Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

Young recalled, that Levison and O’Dell should sue the FBI for defamation and force the Bureau’s evidence out in court, if they dared. “Sue? Why should I sue?” interjected O’Dell, who had been brooding like a prisoner on death row. “I don’t consider it a slander!” He said he was proud of his association with Communists who had dedicated themselves to fighting racism. All of the people in the room knew most of them—they were some of Du Bois’s people, and Ben Davis, the hard-line vice chairman of the party, now sick with terminal cancer. O’Dell said he had never done anything to betray Dr. King. As the only one there who did not call King by his first name, he already felt less a colleague than a defendant, and soon he sputtered into rage. “Hoover can kiss my ass!” he said. “I am not the issue!” The issue was control of the movement, he said, and whatever Dr. King decided, he should not kid himself into believing that Hoover and the Kennedys would be satisfied with this one execution.