[grc] Jack O'Dell - former chair of Pacifica Board

[Heather Gray]

Dear all ­ just wanted to share with you information about Jack O'Dell ­
please see "The Jack O'Dell Story" below.  He is now living in Vancouver,
BC. As I was recently in Seattle for a meeting I decided to drive up to
Vancouver to see him and his wife Jane Power. Jack has been a long time
friend and mentor of mine. He turned 90 this year. In our southern
organizing work Jack was often there, thanks to the insistence of Anne
Braden,  to advise and inform us about any number of domestic and
international issues. He had worked for Dr. King in the 1950's and 60's and
was one of the staff members the Kennedy administration told King he needed
to fire from SCLC, which he did ­ but Jack says that later on King brought
him back (in other words King wisely never definitively fired him).

Jack ended up also working with Jesse Jackson as his international envoy and
adviser. Our WRFG-Atlanta producer Jorge Lawton ­ who died recently - served
as the interpreter for Jack O'Dell and Jesse Jackson when they visited
Castro years ago. Not mentioned in the article below is that Jack attended
the Progressive Party convention in 1948 when Paul Robeson and others
endorsed Henry Wallace as the Party's presidential candidate. Jack had
served in the Merchant Marines during WWII and after that experience almost
immediately went to the 1948 Progressive Party convention and then on to his
remarkably long career in working for justice. Jack is the former chair of
the Pacifica Board (1977-1997).

In the 2000's some of us were working with Jack in the development of a
"Democracy Charter" for America. Attached please find the Democracy Charter
document that would be wise for us to organize around yet again. Certainly
germane to recent events surrounding Ferguson and the on-going human rights
abuses in America, the Democracy Charter is relevant for us all to consider.
As Jack states:

> The essential purpose of such a charter is the expansion of democracy and
> fundamental human rights in our country. Therefore, the historical point of
> reference of the Democracy Charter is our nation¹s Bill of Rights and the
> subsequent Amendments, won over generations of struggle to enshrine them in
> the U.S. Constitution. In the U.S. American experience, unyielding resistance
> to any and all efforts to weaken the Bill of Rights is an essential condition
> for the transition from formal democracy to a society of substantive
> democracy. At the very heart of the unfolding struggle for substantive
> democracy today are the issues of race, class, and gender, in relation to
> power and decision-making. This has been the fundamental reality since the
> birth of this Republic.

> 
Jack is doing well and as active as ever. He's working on his papers much of
which are now at the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.

Peace,  Heather Gray

The Jack O'Dell Story
http://monthlyreview.org/2011/05/01/the-jack-odell-story/

                Jane Power and Jack O'Dell in Vancouver 2014 ­ Photo by
Heather Gray

by Paul Buhle topics: History , Labor
Nikhil Pal Singh, editor, Climbin¹ Jacob¹s Ladder: The Freedom Movement
Writings of Jack O¹Dell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010),
298 pages, $34.95, hardcover.
Paul Buhle (paul_buhle [at] brown.edu), a contributor to Monthly Review
since 1970, is now retired from teaching and produces radical comic books.

Climbin¹ Jacob¹s Ladder is an important document in political history, even
more so in exploring the intimate political and cultural history of the left
so often undiscussed, or discussed only among trusted friends. Speaking as a
teacher of social movement history (the 1960s in particular), I often
advised students that the simplest primary research they could do was right
there on the library shelves: the bound volumes of the preeminent African
American progressive quarterly journal Freedomways (1961-85).

There hangs a tale, and not a simple one. It is very much the story of Jack
O¹Dell, if not by any means his whole story, because he became Freedomways
associate managing editor early on, wrote a great many of the unsigned
editorials, and did much to provide its framework and its connection with
the activists and political actions of the time. A former intimate advisor
to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but also a member of the Communist Party
during the 1950s, O¹Dell represented and also exemplified the survival of
what we may call the Popular Front, actually surviving repression to fight
on another day.

