Martin Luther King, Jr and The Civil Rights Movement
In the late 1950s O'Dell withdrew his membership from the CPUSA to work in the Civil Rights movement in the South. He worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. O'Dell was a director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Because of O'Dell's past involvement with the Communist Party, Dr. King received pressure from many liberal leaders—including the Kennedy brothers, John and Robert—to distance himself from O'Dell. After conferring with King, O'Dell decided to accept a less prominent post within the movement in order not to alienate important allies of the Civil Rights struggle; nevertheless, he continued to play a decisive role in the SCLC, as well as in King's move towards the political left towards the end of his life.
Read more about this topic: Hunter Pitts O'Dell
Famous quotes containing the words martin luther, martin, luther, civil, rights and/or movement:
“Young fellows are tempted by girls, men who are thirty years old are tempted by gold, when they are forty years old they are tempted by honor and glory, and those who are sixty years old say to themselves, “What a pious man I have become.””
—Martin Luther (1483–1546)
“Let me tell you something. Nobody goes to jail unless they want to. Unless they make themselves get caught. They don’t have things organized.”
—Nicholas Pileggi, U.S. screenwriter, and Martin Scorsese. Henry Hill (Ray Liotta)
“Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination—everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.”
—John Adams (1735–1826)
“The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)
“In our governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of government contrary to the sense of the constituents, but from the acts in which government is the mere instrument of the majority.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“...I lost myself in my work and never felt that marriage would give me the security I wanted. I thought that through the trade union movement we working women could get better conditions and security of mind.”
—Mary Anderson (1872–1964)