Climbin' Jacob's Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell

By Jack O'Dell and Nikhil Pal Singh

This book collects for the first time the black freedom movement writings of Jack O'Dell and restores one of the great unsung heroes of the civil rights movement to his rightful place in the historical record. Climbin' Jacob's Ladder puts O'Dell's historically significant essays in context and reveals how he helped shape the civil rights movement. From his early years in the 1940s National Maritime Union, to his pioneering work in the early 1960s with Martin Luther King Jr., to his international efforts for the Rainbow Coalition during the 1980s, O'Dell was instrumental in the development of the intellectual vision and the institutions that underpinned several decades of anti-racist struggle. He was a member of the outlawed Communist Party in the 1950s and endured red-baiting throughout his long social justice career. This volume is edited by Nikhil Pal Singh and includes a lengthy introduction based on interviews he conducted with O'Dell on his early life and later experiences. Climbin' Jacob's Ladder provides readers with a firm grasp of the civil rights movement's left wing, which O'Dell represents, and illuminates a more radical and global account of twentieth-century US history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Jan 18, 2010
• ISBN: 9780520945067

Jack O'Dell

Jack O'Dell was Editor of Freedomways, a legendary publication that from 1961-1985 published Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Pablo Neruda, and Alice Walker, among many others. Nikhil Pal Singh is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. He is the author of Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy.

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Introduction

Learn Your Horn

Jack O’Dell and the Long Civil Rights Movement

NIKHIL PAL SINGH

My identity is: born of African American parents; grew up in Detroit, west side; went to a traditional black college in the South, couple of years; went into the merchant marines in World War II ’cause it wasn’t segregated; ended up in the Communist Party for a while; studied Marxism and the class struggle; moved on out into the civil rights movement. That was an easy journey—an easy course. Just like having a road map.

Jack O’Dell, 2005

The black freedom movement raises specific problems of representation, narration, and memory. How we imagine its scope, the terminology we choose to tell its stories, and the way we situate its development in time determine our qualitative assessments of its successes and failures and give shape to its political significance and contemporary relevance. Legions of scholars over the past three decades have formed a remarkably comprehensive picture of the long history, local people, indigenous organizing traditions, behind-the-scenes activism, international dimensions, and principled, often radical demands that have made up the modern black freedom movement.¹

This body of work, however, does not correlate well with public knowledge and perception in the United States, which, for the most part, erase this movement by letting one part—the legal codification of civil rights—stand in for the whole. Fixed upon a static image of a singular leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., frozen in time against the backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial, official memory holds that racial division and hierarchy have given way to patriotic acceptance and universal striving for affluence across the color line. The public has forgotten or ignored King’s own ominous, uncannily relevant warnings delivered near the end of his life about a deeper malady . . . the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism afflicting a nation engaged in a costly, immoral war and characterized by persistent poverty, inequality, and the physical confinement of black people in the nation’s ghettos and prisons.²

King’s assassination preempted determined efforts to destroy his reputation and to isolate him politically. His outspoken opposition to U.S. foreign policy in the late 1960s and his controversial decision to enlist the moral authority of the civil rights movement against the Vietnam War were viewed as wholesale betrayal by the Johnson administration and as vindication of the longstanding whisper campaign and wiretapping operation directed against him from within the domestic security agencies of the federal state.³ By breaking silence on Vietnam, King also broke a painstakingly calibrated compact that linked domestic advancements in racial equality with acquiescence to Cold War militarization and global anti-communism (a pact that had been sealed in the 1950s with the public silencing of an earlier generation’s black luminaries, Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois). Even as King illuminated a relatively unbroken tradition of visionary black leadership in world affairs from across the political spectrum, influential sources of public opinion began to lay siege to his credibility and his relevance. One year to the day after he publicly laid out his case against the war for the first time, in a speech at New York City’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, King was dead (an uncanny timing that still disturbs).

