Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  20. Obama, DFMF, pp. 29–30, 51–52; Obama in Monica Mitchell, “Son Finds Inspiration in the Dreams of His Father,” Hyde Park Herald [HPH], 23 August 1995, p. 10; Kay Ikranagara in Judith Kampfner, “Dreams from My Mother,” BBC Radio World Service, 16 September 2009 (and, similarly, in Ben Barber, “Obama’s Mother Worked for USAID, World Bank, in Indonesia,” FrontLines, March 2009); “Oprah Talks to Barack Obama,” O, The Oprah Magazine, November 2004; Obama in Charles Barkley, Who’s Afraid of a Large Black Man? (Penguin Press, 2005), pp. 22–23 (printing a fall 2004 interview with Obama conducted by Barkley and Michael Wilbon); Obama in Scharnberg and Barker, “The Not-So-Simple Story,” CT, 25 March 2007; Obama on ABC’s 20/20, 26 September 2008; “I Wish I Were Black—Again,” Ebony, December 1968, pp. 119–20, 122, 124; John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (Houghton Mifflin, 1961); Jonathan Yardley’s luminous “John Howard Griffin Took Race All the Way to the Finish,” WP, 17 March 2007; Bruce Watson, “Black Like Me 50 Years Later,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2011; Phillip L. Hammack, “The Political Psychology of Personal Narrative: The Case of Barack Obama,” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 10 (December 2010): 182–206, pp. 190, 193; Obama Remarks at Cornell College, Mt. Vernon, IA, 5 December 2007. See also especially Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Duke University Press, 2000), who notes that in earlier decades Ebony had published at least three illustrated stories about the downsides of passing: “Case History of an Ex-White Man,” December 1946, pp. 11–16, “I’m Through with Passing,” March 1951, pp. 22–27, and “The Curse of Passing,” December 1955, pp. 50–56.

  21. John F. O’Shea to Ann D. Soetoro, 22 August 1968, Soetoro INS File (letter addressed to 2234 University Avenue returned to sender); Obama, DFMF, pp. 54, 58; Will Hoover, “Obama’s Hawaii Boyhood Homes Drawing Gawkers,” HA, 9 November 2008; Ron Jacobs, Obamaland (Trade Publishing, 2009), p. 30; Scott, A Singular Woman, p. 97; DJG interviews with Ralph Dunham, Virginia Dunham Goeldner, Charles Payne, Alec Williamson, Susan Williamson Corley, and Rolf Nordahl. See also Obama in Jackie Calmes, “President Hits His Stride,” NYT, 21 November 2011 (perhaps referencing another transit through Sydney at age eight). Bob Pratt would apparently operate a furniture store in Kailua, Kona, on the big island of Hawaii, during at least the late 1970s and early 1980s: see In the Matter of the Petition of T.S.K., Associates, Hawaii Land Use Commission #A80-482, 14 May 1981, p. 9. Per his 17 February 2005 Honolulu Advertiser obituary, Albert Robert Pratt was born in 1927 and died in Kailua at age seventy-seven. On Punahou, see especially Nelson Foster, ed., Punahou: The History and Promise of a School of the Islands (Punahou School, 1991), a beautifully rich pictorial history, and Lawrence Downes, “For Obama, Estranged in a Strange Land, Aloha Had Its Limits,” NYT, 9 April 2007, p. A16.

