Jack O'Dell on Black
Communism
14/06/03 05:51 Filed by Saswat Pattanayak in:
Political
| Reference
A significant interview below:
“Jack O’Dell was a union organizer, a civil rights
leader, and a member of the Communist Party. His
political consciousness formed in the 1940’s, when
the African-American community became more assertive
in their efforts to improve conditions and expand
civil rights. Like many blacks, including one of his
role models, Paul Robeson, O’Dell was drawn to the
Communist Party because of their staunch stand
against racism and segregation. During the 1940’s,
O’Dell found a welcoming environment in the National
Maritime Union. Later, he worked for the director of
the Southern Christian Leadership Counsel (SCLC)
office in New York, before becoming SCLC’s voter
registration director in seven southern states.”
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6927.html
“I
Never Met a Black Person Who Was in the Communist
Party Because of the Soviet Union:” Jack O’Dell on
Fighting Racism in the 1940s
————————————————————————————————————————
O’DELL: A good buddy of mine, Jesse Gray, he went
into the Merchant Marines. He came back. So I went
out to see him and he says, “Man, I found a Union
where there’s no segregation.” He’d shipped out in
the SIO where they had—you know—black and white jobs
because all blacks were confined to the Steward
Department and whites had all the other jobs. He
said, “But I found a Union that you could just throw
in your card and you could ship deck, you could ship
engineer room, absolutely no segregation. It’s called
National Maritime Union. And guess what? They’ve got
a black who’s Secretary General, named Ferdinand
Smith.” I said, “Oh, you’re kidding!. So, that
inspired the idea that I would go into the Merchant
Marines because I wasn’t going to have to put up with
a lot of Jim Crow.
I had three role models as men in my upbringing my
grandfather, John O’Dell, who was a janitor in the
public library. He got up every morning at 6:30 and
went to work. I learned my work habits from him. My
second role model was my father, Jack O’Dell. I liked
just the way he was as a human being. I wanted to be
like him in the sense of, I don’t know how to
describe it, just a love for my father — many sides
to him. And the third role model was Paul Robeson.
When I was getting ready to go away to college my
mother told me, “Honey, if you decide to join a
fraternity, join the Alphas.” I said, “Why?” She
said, “Because Paul Robeson’s there. (chuckles) I
said, ”Okay.” You know? That didn’t mean anything to
me but it still stuck with me. I had heard Paul
Robeson was a Communist. I had heard a lot about Paul
Robeson. He sang down at Booker T. Washington High
School in New Orleans my sophomore year and I went to
the concert. He sang songs from China, the Soviet
Union, Negro spirituals; had a great presence. But I
was most impressed when, after the concert, he spent
an hour signing autographs for students and asking
them where they were in school ad what you were
doing, and so forth, and I was in that line. So Paul
Robeson became a political model. I liked his
militancy, I liked his stance, I liked his integrity
and he was a powerful symbol. I began to follow his
career more closely because, as I said, he was a role
model for manhood,—black manhood.
So it was from the larger progressive movement that I
as a seaman got an interpretation of what was going
on. It wasn’t just an NMU thing. It wasn’t just a CIO
thing. There were lynchings going on in the south of
veterans returning from World War II. Segregation was
still up. What had begun to emerge in the country was
an assault on racism coming out of World War II by
the NAACP and Unions. And the segregationists
defended segregation by saying they weren’t against
blacks —they weren’t against equal rights for blacks
—they were against communism. But their
interpretation of Communist was anybody who supported
the right of blacks to have civil rights. While most
blacks didn’t join the Communist Party, they
understood that the Communists were the fighters. And
they knew individual Communists who were fighters,
and they were black and white and Latino, and so
forth. And with this anti-Communism that now was
becoming the state religion and with the persecution
of the Communists, I just said, well to show where
I’m at I’ll join the communists. I’ll join the
Communist Party. And I did, and I remained an active
member of the Party for about seven years.
I was first and foremost a person with the
African-American experience. I knew living in the
north and I knew living in the south and I knew the
contradiction that this country was living with great
hypocrisy. Secondly, I was viewing this as a trade
Unionist because militancy of the trade Union
movement appealed to me. I knew you had to fight and
you had to fight in an organized way and you had to
fight with a weapon. And for me the weapon was the
Union. So the fight to keep the Union true to the
course that it had set for itself was of great
priority. Thirdly, I found within the Union a left
called Communists and other variations of that which
I respected. I was not, shall we say, inexorably
attracted to them for any particular reason except
that I saw the role they played in the Union and that
there would not have been a good NMU without their
participation, from what I could see.
At the same time, the NMU stood as a bulwark against
the kind of institutional racism that I had
experienced. I knew that people had different views
with respect to, say, the Soviet Union. I’ve never
taken a census, but I never met a black person who
was in the Communist Party because of the Soviet
Union. We joined the Communist Party because they
fought against racism and they were dependable in
that fight. And they were Union builders. They were
mass movement organized builders. And I knew that as
an individual you were strengthened by the fact of
unity with other people. So it was precisely that
perspective that led me into a relationship to the
left.
Source: Interviewed by Sam Sills 8/5/93
Courtesy Sam Sills
Tags: Saswat, Communism, Interview