Maybe, but I'm skeptical. Frank wasn't elected to Congress until 1980 -- not the late 1970s. So the author must have been an especially astute follower of state politics on Beacon Hill to even know who Frank was. Hey anything's possible, but if you were to leave the Democrat Party in the 1970s, would you really leave because of an obscure state legislator -- at a time when you could have stood against Dukakis, Ted Kennedy or Tip O'Neill? All of whom were equally liberal, and vastly more important and better known? The story makes no sense.
It would be shocking if E.W. Jackson didn’t know about Barney Frank long before you did, since Jackson graduated from UMASS-Boston in 1975 and from Harvard Law School in 1978, and stayed in the Boston area to practice law. Barney Frank was a state representative from a Newton district from 1973 until he was elected to Congress in 1980, taught part-time at UMASS-Boston in the early-to-mid 1970s, and was one of the best known liberals in Massachusetts state government throughout the ‘70s. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Jackson’s “crisis of conscience” during the late 1970s was spurred at least in part to seeing how someone with views such as Barney Frank’s was able to rise to power.