  22. The literature on Frank Marshall Davis is extensive, but anyone interested in his life story must begin with his exceptionally rich and revealing autobiography, Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet, ed. John Edgar Tidwell (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), esp. pp. 312, 323, and 327, and then proceed to “Bob Greene,” Sex Rebel: Black (Greenleaf Classics, 1968), which of course is difficult to obtain. Tidwell’s works are the starting point for any critical appreciation of Davis. See Tidwell, “An Interview with Frank Marshall Davis,” Black American Literature Forum 19 (Autumn 1985): 105–8; “Frank Marshall Davis,” Kansas History 18 (Winter 1995–1996): 270–83; Tidwell, “‘I Was a Weaver of Jagged Words’: Social Function in the Poetry of Frank Marshall Davis,” Langston Hughes Review 14 (Spring–Fall 1996): 65–78, esp. p. 65 (“did not survive”); Tidwell, “Alternative Constructions to Black Arts Autobiography: Frank Marshall Davis and 1960s Counterculture,” CLA Journal 41 (December 1997): 147–60; Frank Marshall Davis, Black Moods—Collected Poems, ed. Tidwell (University of Illinois Press, 2002); Tidwell, ed., Writings of Frank Marshall Davis: A Voice of the Black Press (University Press of Mississippi, 2007). See also Bill V. Mullen, Review of Livin’ the Blues, Black Moods, and Writings of Frank Marshall Davis, African American Review 42 (Fall 2008): 768–770 (“among the best”); James E. Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 135–41 (“a certain distance”); Bill V. Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Cultural Politics, 1935–1946 (University of Illinois Press, 1999); Stacy I. Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930–1953 (University of Georgia Press, 2004), pp. 24–25, 28–29, 184–206; Dudley Randall, “An Interview with Frank Marshall Davis—‘Mystery’ Poet,” Black World 23 (January 1974): 37–48; Davis to Ron Welburn, 31 August 1982, in Ronald G. Welburn, “American Jazz Criticism, 1914–1940,” Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, October 1983, pp. 189–90; Davis’s May 1987 oral history interview with Chris Conybeare and Joy Chong of UH’s CLER; Kathryn Waddell Takara, “Frank Marshall Davis,” in Steven C. Tracy, ed., Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance (University of Illinois Press, 2011), pp. 161–84; and Takara’s Frank Marshall Davis: The Fire and the Phoenix—A Critical Biography (Pacific Raven Press, 2012). Takara’s 2011 essay and 2012 book supplant her earlier “Rage and Passion in the Poetry of Frank Marshall Davis,” Black Scholar 26 (Summer 1996): 17–26, “Frank Marshall Davis in Hawaii: Outsider Journalist Looking In,” Social Process in Hawaii 39 (1999): 126–44, and “Frank Marshall Davis: A Forgotten Voice in the Chicago Black Renaissance,” Western Journal of Black Studies 26 (Winter 2002): 215–27. Regarding Sex Rebel, see Davis’s 1 November 1968 and 27 October 1982 letters to Margaret Burroughs in the Burroughs Papers, DuSable Museum, Chicago. See also William Grimes, “Margaret T. Burroughs, Archivist of Black History, Dies at 95,” NYT, 27 November 2010. The DuSable Museum also houses a small Frank Marshall Davis archival collection.

  On Frank and Helen’s December 1948 move to Oahu, see especially Davis, “Inventory After a Year,” Honolulu Record, 8 December 1949, pp. 8, 6; see also “Helen Peck’s Marriage to Lt. Kline Told,” CT, 16 February 1944, p. 17. On Frank’s CPUSA affiliation and involvements, anyone must begin with Frank’s FBI headquarters main file, 100-328955, whose first serial dates from July 1944 and its last from September 1963. Other sources referencing or discussing Frank in that vein are U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings Regarding Communist Activities in the Territory of Hawaii—Part 3, 17–19 April 1950, 81st Cong., 2nd Sess. (U.S. GPO, 1950), pp. 2065–68; Hawaii Residents’ Association, Communism in Hawaii: A Summary of the 1955 Report of the Territorial Commission on Subversive Activities, p. 44; U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States—Hearings Before the Internal Security Subcommittee, Part 41, 5 and 6 December 1956, 84th Cong., 2nd Sess. (U.S. GPO, 1957), pp. 2518–19, Part 41-A, Appendix II, pp. 2697–98, and Appendix III, pp. 2782–83; Gerald Horne, Fighting in Paradise: Labor Unions, Racism, and Communists in the Making of Modern Hawaii (University of Hawaii Press, 2011), pp. 36–38, 129–33, 198–202, 269–70, 298–99, and esp. 330–31; and Paul Kengor, The Communist—Frank Marshall Davis (Simon & Schuster, 2012). On Jack Hall, see Sanford Zalburg, A Spark Is Struck! Jack Hall and the ILWU in Hawaii (University of Hawaii Press, 1979).