Jack O’Dell remembers mixed feelings of hope and disquiet in the days following the Riverside Church address. A former staff member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and a King confidante in the early 1960s, O’Dell understood that the publicity the speech garnered would expose King to even greater personal risk from his sworn enemies. A typical editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer was headlined ominously: Martin Luther King Crosses the Line. The specter of alleged communist influence that had dogged King for several years loomed large. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) believed that it now had confirmation of the conspiracy it had been searching for since it began its surveillance of SCLC in the early 1960s. His recent vicious condemnation of the United States in a public speech, one high-level official wrote, shows how much of a communist puppet he has become and illustrates the danger he represents in the hands of scheming communists.⁴ FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would soon refocus the agency’s domestic spying operation away from the far left to black nationalist hate groups—with, incredibly, King’s SCLC listed among them. Hoover expressly defined the goal of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s covert counterintelligence program directed against dissident groups, as preventing the emergence of a messiah figure who might unify black militants—and an increasingly radical King was now described as a real contender.⁵

A former member of the U.S. Communist Party, O’Dell knew firsthand what it meant to live in the perilous shadows of the national security state. Although he had left the party in the 1950s, O’Dell was forced to distance himself from King and SCLC in 1962, after FBI-orchestrated red baiting personally targeted him.⁶ O’Dell’s concerns about King’s safety were compounded by the regret he felt, as he put it in a recent interview, that I was no longer there to help protect him from the wolves I knew would be snapping at him.⁷

As a radical and an internationalist whose commitment to the cause of racial justice extended back to World War II, O’Dell grasped more clearly than most the watershed significance of someone of King’s moral stature and credibility turning against the war. In 1965, in his capacity as associate managing editor of the quarterly periodical Freedomways, O’Dell had penned one of the first anti–Vietnam War editorials to emerge from within the black freedom movement. Anticipating the course King would pursue, O’Dell called for fuller cooperation between the grassroots participants and leaders of the Peace Movement and the Civil Rights Movement. Advancing an analysis and prescription few had yet stated as boldly, he pointed to an effective public synergy of racism and war in American life, suggesting that the contempt bred by familiarity with violating the civil and political rights of black people was the link that connects Selma and Saigon.⁸

Freedomways subsequently emerged at the forefront of black antiwar discourse and analysis. Through O’Dell’s offices, King’s Riverside Church address, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, appeared in the April 1967 issue, just weeks after it had been delivered. Though it was the farthest thing from O’Dell’s mind, the speech clearly vindicated the political association between the two men. King had done more than issue a challenge to the foreign policy prerogatives of the state; he had joined in a wider questioning of the scope and legitimacy of the officially negotiated compact over the domestic politics of race arranged under the banner of the Cold War. Tribunes of Cold War liberalism and racial moderation, from the New York Times to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), obscured the point when they insisted that King had simply erred in linking civil rights and peace, racial justice and foreign policy.⁹ By arguing that the violent arrogation of the global ecumene by the U.S. state contributed to the suffering of poor people of all colors everywhere, King located black life alongside Vietnamese life, beyond the boundary of the social protections assumed to be inherent in the U.S.-led extension of the nation-form to all of humanity. Doing so affirmed the continuing relevance and durability of comparative racial and colonial conditions: the social, political, and ideological constitution of group-differentiated vulnerability to a continuum of social misery, up to and including premature death, as a consequence of exposure to the direct and indirect violence of sovereign power.¹⁰

To put it more plainly, King rejected the notion that the legal achievement of civil rights had inaugurated an era of normal politics for the racially excluded inside the United States, just as he challenged the belief that the pax Americana would deliver a just and legitimate developmental framework for previously colonized peoples. In Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Life and Times of the Freedom Movement (1969), a wide-ranging assessment of the black freedom movement published in Freedomways after King’s death and reprinted for the first time in this volume, O’Dell amplifies the point, arguing that King’s commitment to nonviolence led him to recognize the intertwining of a history of racial self-definition (that is, white supremacy) and militarization in constituting the borders of established membership in the U.S. as a political community. Taking this stand surely did not make King a communist, but it did align him with a black intellectual tradition that conceptualized the global production of racialized disparity in terms of Euro-American genealogies of African slavery, colonial rule, and imperial statecraft. This approach refused to permit incremental racial integration within the United States to serve as an alibi for policies that violated emergent postcolonial and postimperialist norms of world behavior. It presciently warned, moreover, of persistent, spiraling, and unpredictable violence as long as material deprivation and assaults on human dignity continued to assign the majority of the world’s poor and powerless to sociocultural and spatial zones where the frayed, tattered ends of the social contract received the unforgiving cut of racialized governance.

