Community organizing: Alinsky's legacy

Saul Alinsky       Photo courtesy the Industrial Areas Foundation

This is the first in a series on community organizing in Illinois made possible by a grant from The Woods Charitable Fund, Inc.

The old folks remember Saul Alinsky from the early days as the gawky, bookish-looking fellow in the round-rim glasses, who stood at the back of meeting rooms, quietly and inconspicuously taking notes.

That was in 1939, the year Alinsky and his colleague Joseph Meegan put together the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, an effort to transform a rundown, working-class slum on the south side of Chicago. None of them could have expected, or even imagined, the sweeping consequences of that birth. "How could they have known what they were creating? Who could have predicted it?" says Robert Slayton, historian and author of Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy. "But even now, when I go to community meetings, and I hear people talking about neighborhood empowerment and controlling one's destiny, I think, 'My God, that's Alinsky.' And it all goes back to the Back of the Yards."

Now, of course, Alinsky's influence is beyond refute. He died in 1972 of a heart attack, but the Alinsky model of a democratically run, church-based community organization has become the prototype for groups in poor and working-class black, white-ethnic and Hispanic neighborhoods across the country.

The organizers he trained — Tom Gaudette, Fred Ross Sr., and Ed Chambers chief among them — in turn trained others, including Cesar Chavez, cofounder of the United Farmworkers Union, whose influence has shaped movements of politics, labor, peace and civil rights. In 1969 Alinsky created the Industrial Areas Foundation, a training school for organizers. Now under Chambers' command, it oversees a network of 22 organizations in regions as disparate as New York, Texas and southern California.

Even activists such as Heather Booth and Shel Trapp, who never or only briefly met Alinsky, have been touched by his philosophy. Local leadership, confrontational tactics, personalizing the issue — all well-recognized and widely practiced tenets taught by Booth and Trapp at their training schools in Chicago — were espoused for the first time in Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, the two primers Alinksy wrote. And through it all, he developed almost a personality cult of admirers, young and old, galvanized by his persona: the caustic, acerbic and witty University of Chicago graduate who scored scholars and academicians and struck a pose of street-smart tough.

"I remember my first meeting with Saul," says Peter Martinez, an organizer who was trained and employed by Alinsky and later helped organize the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), a network of groups active in Chicago's Hispanic community. "He said, 'Have you been to college?' I said, 'Yes.' He said, 'Oh, Hell. Have you graduated?' I said, 'Yes.' He

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said, 'Things are really going downhill. What's your major?' I said, 'English.' So, he said: 'Thank God, if you had said social work or sociology, I'd have kicked your ass out the door.'"

Not surprisingly, it is in Chicago, Alinsky's hometown, that his thumb print is strongest. Indeed, his organizations were tailored for Chicago. They were rooted in neighborhood parishes, organized around union principles of solidarity, and dedicated to the steel-edged proposition that power — in this case the city's Democratic machine — concedes nothing unless it has to.

"Chicago is the Harvard of community organizing," says John McDermott, former publisher of The Chicago Reporter. "Or, maybe I should say the Notre Dame of organizing, since the Catholic church has played such an integral role." By the late 1970s, the number of active, Alinsky-style organizations here hovered near 100. Now that number may have halved, the result no doubt of suburban migration and inner city deterioration, the very things the organizations were formed to prevent. Some of Alinsky's best-known creations have folded. Others, like The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), which helped stabilize a poor, south-side, black community in the 1960s, are now known more for social service and development efforts than agitation.

More and more, the talk in town is that Alinsky's pot-boiling tactics of confrontation are passe and no longer unnerve or intimidate egregious corporations, landlords or politicians. Instead, many activists say the time has come to forge partnerships with corporate Chicago and seed the inner city with philanthropic donations that will sprout not-for-profit housing and small-business operations (For more on housing initiatives, see "Low-income housing without the fed's largesse" by Nina Burleigh in the October 1987 Illinois Issues.)

Many of the best and brightest community activists have run for office, usually as allies of the late Mayor Harold Washington. Some — such as Aldermen Luis Gutierrez (26th Ward), Dorothy Tillman (3rd) and Bobby Rush (2nd) — even got elected. And, ironically, they sometimes scolded the spunkier organizations such as UNO and the Northwest Neighborhood Federation for embarrassing Washington with their boisterous demonstrations.

