served alternately to question the existing order, instill race pride, and build interracial, working-class coalitions. Morgan discusses, among others, such figures as Charles White, John Wilson, Frank Marshall Davis, Willard Motley, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Catlett, and Hale Woodruff.

Dreams from My Father

Dreams from My Father
Author: Barack Obama
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 463
Release: 2007-01-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307394123

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama “guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race” (The Washington Post Book World). “Quite extraordinary.”—Toni Morrison In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. Praise for Dreams from My Father “Beautifully crafted . . . moving and candid . . . This book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride’s The Color of Water and Gregory Howard Williams’s Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America’s racial categories.”—Scott Turow “Provocative . . . Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”—The New York Times Book Review “Obama’s writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring.”—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here “One of the most powerful books of self-discovery I’ve ever read, all the more so for its illuminating insights into the problems not only of race, class, and color, but of culture and ethnicity. It is also beautifully written, skillfully layered, and paced like a good novel.”—Charlayne Hunter-Gault, author of In My Place “Dreams from My Father is an exquisite, sensitive study of this wonderful young author’s journey into adulthood, his search for community and his place in it, his quest for an understanding of his roots, and his discovery of the poetry of human life. Perceptive and wise, this book will tell you something about yourself whether you are black or white.”—Marian Wright Edelman

Deconstructing Obama

Deconstructing Obama
Author: Jack Cashill
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2011-02-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1451611137

Did Obama write his own books and is the story they tell true? “I've written two books,” Barack Obama told a crowd of teachers in July of 2008. “I actually wrote them myself.” The teachers exploded in laughter. They got the joke: lesser politicians were not bright enough to do the same. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama supporters pointed to the first of those two books, the 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, as proof of Obama’s superior intellect. Time magazine called Dreams “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.” The Obama campaign machine traded on the candidate’s literary reputation, encouraging volunteers to “get out the vote and keep talking to others about the genius of Barack Obama.” There was just one small flaw, as writer and literary detective Jack Cashill discovered months before the November 2008 election: nothing in Obama’s history suggested he was capable of writing either Dreams or his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope. In fact, as Cashill continued his research, he came to the shocking conclusion that the real craftsman behind Dreams was terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers. “This was a charge,” David Remnick admits in his definitive Obama biography, The Bridge, “that if ever proved true, or believed to be true among enough voters, could have been the end of the candidacy.” Deconstructing Obama tells the story of what happens when a citizen journalist discovers a game-changing reality that the media refuse to acknowledge. Despite their rejection, Cashill expanded his research into Obama’s literary canon. As he came to see, if Dreams serves as sacred text, the poem “Pop” is the Rosetta stone, the key to deciphering Obama’s shrouded past, his fragile psyche, and his uniquely cryptic political life. In unlocking that past, Cashill discovered that the story that Obama has been telling all his life varies from the true story in ways big and small. In fact, much of Obama’s life story appears to be a wholly constructed fabrication, one that Jack Cashill “deconstructs” to show the world just who Barack Obama really is.