As Taylor Branch, King’s preeminent chronicler, writes, American public discourse broadly denied King the standing to be heard on Vietnam.¹¹ Although the intervening years have brought profound social change on local, national, and global scales, the disavowal that presaged King’s death continues to constellate the present. In martyrdom, King has become a celebrated figure in a nation-state that ostentatiously declares an end to its historical devaluation of black life and trumpets benign uses of its military power. Unmistakable progress in the civic inclusion and political representation of black citizens—culminating in the historic election of Barack Obama to the presidency—inspires a hopeful sense that the United States has entered a new era of racial comity. At the same time, wars on drugs and terror, waged disproportionately (and with disproportion) against black and brown populations, have expanded and filled U.S. prisons and extended their global reach. It is worth recalling that the rioting and rebellions of the black urban poor across hundreds of U.S. cities following King’s assassination produced the largest domestic mobilization of federal troops since the Civil War. Met with southern electoral strategy, anti-urban public policy, law and order rhetoric, and street-level lockdown, the disrepair resulting from the racial strife of the early post–civil rights period is still manifest in our own time. And the broad failure to reckon the destructive consequences and absorb the criminal irresponsibility of U.S. intervention in Vietnam still underwrites widespread belief in militarized solutions to foreign conflicts, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stretching on for nearly a decade at this writing.

Those who hope to change the political course of the country do so as heirs to this ambiguous and bifurcated political inheritance. The remarkable gains of the civil rights era have set new thresholds of tolerance and inclusiveness within U.S. political culture. Under the cover of such tolerance, it becomes increasingly difficult to connect the dots between the explicit exclusions and injustices of the past that persist in the social structures, norms, and institutions of the present. The legal demise of white supremacy and its seeming political and cultural decline as well (exemplified by the 2008 election) inspire new investment in the U.S. nation-state as a horizon of social equality and just distribution. Still, with a sense of innocence and righteousness restored, the robust reassertion of U.S. militarism consigns to the margins of U.S. political life the more radical demand that we cut the knot binding the public welfare to the warfare state. This volume, Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell, represents a modest effort to clarify the critical challenges of these times. For if King has been woven into the fabric of national civic life by means of myth and selective memory, the vast contributions of Jack O’Dell remain largely unknown.

A dedicated organizer, political strategist, and intellectual, Jack O’Dell neither sought nor gained public recognition for his work in the black freedom movement over the course of almost half a century. Yet, like the discovery of a star whose gravitational pull on a field of objects changes our understanding of how those objects move, discovery of O’Dell’s remarkable longevity as an activist for social change—with many of those years spent behind the scenes—illuminates how black emancipatory aspirations were propelled by a politics of planetary justice that fundamentally challenged the historical underpinnings and prevailing terms of U.S. world-ordering ambition.¹² If the commemoration of King’s life has come to represent a widely recognized and largely domesticated civil rights era that began with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and culminated with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, then O’Dell’s persevering, long-distance journey provides a window into a more complex history, worldly in its scope and effects and filled with hidden transcripts of social and political contention that are still being reckoned with and have yet to be settled.¹³

From his youthful days as a merchant seaman and rank-and-file labor militant during World War II, to his formative administrative and intellectual contributions to civil rights institutions such as SCLC and Freedomways in the 1960s, to his mature travels as a citizen-diplomat in apartheid South Africa and occupied Palestine in the 1970s and 1980s, O’Dell weathered severe changes in political climate throughout his career as an activist. A member of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) and Seamen for Wallace (a group of maritime workers supporting Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential bid), O’Dell was expelled from the National Maritime Union (NMU) for his left-wing political sympathies in the late 1940s. He joined the American Communist Party in 1950, just as arrests and prosecutions under the Smith Act were decimating its leadership. Three years after the Montgomery bus boycott, O’Dell decided to leave the party, becoming convinced, as he puts it, that we would get desegregation, and we would get it before we would get socialism.¹⁴ Invited to join the staff of SCLC in 1961, O’Dell soon rose to prominence in the organization, in charge of both the New York fundraising office and voter registration operations in several southern states. But he was eventually forced out (once again)—the victim of a smear campaign in which the highest levels of the Kennedy administration were implicated.

