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...Axelrod graduated from New York’s Stuyvesant High School in June 1972 and enrolled, that fall, at the University of Chicago, where he majored in political science and wrote for the student newspaper. In late 1973 or early 1974, he secured a job as a political columnist for the Hyde Park Herald, a local weekly newspaper. His work at the Herald caught the attention of two particularly noteworthy individuals, David Canter and Don Rose:
David Canter (1923-2004) was the son of Harry Jacob Canter, a lifelong communist who: served as secretary of the Boston Communist Party; ran for governor of Massachusetts on the Communist Party ticket in 1930; earned a special invitation to Joseph Stalin’s USSR in 1932; worked in Moscow as an official translator of Lenin’s writings; and later taught at the Abraham Lincoln School, an infamous Chicago-based front that indoctrinated students in the teachings of Marx and Lenin. Like his father, David Canter was also a lifelong communist. He was educated in Stalin’s Soviet Union from 1932-37, before returning with his family to the United States. He later became an attorney and developed ties to the National Lawyers Guild. In the Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications, an exhaustive Congressional analysis compiled between 1955 and 1968, Canter’s name appeared 25 times. On July 12, 1962, Canter was subpoenaed to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), where he was questioned about the agendas of Translation World Publishers, the pro-Soviet, Soviet-subsidized publishing house he had co-created with LeRoy Wolins, a well-known communist. Canter refused to answer any HUAC questions about his past or present membership in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Canter’s associate, Don Rose (who is still alive), was never proven to be a CPUSA member. He was, however, a member of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, an organization replete with communists and Sixties radicals. He also belonged to the Alliance to End Repression (a suspected Communist Party front), and he did some press work for the Students for a Democratic Society. In the 1960s, Rose and Canter collaborated to establish a far-left, pro-communist community newspaper called Hyde Park-Kenwood Voices, which echoed CPUSA propaganda. Soon after meeting Axelrod, Canter and Rose became mentors to the young man and helped shape his political development.
And during this time, from just after WW2 until he retired in the mid 90’s, Charles T Payne, the brother of Madelyn Dunham was Deputy Director of the Library at the University of Chicago and lived in Hyde Park.
In the seventies, his wife Melanie was on a committee with the wife of David Axelrod.
http://keywiki.org/index.php/Frank_Marshall_Davis
Frank Marshall Davis, poet, journalist, and educator, lived in Chicago from 1924-1928 and again from 1934-1948. He served as Executive Editor of Claude Barnett’s Associated Negro Press from 1935-1947. A prolific journalist and arts critic, Davis was also the author of three major volumes of poetry, Black Man’s Verse (1935), I Am the American Negro (1937), and 47th Street (1948).
Active in all arenas of Chicago’s bourgeoning Black cultural scene, Davis was one of the founding members of the late-1930s South Side Writers’ Group associated with Richard Wright, as well as a prominent participant in events organized by the South Side Community Art Center and the Abraham Lincoln School throughout the 1940s. Davis frequently gave public lectures on subjects ranging from the political and social status of African Americans to the history of jazz[2].
Then in 1955, Richard Wright accompanied Malcolm X to the Bandung Conference in Jakarta, hosted by President Sukarno, who in turn, visited Malcolm in the US the year after, in 1956.