Frank Marshall Davis - Legacy and Impact

Legacy and Impact

Kathryn Waddell Takara has made this evaluation of Davis's political legacy.

"No significant African American community existed in Hawai`i to provide Davis with emotional and moral support, and an expanded audience and market for his writing. Also, because he was still concerned with the issues of freedom, racism, and equality, he lacked widespread multi cultural support.

...

It can be argued that Davis escaped defeat like a trickster, playing dead only to arise later and win the race, although the politics of defeat were all around him. If society seemed to defeat him by denying him financial rewards, publication, and status, he continued to write prolifically. He stood by his principle that the only way to achieve social equality was to acknowledge and discuss publicly the racial and ethnic dynamics in all their complexity situated in an unjust society. He provided a bold, defiant model for writers to hold onto their convictions and articulate them."

Davis has been cited as being an influence on poet and publisher Dudley Randall and through exposure provided by Randall, Stephen Henderson and Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, Davis became an influence to the Black Arts Movement.

In his memoir Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama mentions a friend of his grandfather named Frank, that was later identified as Davis. Davis told Obama that he and Stanley (Obama's maternal grandfather) both had grown up only 50 miles apart, near Wichita, although they did not meet until Hawaii. He described the way race relations were back then, including Jim Crow, and his view that there had been little progress since then. As Obama remembered, "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." Obama also remembered Frank later in life when he took a job in South Chicago as a community organizer and took some time one day to visit the areas where Frank had lived and wrote in his book, "I imagined Frank in a baggy suit and wide lapels, standing in front of the old Regal Theatre, waiting to see Duke or Ella emerge from a gig."

Claims that Davis was a political influence on Obama were made by Jerome Corsi in his anti-Obama book The Obama Nation. A rebuttal released by Obama's presidential campaign, entitled Unfit for Publication disputes those claims about the nature of their relationship.