  The Koa Cottages were located within the rectangle formed by Kuhio, Liluokalani, Kalakaua, and Kealohilani Avenues. Mark Kaleolualoha Davis’s “glee” remark appeared in a 3 April 2009 comment on neoneocon.org. Stan and Barry’s August 1970 visit there is informed by Obama, DFMF, pp. 76–77, DJG interviews with Charles Payne and Dawna Weatherly-Williams, Sudhin Thanawala (AP), “Writer Offered a Young Barack Obama Advice on Life,” 2 August 2008 (quoting Maya Soetoro-Ng); Toby Harnden, “Barack Obama’s True Colours” and “Frank Marshall Davis, Alleged Communist, Was Early Influence on Barack Obama,” Telegraph [Sunday] Magazine (UK), 23 August 2008, pp. 26ff.; David Remnick, The Bridge (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), p. 96; Kathryn Takara interview quotation (“His grandfather was one of Fra
nk’s closest friends”) in Cliff Kincaid and Herbert Romerstein, Communism in Hawaii and the Obama Connection (America’s Survival, May 2008), p. 5; and Maraniss, BOTS, p. 270 (apparently quoting Obama). Davis was first publicly identified as the “Frank” in DFMF by Gerald Horne, “Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party,” Political Affairs, 28 March 2007.

  23. Scott, A Singular Woman, photo section following p. 120; Ed Davies, “Indonesia Left Deep Imprint on Obama Family,” Reuters, 22 March 2008; Soetendro, Trisulo et al., A Gift from Your Family, p. 9; Obama, DFMF, pp. 31, 38–41; Obama, Illinois Center for the Book Presentation, Illinois State Library, Springfield, 7 March 2001; Obama, The Audacity of Hope (Crown Publishers, 2006), p. 346; Obama in Todd Purdum, “Raising Obama,” Vanity Fair, March 2008; Obama on C-Span Book TV, 23 November 2004; Ian Buruma, “A Free Spirit,” NYRB, 26 May 2011; Justin A. Frank, Obama on the Couch (Free Press, 2011), pp. 126, 205; Tammerlin Drummond, “Barack Obama’s Law,” LAT, 12 March 1990, pp. E1, E2; Allison J. Pugh (AP), “First Black President of School’s Law Review Uninterested in a Cushy Job,” 15 April 1990; Obama, Book Channel interview with Marc Strassman, Studio City, CA, 11 August 1995; Obama, “A Life’s Calling to Public Service,” Punahou Bulletin, Fall 1999, pp. 28–29; Julieanna Richardson’s wonderfully rich 2001 HistoryMakers.com interview with Obama; Obama on Fresh Air, NPR, 12 August 2004; Obama in Stephanie Griffith, “White House Prospect Obama Forever Changed by Asia Sojourn,” Agence France-Presse, 9 January 2007; Obama interview with Nicholas D. Kristof, NYTimes.com, 5 March 2007; Wolffe, Renegade, p. 235. See also Obama in Mitchell, “Son Finds Inspiration on the Dreams of His Father,” HPH, 23 August 1995, p. 10 (“My mother gave me a positive self-image of being a black person. She raised me on stories about my father” and indeed “I think to some extent, she romanticized black life”) and in Q&A with Wakefield High School Students, Arlington, VA, 8 September 2009, Public Papers 2009 Vol. II, p. 1352 (“she never spoke badly about him”). See as well Sharma, Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia, p. xxiii: “The early formative experiences in Jakarta shaped Obama indelibly.”

  24. Obama, DFMF, pp. 53–62; Will Hoover, “Obama’s Hawaii Boyhood Homes Drawing Gawkers,” HA, 9 November 2008; Punahou Catalog 1971–1972, Punahou School Archives; Jacobs, Obamaland, pp. 30, 39; Dan Nakaso, “Obama’s Tutu a Hawaii Banking Female Pioneer,” HA, 30 March 2008; DJG interviews with Pal Eldredge, Susan Williamson Corley, Alec Williamson, and Mark Hebing; Joella Edwards, “Buff ’N Blue & Black,” in Jacobs, Obamaland, pp. 60–63; Ronald Loui and Joella Edwards on Real Talk with Jack McAdoo, JMacRadio.com, Shows 9, 10, and 12, (1, 4, and 10 November 2010), and Joella Edwards, “Growing Up with Obama,” Lowcountry View with Earl Yates, 15 and 23 January 2011, Youtube.com.

  Incorrect perceptions of Obama’s financial aid status at Punahou are legion. John Rowehl, “Financial Aid Explained,” Ka Punahou, 17 December 1976, p. 1, is an almost definitive guide. Punahou did not use “the term ‘scholarship’ because” that “implies that monetary assistance is given for special talents or abilities,” which was not the case. “Punahou gives financial aid only to those who cannot afford to pay full tuition,” and during the initial admissions process “a financial status form” is filled out by parents. “Usually if a family’s net income is $12,000 or more, they won’t be eligible.” In 1975–76, only 240 Punahou students were receiving aid, with only two being awarded the top sum of $1,500: “No full scholarships exist.” If a student is “granted aid, those in grades seven and up are placed in work service” totaling 100 to 140 hours per year. Not one of Obama’s many friends and classmates, nor any Punahou teacher, has ever recounted Obama working at Punahou.