Over the ensuing decades at Freedomways, O’Dell established himself as a prolific writer, a public intellectual, and one of the black freedom movement’s most astute radical theorists. Refusing to be sidelined from active movement building, he served on the National Coordinating Committee of the Coalition to End the War in Vietnam in the late 1960s and on the staff of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign. After King’s death, Jesse Jackson (based in large measure on reading O’Dell’s essays and editorials in Freedomways) sought the older man’s advice on organizational development and international affairs, a formal collaboration that lasted through the aftermath of Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign. Continuing his work on behalf of radical education and independent media during the 1970s and 1980s, O’Dell taught courses on colonialism and U.S. history at the Antioch Graduate School of Education in Washington, D.C., and served as chairman of the board of the Pacifica Foundation, which pioneered listener-supported radio. Even in these later years, conservative U.S. senators such as Jesse Helms and Orrin Hatch continued to evoke O’Dell and his communist past as a way to cast doubt on King’s legacy.¹⁵

Now in his eighties, living in Vancouver, Canada, and still working as a human rights activist, O’Dell, to quote Ralph Ellison, enlisted for the duration of the black freedom movement.¹⁶ As he explained in a 1997 interview, I made a commitment when I was twenty-five that I would live in the United States as long as I could work in a movement to change things. . . . And I consider working in the movement—you’re flexible in the vehicle that you choose.¹⁷ Trade unionist, communist, electoral strategist, fundraiser, community leader, writer, editor, and policy advisor, O’Dell wore many hats as part of his life-long commitment to social change. Viewed broadly, his life has bridged the time that stretched from the age of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to the era of the New Left—and the space that separated the global work of decolonization from nation-based struggles for rights and recognition. Over its course, O’Dell straddled the at times incommensurable worlds of revolutionary organization and pragmatic reform, as he moved between and across the great mass social struggles of the mid- and late twentieth century: the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and the peace movement. He participated in three heroic failures to constitute a left alternative presidential candidacy (the Henry Wallace, Eugene McCarthy, and Jesse Jackson campaigns), as well as three of the great democratic successes of the twentieth century: the establishment of workers’ right to organize into trade unions, the military and intellectual defeat of Nazi fascism, and the demise of the legal and moral edifice of racial segregation.

Just as O’Dell’s early years belie truncated accounts of the historical origins and political scope of the civil rights movement, his later work in the 1970s and 1980s suggests how premature accounts of its demise and closure have been. This volume gathers for the first time O’Dell’s major writings since the 1960s, along with several previously unpublished documents that reflect the range of his organizational work and activism. The bulk of the volume consists of O’Dell’s germinal essays from Freedomways, written in the 1960s and 1970s, which contain searching theoretical examinations of the relationship between racism and colonialism in the historical development of the United States; strategic assessments of marches, strikes, and rebellions of the era; and historical appraisals of the political roots, accomplishments, and limitations of the civil rights movement. In the concluding two essays, composed for this volume, O’Dell offers a sweeping reconsideration of the political and historical significance of the Second Reconstruction and an outline for a new Democracy Charter that might guide the social reconstruction of the United States in the twenty-first century.

