O'Dell, Jack

O’DELL, JACK (1923-2019). A singular figure in US left, labor, civil rights and anti-war movements, multiracial journalism and politics for more than forty years, Jack O’Dell was also a close advisor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., until forced out by FBI pressure.

Born Hunter Pitts Odell, he grew up in Detroit, son of a hotel and restaurant worker and a mother who had studied music at Howard University. O’Dell entered Xavier University intending to become a pharmacist in 1941, but dropped out in 1943 to enter the Merchant Marine to join the war against fascism. After the World War II and a stint in the left-led National Maritime Union, he joined the ill-fated “Operation Dixie,” the effort of CIO unions to organize the South. On shipboard, he had been reading W.E.B. Du Bois on issues of racism and colonialism, and in 1946 he attended an important conference of the Southern National Youth Congress that his hero addressed. Du Bois sounded the note for O’Dell’s future in the civil rights movement: it was time for a Second Reconstruction. At the conference, O’Dell also met Paul Robeson, another important figure in his future.

O’Dell fatefully joined the Communist Party in the early 1950s, when all the odds ran against the left, but a minority remained firm. The earlier following of the Popular Front in the South stubbornly held on in Birmingham, Alabama, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, New Orleans, Louisiana, and a scattering of other spots. Thus O’Dell, a skilled organizer, gifted thinker and strategist, swiftly found himself in leadership. In leading protests and sit-ins, he hit upon the benefit concert, featuring the likes of Diahann Carroll, Harry Belafonte, Pete Seeger, and Sidney Poitier.

O’Dell did what civil rights organizing could be done at a time when the Alabama legislature banned the NAACP. The pressure from authorities was severe, and personal arrest could come at any time. O’Dell lived and worked under a variety of pseudonyms, met secretly with other activists, and moved often. Snagged in 1956 by the FBI at a job with a Black-owned insurance company, he was called before Mississippi senator James Eastland’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1956. O’Dell confronted its members, asking the Senate’s lead counsel if he was “some kind of dictator.” When the committee alleged that his civil rights activity was a front for communist conspiracy, O’Dell responded: “The Jim Crow system is not a front… if you think it is a front you’ve got a great deal to learn about your own country.”

Leaving the South, O’Dell joined an old college friend, Jesse Gray, in tenant organizing in New York City and tactically took on a new first name, Jack (his father’s name). Even as the repression got to him, the political ground was shifting, creating new openings: the work of Dr. King and others had made all-out suppression of Black rights more difficult. His work in the planning of the youth march in 1959 for integrated schools, not only put O’Dell in touch with King but also with A. Philip Randolph and Stanley Levison, another close adviser to King. O’Dell’s experience as organizer and leader were instrumental in the successful campaign in Birmingham in 1963.

By the time the 1960 presidential campaign opened, O’Dell was asked to coordinate get-out-the-vote efforts in the Bronx for Kennedy and soon joined the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He became close to King and due to his communist past, a ready target in the FBI’s vendetta against King, intended to unseat and replace the great leader with someone more malleable. On the verge of becoming Executive Director of the SCLC, O’Dell was instead forced out by the pressure that FBI counterintelligence and Kennedy administration operatives put on King.

After leaving the SCLC, O’Dell joined Freedomways (1961-1985), the quarterly voice of the Black left from its inception in 1960. Under the editorship of Esther Cooper Jackson, Freedomways garnered a wide following from African-American writers, artists and entertainers among others and was also the best-looking publication of the left. O’Dell wrote more than half of the unsigned editorials in the journal and took a leading role in making the magazine a presence beyond the left and an indispensable chronicle of the civil rights movement. O’Dell also wrote a series of important essays in the mid-1960s published in the journal that sought to outline a comprehensive radical perspective on the politics of racial domination and its relationship to capitalist development in the history of the United States.

From his days as a maritime worker, sailing the world’s oceans, O’Dell remained a consistent and committed internationalist. In his essays, “Colonialism and the Negro Experience” (1966) and “A Special Variety of Colonialism” (1967), he emphasized the interrelationship between struggles against racism and colonialism in that period and what he called “the road that led from Selma to Saigon.” When King took his famous stand against the Vietnam War, O’Dell saw to it that this iconic speech was immediately published in Freedomways. By that time, O’Dell had also thrown himself into the anti-war movement as a supporter of Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign. He tirelessly worked in peace and anti-nuclear campaigns over the next two decades.

After King’s assignation, O’Dell returned for a brief stint to serve as Executive Director of SCLC. He went on to support Jesse Jackson in the development of Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity). Living in Washington, D.C., he taught courses as Antioch College, where he met his life partner, Jane Power. Over the next decade, O’Dell became one of Jackson’s most trusted advisors, especially on international affairs, leading emerging fact-finding and solidarity initiatives aimed at ending South African apartheid and supporting Palestinian rights. O’Dell worked closely with Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and Operation Breadbasket. Later as Jackson ventured into Middle East affairs, he provided the research, background, and talking points on the minister’s engagement and decisions. He was also a key adviser in Jesse Jackson’s presidential bids in 1984 and 1988.

From 1977 to 1997, O’Dell was chair of the Pacifica Foundation, which supported the Pacifica Radio Network. Retiring from active organizational work in 1989, O’Dell and Power moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, and became Canadian citizens. O’Dell remained active on many fronts, giving lectures and meeting with students from all over the world. In the early 2000s, the Institute for Community Leadership, a non-profit organization devoted to juvenile justice issues, opened the Jack Hunter O’Dell Education and Reflection Center in Southeast King County between Tacoma and Seattle.