  On Mabel Hefty, see Susan Essoyan, “A Teacher’s Hefty Influence,” HSB, 29 July 2007 (reprinted in Punahou Bulletin, Fall 2007); Maraniss, BOTS, p. 269; and Obama’s “Remarks Honoring the 2011 National and State Teachers of the Year,” 3 May 2011, Public Papers 2011 Vol. I, p. 488, “Remarks at Campaign Rally,” 22 August 2012, North Las Vegas, Nevada, and “Email from President Obama: ‘My Fifth-Grade Teacher,’” White House Blog, 29 April 2015. On the fifth-grade year, also see Jason Hagey, “Man Who Grew Up with Barack Obama . . . ,” Tacoma News Tribune, 23 August 2008, p. A1; Chris McGann, “Basketball Buddy Remembers Years with Obama,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 25 August 2008, p. B1; Woody Paige, “A Special Boy Called Barry,” Denver Post, 28 August 2008, p. P6; Matt Roper, “Our School Pal Barack,” Mirror, 15 November 2008, p. 14; Ronald P. Loui in Constance F. Ramos, ed., Our Friend Barry: Classmates’ Recollections of Barack Obama and Punahou School (Lulu.com, September 2008), pp. 83, 88–89; and Jackie Calmes, “On Campus, Obama and Memories,” NYT, 3 January 2009.

  25. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, “Request by U.S. National for and Report of Exception to Section 53.1 . . . ,” 21 October 1971, Dunham Passport File; Obama, DFMF, pp. 62–71; Scott, A Singular Woman, pp. 90–91, 143–45; P. Huddait [?] to Mr. [Patrick F.] Coomey, “A11 938 537, Barack H. Obama,” 17 July 1964, and E. Golden, untitled memo, 28 August 1964, Obama INS File; Mark Obama Ndesandjo, Nairobi to Shenzhen (Aventine Press, 2009), pp. 110–15; Ndesandjo, An Obama’s Journey, pp. 14–20, 27, and esp. 359; Edmund Sanders, “Obama Not Quite His Father’s Son,” LAT, 17 July 2008; Robert Shenton (Harvard Registrar) to Obama, 16 November 1965, and Alice B. Hall to INS District Director, 17 November 1965, both Obama INS File; DJG interviews with Zeituni Onyango; Onyango, Tears of Abuse, pp. 26–41; Malik Obama, Barack Obama Sr., pp. 217, 228–35; Jacobs, The Other Barack, pp. 165–90; Firstbrook, The Obamas, pp. 205–6, 213–15. Maraniss, BOTS, pp. 206–7, appears to present the most accurate account of Obama’s mid-1965 auto accident, and it is relied upon here. Photographic evidence suggests that Lolo Soetoro and one-year-old Maya, as well as Lolo’s parents Tik and Titi, also traveled to Honolulu in the fall of 1971. See the three photos each dated 1971 and clearly taken in Honolulu in Soetendro, Trisulo, et al., A Gift from Your Family, pp. 13–15.