As a body of historical reflections and activist interventions, the texts gathered here represent an invaluable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand the political course, conceptual scope, and historical breadth of black freedom struggles over more than half a century. Written against the backdrop of the fervent political activity and rapid social change of the 1960s and early 1970s, O’Dell’s earlier essays retain a strong contemporary flavor and anticipate with remarkable clarity major themes of an emergent historiography of civil rights and critical race studies. By reintroducing the writings and political legacy of Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other black radicals suppressed by the Cold War to a new generation of activists and intellectuals, O’Dell and his Freedomways colleagues provided early insight into and also helped to shape the contours of a long civil rights movement with roots in the left-labor internationalism of the 1930s and 1940s.¹⁸ O’Dell’s 1971 essay on Paul Robeson, A Rock in a Weary Lan’, for example, is one of the first to consider the significance of the decade before Montgomery for developing the forms of black political consciousness and institutional capacity that underpinned anti-racist struggles in the ensuing decades.¹⁹

O’Dell’s theoretical and practical insistence on the epochal significance of postwar national liberation struggles and the formal end of European colonialism remains particularly important, exemplifying the consistent transnational, internationalist, and diasporic aspects of the U.S. black freedom movement long before these characteristics emerged as prominent academic themes. Before it was fashionable to complicate a black-white binary in the study of race, O’Dell sought to develop sophisticated analytical connections between the varieties of what he called state racism, which implicated the seizure and settlement of land, and the regulation and control of borders, in addition to the theft of black labor. Espousing a distinctively working-class black radicalism, his writings are especially attuned to the intersections of race and class; to the parallels between the origins, tactics, and goals of the postwar labor and civil rights movements; and to the ways these two movements diverged, thwarting the formation of a durable center-left political bloc that might have solidified the progressive legacy of the New Deal. O’Dell’s intimate familiarity with some of the most reactionary currents in U.S. political culture—specifically, the articulation of traditional white supremacy with anti-communism—stimulated prescient insights into the formation of a new conservatism based ideologically on resisting the advances of labor, civil rights, and new social movements of the late 1960s and materially in the extractive, resource-intensive, and defense-enhanced political economy of the Sun Belt states.²⁰

Even more valuable for the contemporary reader are the profound historical sensibility and the deep insistence on the inseparability of thought and action that animate O’Dell’s work. His lengthy political biography and his writings represent both the cumulative and durative logic of black social movements and the coherence of a radical intellectual and political vision forged in a long, bitter opposition to the politics and cultures of U.S. racism. As an intellectual activist, O’Dell is a major twentieth-century exemplar of what historian Jeanne Theoharis has recently termed black freedom studies.²¹ His relative obscurity within the modern canon of black activists and intellectuals can be largely attributed to an anti-communist, liberal nationalist framing of racial equality in the United States in terms of moral reform, domestic stability, political legitimacy, and even civil rights. Given the narrow interpretation of the civil rights era that has become part of a normative account of the progress of American democracy in the twentieth century, the discrepant and discordant as well as the subterranean and global dimensions of the more than century-long movement against white supremacy have arguably become more difficult to see and hear, to apprehend and understand. To admit a figure like Jack O’Dell from history’s waiting room thus requires a decisive shift in orientation and perspective.²² It means recognizing that black freedom struggles are less the culmination of America’s founding ideals than a tectonic shift in Western political orders, whose impact is still being registered and fought over today.

If O’Dell’s long-distance journey reveals anything, it is that the past is not truly past; historical time is neither linear nor uniform, but created from the shifting tempo of collective human activity in fitful struggles to change and transform the world. To reread O’Dell today reveals that the space between historical and contemporary struggles for racial equality and social justice may be more proximate than previously thought. Thus, instead of assenting too quickly to the conventional notion that Barack Obama’s election represents a final transcendence of historical racial division and a vindication of timeless national foundations, we might consider how the activist instruction and training Obama received from black intellectuals, community spaces, and post–civil rights era movement formations contributed in no small part to the social reform trajectory and the collective investment of political hope and ambition he has come to represent.