We need some serious back-story here. Nikhil Pal Singh, one of the
outstanding younger Marxist thinkers of today¹s academy and an active
participant in many projects, intellectual and activist alike, is the
perfect editor for this volume. His Introduction provides rare insight into
O¹Dell¹s life and work. We can start the story with Hunter Pitts O¹Dell (his
birth name), a blue-collar Detroiter and then Xavier college student, along
with his new friend, future New York rent-strike leader Jesse Gray. O¹Dell
left college to fight fascism, joining the Coast Guard in 1943 and the
racially integrated, radical-minded National Maritime Union. On ship, he
read Du Bois and learned more about the complications of colonialism,
communism, and the New Deal.

Coming back from the war, O¹Dell enthusiastically signed up with ³Operation
Dixie,² the ill-fated effort to organize Southern workers, black and white,
and thus to transform the most conservative region of the country. But, in
the new mood of the Cold War, most labor organizations were busily going
backward, and the great hopes for the South died with the purge of the CIO¹s
once-powerful left. O¹Dell moved into that dangerous, volatile region and
quickly demonstrated his leadership skills, earning a ³Citizen of the Year²
award from Miami¹s African-American press for his successful mediation of a
racial incident in a local grocery-store, turning mob rage into an effective
boycott. He got himself invited to a conference of the still-strong Southern
National Youth Congress (where he met or came indirectly into contact with
some leading African American militants and intellectuals, including Angela
Davis¹s mother, Sallye Davis). But it was Du Bois¹s address to this 1946
meeting that really hit home with O¹Dell: Reconstruction had been betrayed,
and now it was time for a new Reconstruction.

These were not socialistic ideas, necessarily, but they were certainly
radical, and, as late as 1946, they were vitally alive among the notions
within the New Deal coalition that seemed, despite the death of Franklin
Roosevelt, still very strong. Then the tide turned suddenly, and all sorts
of public figures who had been treated with respect and admiration found
themselves assaulted with redbaiting and, especially in the South, with
black-baiting and new anticommunist laws, as well. Lynching was not quite
back in style, but Northern liberals of the Truman variety did not seriously
object to FBI pursuit of civil rights activists, if they happened to be
tainted with ³red² records. Many prominent liberals, including Senator
Hubert Humphrey and his sometime speechwriter Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., made
it clear that isolation and prosecution of anything resembling sympathy for
the Soviet Union‹or even resistance to the Cold War machine‹was a
prerequisite to racial progress. Only the brave or foolish would actually
join the Communist Party at a time like this.

Mark O¹Dell down among the brave. And not entirely reckless in his bravery.
The wider following of the Popular Front‹surrounding the Communist Party but
less demanding in many ways‹in the South stubbornly held on in Birmingham,
Alabama, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, New Orleans, Louisiana, and a
scattering of other spots. O¹Dell did what civil rights organizing as could
be done, at a time when the Alabama legislature banned the NAACP. The
pressure from authorities was severe, and arrest could come at any time, so
O¹Dell lived and worked under a variety of pseudonyms, moved often, met
secretly with other activists, and moved on. Snagged in 1958 by the FBI at a
job with a black-owned insurance company, he used his constitutional right
against self-incrimination and refused to testify before the House
Un-American Activities Committee, gaining almost instant notoriety as ³one
of the most belligerent² witnesses ever called.

Leaving the South, he joined his old pal Jesse Gray in tenant organizing and
tactically took on a new first name, Jack (his father¹s name). Even as the
repression got to him, the ground was shifting; the Southern work of Dr.
King and others had made all-out suppression of black rights more difficult.
Meanwhile, leading liberals now fretted aloud that if the United States
could not bring some kind of equality to its minorities, it would face
rough-going in a world where the new nations were mostly nonwhite, and
anticolonialism translated easily into anticapitalism.

Thus O¹Dell, the formal intellectual-organizer, emerged and swiftly found
himself in the lead, creating, for protest sit-ins, a benefit concert
‹featuring the likes of Diahann Carroll, Harry Belafonte, Pete Seeger, and
Sidney Poitier. By the time the 1960 presidential campaign opened, he was
asked to coordinate get-out-the-vote efforts in the Bronx for Kennedy, and
soon thereafter, joined the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC). That is, close to King and not far from the FBI¹s
vendetta against King, which intended to unseat and replace the great leader
with someone more malleable. On the verge of becoming Executive Director of
the SCLC, O¹Dell was instead forced out by the pressure that Kennedy
administration operatives put on King.

