N.Y. Times: MLK Aid Dies at 96

From a Film about O'Dell: "The Issue of Mr. O'Dell"

Jack O’Dell died of a stroke on Oct. 31, said his wife, Jane Power.

             From The NY Times Report:

“Dr. King would have kept Jack O’Dell forever; he didn’t believe in demonizing anyone,” Taylor Branch, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Parting the Waters” (1988), the first of a three-volume history of the civil rights era, said in a phone interview. “But it was a demand from the Kennedy administration.” (Because O'Dell was a member of The Communist Party)

King dismissed Mr. O’Dell, writing in a July 3 (1963) letter to him that “any allusion to the left brings forth an emotional response which would seem to indicate that S.C.L.C. and the Southern Freedom Movement are Communist inspired.”