Such a perspective means refusing to accede to habits of remembrance in which the movement is a dead letter, bent to political orthodoxies that enlist the rhetoric and form of democracy in violation of its procedures and substance. Consider, for example, the Bush administration’s hasty deployment of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the devastated Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Dismissing the panorama of black suffering revealed by the storm as a vestige of the Old South, Rice depicted herself as a bridge to a world grown skeptical of U.S. democracy promotion, enlisting the history of black civil rights struggles in support of the Iraq War and occupation:

Across the empire of Jim Crow, from upper Dixie to the lower Delta, the descendants of slaves shamed our nation with the power of righteousness and redeemed America at last from its original sin of slavery. . . . by resolving the contradiction at the heart of our democracy, America finally found its voice as a true champion of democracy beyond its shores.²³

While this passage appears to affirm the legitimacy and prestige of civil rights achievement, it does so in the name of a robust U.S. exceptionalism and a consensus history of state power, firmly rooted in the legacy of the Cold War. Implicit within Cold War discourse was the notion that slavery and empire were not properties of the United States and its allies, but only of its adversaries. In fact, as historian Mary Dudziak points out, the imperatives of U.S. global legitimacy after World War II actually sharpened contradictions of race and empire, adding to domestic political pressures for civil rights reforms. In Rice’s account, these valences are quietly reversed, offering an extant national narrative of civil rights success as if it were a precedent for a foreign policy of quasi-permanent, preventive war.²⁴

This suggests a larger point: as the most visible expression of the contradictions of U.S. democracy at the end of World War II, the black freedom movement was caught in and to this day continues to reflect epochal transformations in the relationship of the United States to the world. Specifically, the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s established political tendencies that have remained deeply resistant to change and that have yielded sharply bifurcated views of the world which still inspire fierce political contest and alternative claims to truth. As a casualty of the governing Cold War discourse of anti-communism throughout his career, Jack O’Dell embodied and gave voice to an often clandestine, radical current of civil rights activism—one that actually outlasted numerous bouts with agents of Cold War orthodoxy. While Dudziak rightly identifies the important relationship between Cold War foreign policy and civil rights reform that was manifest within public transcripts of legislation, court decisions, and government propaganda of the 1950s and 1960s, O’Dell’s experience suggests that the Cold War assumptions that shaped postwar foreign and domestic policy were deeply unsettled by and resistant to emerging struggles for racial and social justice.

More specifically, to read Jack O’Dell’s work and trace the course of his lifetime of activism is to rediscover an effective counterpoint to the Cold War discourse on civil rights: the radical universalism promoted by the dialectic of black assertiveness and its drive for civic inclusiveness. The black freedom movement called for more than vanquishing the criminal order of Jim Crow. It also exposed a history of dehumanization embedded within a modern political economy; it proposed alternative ethics based on compassion rather than fear for social interaction among heterogeneous peoples; and it demanded a departure from imperialist arrogance and colonial violence in the relationship of the United States to the non-European world. Among the most important intellectual legacies it bequeathed to contemporary democratic theory and practice is the knowledge of an ancient and politically productive antagonism between black aspirations for freedom and prevailing discourses of American freedom—discourses that time and again made peace with the opponents of those aspirations. Why is apprehending this difference so essential? As O’Dell has put it, anticipating the disasters we now face: If we fail to live up to the best in our tradition, then we’re going to find ourselves drowning in the worst of our tradition.²⁵

One of the Most Perfidious Chapters

Jack O’Dell was born on Detroit’s west side in 1923. For the first half of his life, he was known by his given name, Hunter Pitts O’Dell. The forenames were the mark of his ancestry, the Pitts and Hunter families. Their roots were in the post-Reconstruction exodus of black people from the South to the Midwest and the Oklahoma territories in the 1880s, which preceded their arrival in northern industrial cities via the great migrations of the World War I era. Young Hunter O’Dell was inculcated early on with the values of a respectable and increasingly restive northern, black working class. He learned to resist racial slights at a young age, when his grandmother refused to patronize a popular downtown soda fountain that insisted on using glasses marked with a large red circle to serve beverages to black customers. While still a teenager he penned a letter to his local draft board proclaiming that he had no allegiance to any institution based upon Hitler’s racial theory and . . . considered the armed forces of the United States one such institution.²⁶

In 1941, he was sent off to Xavier, a historically black college in New Orleans, to study pharmacy (a family concern). O’Dell soon heard about the CIO’s eighty-thousand-strong National Maritime Union (NMU) from his college friend Jesse Gray. Offered a nonsegregated route to joining the fight against fascism, with the added lure of travel and adventure, O’Dell signed his Coast Guard papers in 1943 and weeks later hopped aboard a munitions ship headed to the Panama Canal Zone, with the intention of securing his permanent union card.