A new life began with Freedomways: no one wrote more often, across the next
twenty years, essays and unsigned editorials alike. O¹Dell was hugely
valuable for his contacts with activists, artists, and intellectuals.
Freedomways was a truly gorgeous-looking magazine, not large in format but
slick and full of illustrations, photos, and art of various kinds. A bit
like the old pre-1920Masses magazine or the New Masses at its late 1930s
peak, it also resembled the magazines and newspapers of the ³New Negro² in
Harlem, 1910s to 1920s, saluting black achievement and style.

To say that Communists were involved was obvious to anyone knowledgeable,
and looking closely at the masthead: the editor was Esther Jackson, Southern
Negro Youth veteran and wife of Communist leader James Jackson. But
³Communism² rarely appeared in print here, and the real topics at hand were
in the freedom struggle; likewise in antiwar sentiment and mobilization;
also in varieties of Pan-Africanism, from Mother Africa to the Caribbean,
United Kingdom, United States, and Canada. It was not a Black Nationalist
magazine, an aspect for which it earned considerable criticism and real
hostility (Harold Cruse¹s polemical attacks, famous at the time, attacked
the magazine for failing to credit black capitalism), but which was also the
legacy of the Popular Front. Freedomways carried the dream of the New Deal
1940s resiliently, no matter what others might do or say.

O¹Dell¹s work was not confined to Freedomways, nor did it end with its
demise in 1987. As a close advisor to Jesse Jackson and the PUSH
organization, a member of U.S. delegations visiting sites across the
troubled third world, a key intellectual figure in campaigns, from
discrediting South African Apartheid to advancing the Nuclear Freeze, he was
especially key in the Rainbow Coalition and Jackson¹s run for President in
1988. He decided to leave the United States shortly after, and continues his
long-lived engagements from Vancouver, Canada.

By including a selection of his writings, Climbin¹ Jacob¹s Ladder saves much
of O¹Dell¹s work from being left in libraries and forgotten. These essays
were not shortened or excerpted: they are historical documents deserving to
be understood in their own time and in ours. Each essay is carefully and
tellingly introduced by Singh, who modestly takes on himself the task of
explaining its context.

These essays are not easily summarized because the political and historical
points are so numerous and so precise that readers are urged to take up
particulars especially useful to themselves. Singh observes that Marxism is
a major source of insight for O¹Dell but by no means the only source; as
someone wrote about C.L.R. James, his black Marxism is not an adjunct of
Marxism but something different, closer to the overlap of two intimately
related, but not identical, trends. Nor, of course, is it limited by what he
learned in a decade or so of being in or around the Communist Party.

One crucial thing O¹Dell did learn, in my view, more a product of the
Popular Front than Marxist ideas or Communist interpretations: that current
political wisdom always rests on a careful strategic and tactical assessment
of the balance of forces. The Democratic Party, to take the obvious example,
is never out of the picture‹or the whole of the picture. Understanding
class, racial, and cultural dynamics of social movements offers an organic
approach to how things stand and may be changed. Understanding the world
picture provides the widest-angle view of the possibilities and dangers.

Thus, the essays here, and Singh¹s annotations as well, illuminate a long
history of American racism, its connection to slavery days and to
colonialism‹legacies painfully alive into the present day. O¹Dell lucidly
describes the rise of the civil rights movement, and the brutal response of
authorities to the late 1960s uprisings, as a second Reconstruction, and a
second project to overturn the consequences of Reconstruction.
Strategically, O¹Dell sees the political world around the Rainbow Coalition
as dangerous, but promising, territory; and the narrowing of the movement to
electoral politics (worse, the seeking of foundation money to accomplish
social change) as part of a downward spiral.

Is there a road back upward? In an optimistic Afterword, written in 2009,
O¹Dell notes the mass enthusiasm for a certain black presidential candidate.
The enthusiasm was more real than the candidate, as it now appears in
history¹s rear-view mirror. But O¹Dell was shrewd enough, as always, to
point to the movement of history. Things never stay the same.


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