Doubt still exists about Alinsky's approach to organizing, most of it the same criticism that nagged him while he lived. His approach, critics say, is too simplistic. It avoids confronting racism, breeds parochialism, shies from electoral politics and sets such fundamentally routine and meaningless goals for its followers that the power structure remains unshaken, and the poor are provided with what amounts to some sort of recreational diversion.

"Alinsky's organizations are not made for structural change," says Don Rose, a veteran Chicago political strategist, who has been active in civil rights, anti-machine and progressive causes. "He used the rhetoric of radicalism for the purpose of entree to the system. His client, by and large, was the church. And the church is interested in pacification, not change."

All of such criticism, Alinsky's supporters counter, misses the point. Organizing is a process by which exploited people learn to employ the tools of a democratic society, which one day will have no choice but to accept them as equal members. "Alinsky lives," says Chambers. "His concepts are universal to organizing. We have developed them, of coarse. We have made them better. But his fundamental principles will never change."

The man himself was born in 1909 on Chicago's west side. The facts of his early life are based mostly on his own recollections — a somewhat faulty source, given Alinsky's passion for embellishment. In a series of now-famous 1960s interviews with Marion Sanders for Harper's Magazine, Alinsky recalls a childhood spent as a Jewish street ruffian who battled gangs of Irish and Poles. When he was a teenager, his parents divorced. For years, Alinsky shuttled back and forth between his mother in Chicago and his father, a businessman in Los Angeles. His first taste of poverty came even before the Depression.

"My problem was eating," Alinsky told Harper's. "I knew my mother would gladly give me her last dollar and the last crumbs on her table. But she was having a hard time and my father had more or less disappeared from sight. So I'd tell her I had enough. I could have gone on a relief project. But I don't know why this is — I'll steal before I'll take charity. . . .

"I entered the University of Chicago in 1926. More or less by accident, I majored in archeology and I fell in love with the subject. It was all very exciting and dramatic to me. The artifacts were not just pieces of stone or clay. My imagination could carry me back to the past so that when I stood in front of an old Inca altar, I could hear the cries of human sacrifice. You need a lot of imagination to be a good organizer. Today when I go into a community, I suffer and resent with the people there, and they feel this."

In 1930 he won a scholarship from the university and enrolled in its graduate school of criminology, where he elected as an independent study to conduct field research on Al Capone's gangsters. One year later, restless with academia, he dropped out of school and went to work for Clifford R. Shaw's Institute of Juvenile Research. It was Shaw who in 1939 directed Alinsky to the Back of the Yards, with instructions to determine how the community might eradicate a wave of juvenile crime.

"I think it would be a mistake to say that Alinsky went into the Back of the Yards, and just started a community organization," says Sandford Horwitt, a historian whose biography

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of Alinsky will be published this year. "I think he had some general ideas of what he wanted to do. But the specifics evolved from his experiences."

"This was Upton Sinclair's jungle," Alinsky said of the community. 'This was not the slum across the tracks, this was the slum across the tracks from across the tracks." That description is a bit misleading. True, the overcrowded community of crumbling wood shanties and tenements bordered on the city's filthy stockyards. But it also bustled with organizational activity. There were dozens of civic, youth and religious organizations, not to mention stockyard union activists, whose heroics fired Alinsky's imagination.

"The union organizers Alinsky found working in the Back of the Yards were professional radicals," David Fink wrote in his book, The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky. "Their specific assignment from CIO boss [John L.] Lewis was to organize Chicago's packinghouse workers. To accomplish this. . . .involved agitation — convincing people that their problems were not unique, but connected with the problems of poor, exploited people everywhere. They preached unity, solidarity, action and reform. Alinsky went to [their] mass meetings. The organizers fascinated him."

The vision of powerless people uniting to shape their destiny stirred Alinsky. He related it to larger struggles in Europe against Hitler, Mussolini, fascism and anti-Semitism. "I went in there to fight fascism," Alinsky told Harper's. "Delinquency was just incidental, the real crime was fascism. If you had asked me then what my profession was, I would have told you I was a professional anti-fascist."

Saul Alinsky       Photo by Arthur Siegel, courtesy the Industrial Areas Foundation

It struck him as almost hopelessly pathetic that the poor laborers of Packingtown, as the area was called, were divided into feuding ethnic camps of Poles, Irish and Lithuanians. To preach unity, however, on the basis of brotherhood and harmony would be naive, Alinsky figured. No one would listen; their hostile passions ran too deep. He would have to prove that ethnic rivalries thwarted their own self-interest. "To succeed, Alinsky and Meegan had to convince each faction of the notion of greater good," says Slayton. "They would say, 'Okay, for 30 days a month you can hate each other. But on the last day, you are brothers, no matter what.'"