For someone raised in the black working class during the Great Depression, the CIO, which had broken away from the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1935, possessed a legendary status for its commitment to nondiscrimination and to organizing black workers. When asked which union they belonged to, black workers—whether they labored in a mine or a packinghouse, on the docks, in an auto factory or a steel mill—would often just say, CIO and leave it at that.²⁷ Founded in 1937, the NMU was part of a cluster of progressive maritime unions within the CIO that saw racial egalitarianism as the key to overcoming the North-South differential in wages and working conditions and ending the open shop, a practice that curtailed unionization and undermined collective bargaining power.²⁸ The NMU opened its doors to black workers, flouting the white supremacist hiring policies endorsed by its AFL rival, the Seafarers International Union, in favor of the principle that the one who registers first at the union hall is entitled to ship out first. According to Josh Lawrence, a high-ranking black NMU official, Back in the thirties and even the early forties there were only two places in the South where black and white could meet together—in the black churches and the halls of the NMU.²⁹ Of undoubted significance to an aspiring black seaman: Ferdinand Smith, a fiery Jamaican-born radical, not only led the union as its secretary-treasurer but also was the highest-ranking black official in the entire CIO.

From the Atlantic seaboard to the Gulf of Mexico to the West Coast, the maritime world had by this time developed into a vital political arena in which the global anti-colonial perspectives of interwar black radicalism and the labor politics of the CIO mixed and fused.³⁰ As primary contact zones within the history of racial capitalism, southern port cities like New Orleans, with their motley gatherings of sailors and vast international traffic in humanity, had long been places where insurgent black political aspirations met up with a proscribed interracialism. Even the Atlantic world ships that took Africans into bondage in the Middle Passage had been resignified by maritime black radicals and intellectuals from Olaudah Equiano to Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, and Langston Hughes as spaces of individual self-making, class struggle, pan-African engagement, and global citizenship.³¹ Like generations of black sailors before him, Hunter O’Dell found that the six years he spent traveling the world’s seas provided him not only with an unprecedented sense of worldliness but also with formative lessons in participatory democracy and interracial solidarity that proved indispensable for the work that lay ahead of him.

A five-month trip in early 1945 on the Sir Walter Raleigh across the Atlantic; into the Mediterranean; through the Suez Canal, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean; back around the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Town, South Africa; and up the west coast of the continent was particularly eye-opening. On that trip, O’Dell recalls,

I read Black Reconstruction and Du Bois’s Black Folk Then and Now, which is a history of Africa. And I’m in Cameroon, and I said, Whoa, what an expedition this is. You didn’t work but five hours a day, so you’re on the ship nineteen hours with nothing else to do: play poker, and the rest of the time you just read.

Discussions with his shipmates—several of them CIO communists—revealed the economic motive in history, something that O’Dell had never considered before.³² In Calcutta, a place he had dreamed of since childhood, when the weekly radio program Omar the Mystic first captured his boyish imagination, he encountered a scene that shattered the cartoonish orientalism of Walt Disney’s America: an army of workers—wicker baskets piled high atop their heads—loading massive freighters lettered, like his own ship, with names of slave traders and imperial adventurers. This began to crystalize an understanding consistent with Du Bois’s own in which race became visible as part of a comparative history of capitalism and colonialism—the color bar as a mechanism that depressed the cost of labor power, disciplined and divided labor as a social force, and advanced capital accumulation and uneven development on a world scale.