  As of 2014–15, a full and accurate PDF of Sessional Paper No. 10 is easily accessible on the Web page of the World Bank. Barack H. Obama, “Problems Facing Our Socialism,” East Africa Journal, July 1965, pp. 26–33, might best be read after surveying Goldsworthy, Tom Mboya, pp. 234–38, and David William Cohen, “Perils and Pragmatics of Critique: Reading Barack Obama Sr.’s 1965 Review of Kenya’s Development Plan,” 24 March 2010 (unpublished seminar paper), a PDF of which is readily available on the Web. See also William Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, The Risks of Knowledge: Investigations into the Death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990 (Ohio University Press, 2004), p. 182, and Ben Smith and Jeffrey Ressner, “Long-Lost Article By Obama’s Dad Surfaces,” Politico, 15 April 2008. The essential monograph for tracing Kenya’s 1966–67 political upheaval is Cherry Gertzel, The Politics of Independent Kenya 1963–8 (Northwestern University Press, 1970), esp. pp. 32, 49–50, 73–124, 145–46, 152, 175–76; also central are Jet, 30 June 1966, p. 50 (reporting the expulsion of Ernestine Hammond Kiano), D. Pal Ahluwalia, Post-Colonialism and the Politics of Kenya (Nova Science, 1996), pp. 38–59, Barack Echols e-mails to DJG, and DJG interview with Barack Echols (with Echols quoting an e-mail to him from his mother). Echols was born in August 1968; Hansen’s forced departure from Nairobi thus was circa November 1967. See also William R. Ochieng, “Structural & Political Change,” in B. A. Ogot and Ochieng, eds., Decolonization & Independence in Kenya 1940–93 (James Currey, 1995), pp. 83–109, esp. pp. 98, 107; Kiano’s 1989 interview with Harry Kreisler; a biographical citation to Dr. Kiano upon the conferment of an honorary doctorate from the University of Nairobi on 1 December 1997, available at www.uonbi.ac.ke/sites/default/files/Kiano.pdf; and Stephens, Kenyan Student Airlifts to America, pp. 8–12.

  26. Jacobs, The Other Barack, pp. 177, 190–228; Firstbrook, The Obamas, p. 214; Ndesandjo, Nairobi to Shenzhen, pp. 131–33; Ndesandjo, An Obama’s Journey, pp. 30–31, 131; DJG interviews with and e-mails from Zeituni Onyango, especally 22 May 2012 (reporting that Malik Obam
a “who has the birth certificate of David” told her by phone that it shows David was born on 11 September 1968); Onyango, Tears of Abuse, pp. 39, 79, 217; Malik Obama, Barack Obama Sr., pp. 236, 257, 261, 265; Auma Obama, And Then Life Happens, pp. 59–60; Andrea Sachs, “Auma Obama on Her Famous Brother,” Time, 4 May 2012; Angella Johnson, “My Little Brother Barack Obama,” Daily Mail, 9 March 2013.

  Both Jacobs, The Other Barack, pp. 208, 271, and Maraniss, BOTS, pp. 246, 592, quote from an article titled “Tourism Officer on Drinks Charge” in the 4 November 1967, Daily Nation newspaper; BOTS also presents a partial photo of the article. Neither book cites a particular page number, and a careful review of the microfilm edition of the 1967 Daily Nation available in United States libraries fails to show any such article in that edition of the 4 November paper.

  On Abercrombie and Zane’s late 1968 visit to Nairobi, see Tim Jones, “Obama’s Mother: Not Just a Girl from Kansas,” CT, 27 March 2007; Kevin Merida, “The Ghost of a Father,” WP, 14 December 2007, p. A12; Lee Cataluna, “Glimpse of Obama Sr. in Photos,” HA, 8 August 2008; David Maraniss, “Though Obama Had to Leave to Find Himself, It Is Hawaii That Made His Rise Possible,” WP Magazine, 24 August 2008; and DJG interview with Pake Zane.

  On Mboya’s assassination and Obama’s testimony, see especially Goldsworthy, Tom Mboya, pp. 279–81; “Njenga Defence Case Today,” East African Standard, 9 September 1969, p. 1; and Malik Obama, Barack Obama Sr., p. 257.

  27. Scott, A Singular Woman, pp. 90–91, 143–44; Obama, DFMF, pp. 62–71, 126; Jacobs, The Other Barack, p. 229; Obama in Mitchell, “Son Finds Inspiration in the Dreams of His Father,” HPH, 23 August 1995, p. 10; Obama’s 2001 oral history interview with Julieanna Richardson; Obama on Fresh Air, NPR, 12 August 2004, Obama in Barkley, Who’s Afraid of a Large Black Man?, p. 23; Obama on The Oprah Winfrey Show, 19 January 2005; Obama on “Barack Obama Revealed,” CNN, 20 August 2008; Obama, Remarks at the White House, 19 June 2009, Public Papers 2009 Vol. I, p. 859; Obama, Q&A with Wakefield High School Students, Arlington, Virginia, 8 September 2009, Public Papers 2009 Vol. II, p. 1350; and Obama, Remarks at the Kennedy Center, Public Papers 2009 Vol. II, p. 1780. On Arlene Payne and Margery Duffey, see Arlene’s obituary, Andrew Kenney, “UNC Researcher, a Pioneering Academic, Kept Kinship to Obama to Herself,” News & Observer, 23 June 2014.