Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell (review)

In Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell, editor Nikhil Pal Singh has taken on the formidable task not only of reintroducing the intellectual contributions of Hunter Pitts “Jack” O’Dell and the Freedomways journal that he served but also of reexamining the trajectory of civil rights movement history as constructed in academe and popular memory. In an extensive introduction to O’Dell’s collected writings, Singh notes that though “[t]he remarkable gains of the civil rights era have set new thresholds of tolerance and inclusiveness within U. S. political culture. . . . [I]t becomes increasingly difficult to connect the dots between explicit exclusions and injustices of the past that persist in the social structures, norms, and institutions of the present” (5). Singh provides a compelling account of the importance of the civil rights movement not as a static piece of history, but as a critical missing link with the potential to animate our critical consciousness of the present:

The political wisdom born of O’Dell’s acute historical sensibility and his defiant longevity is urgently needed in an era characterized by active forgetting and severe retrogressions in commitment to public life. Although the United States calls itself an advanced democracy, a majority of inhabitants seem to have lost the capacity to think about social reform from below—which is to say, change that is initiated from outside or from the margins of already empowered constituencies and established institutions.

(50; original emphasis)

O’Dell, who began organizing in the 1940s and continues to work and theorize, offers a unique vantage point from which to examine the intersection of U. S. political culture and worldwide black liberation. Singh concludes that “[t]o admit a figure like Jack O’Dell from history’s waiting room . . . 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” (9).

For Singh, Jack O’Dell’s life and work, his critical analysis past and present, offer an under-recognized yet crucial nexus for understanding the ongoing struggle for black liberation. O’Dell, a committed socialist, worked as an organizer for the Communist Party in the South in the 1950s. Thanks to red-baiting by John and Robert Kennedy, among others, he was forced out of the National Maritime Union in the 1940s and then from a position of prominence with the SCLC in the 1960s. O’Dell’s presence as an organizer and an intellectual provided a radical challenge to the movements he participated in, and that challenge continues. For this reason, his legacy has largely been obscured. As Singh notes, “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” (5). Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder remedies this failure of memory by collecting O’Dell’s writings for the first time, including pieces produced from the early 1960s to the present.

O’Dell’s collected essays range from discussions of African Americans and colonialism and the early days of Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH, to accounts of organizing classic civil rights actions such as voter registration drives and the creation of SNCC. The collection’s focus on lesser-known events, including the Charleston hospital workers strike of 1969, described by O’Dell as “being to the Poor People’s Campaign what Montgomery was to the mass action phase of the civil rights movement,” brings into focus how much of our collective understanding of the movement is shaped by convenient myths rather than thoroughgoing analysis (178). Much of O’Dell’s analysis is focused on the South not just because it was the historic battleground of much of the civil rights struggle, but also because it is the continuing site of the...