As he came to adulthood within the heady milieu of the labor movement, the left, and simmering wartime black militancy, O’Dell’s political education was only just beginning; and his overall political trajectory, like that of the country, was far from predetermined at this juncture. As he remembers,

Between the union movement and the Roosevelt tradition that was coming in and the right of labor to organize and the little things that Mrs. Roosevelt did to have the President’s ear about this issue of racism, and Marian Anderson singing and Joe Louis punching out these cats with great regularity. All of that gave one optimism despite the cold-bloodedness of the insult of segregation.³³

Facing economic collapse and ongoing pressure from mobilized workers, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal shifted the dispositions of American capitalism in a decidedly progressive direction, using the taxation, public spending, and regulatory powers of the state to support and legitimate labor organizing and to effect modest redistributions of national income, shoring up the purchasing power of wage-earners across individual lifespans and the vicissitudes of employment. Under equally sustained political attack from the right, however, and conceding significantly to opposition from the owners of capital and the political heirs of the southern plantation oligarchs, the rudimentary welfare state fashioned by Roosevelt’s New Deal was politically unstable and economically fragile.

U.S. entry into World War II recalibrated these political and economic questions as the war mobilization promised new avenues of capital accumulation for corporations, accelerated the ongoing exodus of poor blacks and whites from the Depression-ravaged South, and presaged a return to employment for U.S. workers. As blacks and whites were thrown into new social relations in neighborhoods and workplaces, the war years saw a sharp spike in overt racial conflict. At the same time, an increasing public emphasis on the strength of U.S. pluralism, its contribution to wartime unity, and its contrast with Nazi doctrines of racial purity added new, largely unprecedented support to burgeoning black struggles for civil, political, and economic equality.

A budding trade union activist radicalized by his experience in the NMU, O’Dell, like many black veterans, returned from the war intent on overthrowing the Jim Crow regime. He returned to the South in 1946 to help organize restaurant workers in Miami Beach under the auspices of the CIO’s postwar Operation Dixie. Described by CIO president Philip Murray as the most important drive of its kind ever undertaken by any labor organization in the history of the country, Operation Dixie promised to break the stranglehold that the open shop and a racially segmented labor force held on the South.³⁴

But the promise far outstripped the execution. Facing stiff resistance in the South and a nationwide political backlash against rising labor unrest across the country, the CIO conducted this ambitious organizing campaign with a self-defeating caution and conservatism. The CIO’s Southern Organizing Committee excluded the most energetic left-wing organizers, particularly those suspected of being communists, and sought to avoid open confrontation with the institutions and agents of white supremacy, quietly culling blacks and women from frontline organizing positions. O’Dell experienced these unwritten policies firsthand when Max Singer, the lead CIO organizer on the Miami Beach campaign, agreed to shut down strike activity after a local sheriff warned that the integrated picket lines O’Dell had helped to organize would lead to violent reprisals against the workers.³⁵

O’Dell quickly migrated to the center of another ugly and potentially volatile situation. A black delivery boy accused of stealing from his employer, a white-owned grocery store in Overtown, a local black community, had been badly beaten by some of the storeowner’s family members. Illustrating the activist creativity that would be a hallmark of his career, O’Dell stepped into the mob of black protestors who had gathered in front of the store and channeled their simmering anger into an effective consumer boycott of the establishment. Two World War II veterans, one black and one white, who were well respected in the community, later stepped in to buy the store. For his efforts, O’Dell earned Citizen of the Year accolades from the local black newspaper, the Miami Times.³⁶ This episode exemplifies the rising tide of indigenous militancy among blacks in the postwar South. It also suggests that even as O’Dell committed himself to the great dream of a social movement based on interracial labor organization, he learned early on that community organizing along racial lines and labor organizing across them were parallel and complementary tracks, rather than competing and contradictory methods for defeating Jim Crow.

O’Dell’s exploits in Miami caught the attention of organizers from the Southern Negro Youth Congress, who invited him to be a delegate to its ninth annual convention in Columbia, South Carolina, in October of 1946. The SNYC, founded in 1937, was the brainchild of leading black Communist Party activists Ed Strong, Louis Burnham, and James Jackson. Its chief organizers, particularly Jackson, had cut their teeth in earlier CIO organizing campaigns in the South, among the tobacco workers of Richmond, anticipating the incipient linkages between civil rights and labor that informed Operation Dixie. Conforming to the party’s Popular Front policy, the SNYC privileged coalition politics and movement building over sectarianism and party building. While the organization held to the communist view