Who is Valerie Jarrett? - Part II of IV
Jarrett’s Mother
Valerie Jarrett’s mother is the early-childhood-education author Barbara Taylor Bowman (born 1928), who in 1966 co-founded a Chicago-based graduate school in child development known as the Erikson Institute, named after the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. (In 1950 Erikson became a hero to the left by choosing to resign from his professorship at the University of California rather than sign an anti-communist loyalty oath as the school required.) Indicative of the Erikson Institute’s radical political orientation is the fact that its board of trustees has included, in addition to Mrs. Bowman, such figures as Tom Ayers (father of the former Weather Underground terrorist and lifelong Marxist Bill Ayers) and Bernardine Dohrn (longtime wife of Bill Ayers). Bill Ayers, for his part, called Mrs. Bowman “a neighbor and friend” in his 1997 book A Kind and Just Parent, noting that his neighbors also included Louis Farrakhan and “writer Barack Obama.”
Valerie Jarrett’s maternal grandfather was a Chicago communist named Robert Rochon Taylor, the first African-American head of the Chicago Housing Authority. In the 1940s he was involved with such Communist fronts as the American Peace Mobilization and the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee (where he was an advisory board member). Also a member of these groups was Frank Marshall Davis (the Communist journalist who in the 1970s would mentor a young Barack Obama). FBI documents show that Taylor was “in contact with [Soviet agent Alfred] Stern on a number of occasions.
Taylor also had ties to William Patterson, who was a prominent black communist and a mentor to Frank Marshall Davis. In Congress’s 1944 report titled “Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States,” Taylor was named for his participation in the “Arrangements Committee” that organized the July 1939 Chicago Conference on Race Relations, in which a number of nationally known communist figures played roles. Taylor’s FBI file shows that he was also a “member of the Sponsoring Committee for a reception of Howard Fast,” a 1944 event held in Chicago to honor the Stalin Prize-winning “journalist” who was the most frequent op-ed contributor to Frank Marshall Davis’s Chicago Star.
Jarrett’s Maternal Grandmother
Valerie Jarrett’s maternal grandmother, Dorothy Taylor, was a Berkeley, California native who was active with Planned Parenthood in its early years.
1961-1983
1961-1983
When Valerie Jarrett was five, her family relocated to London for one year before settling in Chicago’s elite Hyde Park neighborhood in 1963.
Jarrett earned a B.A. in psychology from Stanford University in 1978, and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Michigan Law School in 1981. From 1981-87 she practiced law at two Chicago-based private firms. In 1983 she married Dr. William Robert Jarrett, son of the Chicago Sun-Times reporter Vernon Jarrett.
Jarrett’s Father-In-Law
Vernon Jarrett (Valerie Jarrett’s father-in-law) was a pioneering black journalist in the 1940s. He freelanced at Kansas City’s The Call from 1954-58, then returned to Chicago to become the first nationally syndicated black columnist for the Communist-influenced Chicago Defender, where he wrote columns extolling the Communist poet Langston Hughes and lifelong Stalinists W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson. Also in the 1940s, Vernon Jarrett was a leader of the Chicago chapter of American Youth for Democracy—youth wing of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Moreover, he served on a publicity committee for the Packinghouse Workers Union, a Chicago-based entity dominated by the CPUSA. In each of these endeavors, Vernon Jarrett had close contact with the Communist Frank Marshall Davis.
The government watchdog organization Judicial Watch (JW) reports that according to his FBI files, Vernon Jarrett was a leading Chicago-based Communist. “For a period of time,” says JW, “Vernon Jarrett appeared on the FBI’s Security Index and was considered a potential Communist saboteur who was to be arrested in the event of a conflict with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). His FBI file reveals that he was assigned to write propaganda for a Communist Party front group in Chicago that would ‘disseminate the Communist Party line among … the middle class.’”
Vernon Jarrett was a member of the Communist Party from at least 1946-48 and was also one of its key fundraisers. As Paul Kengor puts it, “His [FBI] file is so filled with communist groups and activities that it makes your head hurt.”
When Vernon Jarrett died in 2004, he was saluted in the pages of People’s Weekly World, the house organ of the CPUSA.
Assessing Jarrett’s Radical & Communist Roots
In 2014, Kengor summarized the implications of Valerie Jarrett’s radical Communist lineage: “[Barack] Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, worked with the literal relatives of Valerie Jarrett—her grandfather and future father-in-law—in Chicago’s Communist Party circles in the 1940s.” In an earlier piece, Kengor put it this way: “So, imagine where we are today: Barack Obama, Frank Marshall Davis’s political godson, and Valerie Jarrett, daughter-in-law to Vernon Jarrett and granddaughter of Robert Taylor—men with links to pro-Stalinism—are the two dominant figures in the White House, the power center that battled the USSR throughout the Cold War.”
In July 2015, Kengor elaborated that James Bowman (Valerie Jarrett’s father), Robert Rochon Taylor (Valerie Jarrett’s maternal grandfather), and Vernon Jarrett (Valerie Jarrett’s father-in-law) “were all in Chicago at the exact same time and all operating in the exact same close-knit circles of the city’s Communist Party generally and of a much smaller group of African-American communists specifically.” “Even tinier still,” Kengor added, “they were Chicago-based African-American communist writers, journalists, Party activists, and agitators. There is simply no way—no way—that James Bowman, Vernon Jarrett, Robert Rochon Taylor, and Frank Marshall Davis did not know and work together. Unimaginable.”
See Additional Parts to this Story by Ms. Coffin in subsequent postings.
