Taxpayer-funded Smithsonian Honors Pro-Russian Communist

By: Cliff Kincaid

As President Trump enters negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin over Ukraine, the American taxpayer-financed Smithsonian Institution has been caught honoring an American communist who was devoted to Russia by the name of Angela Davis.

President Trump’s review of the taxpayer-funded Smithsonian museums to eliminate these “woke” displays and presentations has come just in time.

We discovered that the longtime pro-Russian communist Angela Davis is currently being honored by the taxpayer-funded National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution as a “luminary” whose “lifelong impassioned advocacy for those without a voice looms large.” The recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize, Davis was a Communist Party candidate for vice president of the United States when the CPUSA was funded by Moscow and provided cover for Soviet espionage activities.

When this lithograph was on display in the Hammer museum, it was titled a “Love Letter” to the communist and was circulated by the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, a front of the Moscow-funded Communist Party USA.

Recall that Vladimir Putin told Russian television that “people of my generation remember a time when huge portraits of Angela Davis, a member of the U.S. Communist Party and an ardent fighter for the rights of African Americans, were on view around the Soviet Union.”

“It is a fact,” Putin said, “that African Americans constitute a stable electorate, one of the electorates of the Democratic Party. It is a well-known fact, and there is nothing new about this. The Soviet Union also supported the African Americans’ movement for their legitimate rights. Back in the 1930s, Communist International leaders wrote that both black and white workers had a common enemy – imperialism and capitalism. They also wrote that these people could become the most effective group in the future revolutionary battle.”

Davis was once on the FBI’s most wanted list for her alleged involvement in a murder. She was arrested and beat the rap, going on to have a “successful career” as a college professor, and she never disavowed her communist beliefs. In fact, she says, “I have always been a communist.”

According to a biography of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party candidate for mayor of New York City, he studied Davis’s writings at Bowdoin College and graduated in 2014 with a degree in Africana studies.

On the college website, we find Davis as a resource for the course, “Feminist Theory: Women of Color Feminisms and the Politics of Difference.” The course “originates in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and is cross-listed with: Africana Studies, Government and Legal Studies, and Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies.”

Another course, “Creating Change, Getting Free: The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements,” offers Davis as a resource. It says, “Students examine the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement to understand the centrality of race, racism, and political organizing in change-making processes in the US.”

Students are offered “critical perspectives” that “shed light on the connections between ever-changing notions of Blackness(es), structural and institutional forms of oppression, and the bloody, sweaty, and tearful efforts people engaged in to create change.”

Such “change” is coming to New York City, considered the financial capital of the United States, but also a base of operations for the Communist Party USA and its many offshoots and spin-offs, including communist bookstores. Hence, “Democratic Socialist” Zohran Mamdani’s capture of the Democratic Party nomination for mayor should come as no surprise.

Years ago, even the New York Times was reporting on how Angela Davis had pledged her allegiance to Moscow, noting that she was “given the keys to the ancient city of Samarkand and been made an honorary professor of Moscow University on a triumphal tour of the Soviet Union…” She also visited the KGB’s Patrice Lumumba University, “where young people from Asia, Africa, and Latin America are being trained…”

They were trained in communism as part of a Russian and Chinese Communist campaign to spread communism around the world.

Mahmoud Abbas, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) who is also president of the Palestinian Authority, did his Ph.D. work at Lumumba University, where he wrote a report claiming that there was no Holocaust, and that the Jews murdered during World War II were killed by Zionists working with the Nazis.

Mahmoud Abbas had proposed an “international peace conference” on the Middle East in Moscow, after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Abbas was grateful to Putin for the historical support of the Russian government to Palestine,” one report said.

Another graduate of Patrice Lumumba University was the international terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, who converted to Islam.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, was another graduate of Patrice Lumumba University.

Later in life, Davis became a lesbian activist and a vegan, having adopted animals as the latest victims of the white oppressors. She recently received an honorary Doctorate in Letters from Cambridge University, the home of the Cambridge Five, a network of communist spies in Britain.

All of this is a reminder that the communist threat remains here and abroad.

Putin understands the role of the Soviet/Russian Communist Party in subverting American democratic institutions and is still committed to the communist vision of world communism. That is why, in an alliance with Communist China, he is using thousands of North Korean troops to conquer Ukraine.

But President Trump’s review of the Smithsonian could succeed in transferring its “Love Letter” to communist Angela Davis into the trash can of history. And that is a step in the right direction.