"In the world as it is, man moves primarily because of self interest," Alinsky wrote in Reveille For Radicals. "In the world as it is, the right things are usually done for the wrong reason." Or, as he later told Harper's: "I never appealed to people on the basis of abstract values. . . . Sure, everybody's against sin, but you're not going to get off your prat to do anything about it. To the Catholic priests my approach was simply this: 'You're telling your people to stay out of the CIO because it's Communist-dominated. . . . So what do they do? They say, 'Yes, father,' and walk out of your church and join the union. [Why?] Because those union people are doing something about their living problems. . . .while you sit on your rear end in your sacristy.' "

The Back of the Yard council's first meeting was in July 1939. All totaled, 350 people attended, representing 76 organizations. Bishop Bernard Sheil, auxiliary archbishop of the Archdiocese, was elected honorary chairman. The council was a success almost from the start. Most importantly, it was rooted in the parishes of the neighborhood. In time, the council sponsored food, health and recreational programs. Eventually it forced the local Democratic organization to recognize it as a legitimate and permanent organization.

Back of the Yards brought Alinsky nationwide acclaim. In 1946 he codified his technique of organizing in Reveille For Radicals, a passionately upbeat manifesto that outlined how all neighborhoods could transform themselves through democratically run "People's Organizations," just like the council. Alinsky wrote: "The kind of participation that comes out of a People's Organization. . . .completely changes what had previously been to John Smith, assembly-line American, a dull, gray monotonous road of existence that stretched out interminably, into a brilliantly lit, highly exciting avenue of hope, drama, conflict, with, at the end of the street the most brilliant ending known to the mind of man — the future of mankind."

Of course, Alinsky continued, the people cannot reach this future alone. They need an organizer, a behind-the-scenes strategist who knows the community, discovers its "native" leaders and then simplifies, personifies and dramatizes its thorny problems, while never hesitating when necessary to stir the embers of discontent.

"The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentment of the people, fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them," he wrote in Reveille For Radicals,

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adding in Rules For Radicals, published in 1971: "It is essential that [issues] be simple enough to be grasped as rallying or battle cries. They can not be generalities like sin or immorality or the good life or morals. They must be this immorality of this slum landlord with this slum tenement where these people suffer."

In the end, it was this aggressive endorsement of confrontation tactics for which Alinsky is most remembered. He loved to devise outrageous schemes (such as his threatened "fart-in," in which hundreds of protesters would eat baked beans and then attend a concert). The purpose of such acts was to torment the powerful, while rallying his supporters and drawing attention to their cause. "Saul was a funny and irreverent man," says Monsignor John Egan, a close Alinsky friend and ally from many projects in racially changing areas on Chicago's southwest and northwest sides. "Saul never took himself seriously. But, my God, he took the problems and the people seriously."

In many ways, Alinsky was emulating his hero, John L. Lewis. The parameters for action, both men agreed, must be flexible for people in desperate times. "The biggest job of a leader is to develop a rationale, a moral basis for these spontaneous actions," Alinsky told Harper's. "When the first sit-down [auto worker] strikes took place, no one had really planned them. They were clearly a violation of the law. . . . But Lewis issued a pontifical statement: 'A man's right to a job transcends the right of private property.' It undergirded the situation with a purpose, a direction. If [Lewis] had not done this, the strikes might well have collapsed."

"Tactics of confrontation were necessary in Chicago because otherwise the political organization would not respond," says Josh Hoyt, who has organized for UNO. "The community organizations were like governments in exile. They had so little power. Their only strength was in numbers, and they had to fight for everything they got."

Alinsky never intended for such tactics to be ends in and of themselves. The hard work was rooting a group in its neighborhood. But over time, Alinsky's tactics obscured his organizations' accomplishments. All too often, critics charged, Alinsky groups gave little attention to the value or worth of their goals and fell into the habit of confrontation for its own sake.

Such was the case in the 1970s when several groups, including the Northwest Community Organization, pressed school officials to do away with the traditional hour-long lunch break. The residents contended that their children, walking to and from school, were vulnerable to attack by gangs. Many teachers countered that it was educationally unsound and stifling to confine children in a classroom for five-and-a-half hours with only a 20-minute break. The parents persisted, accentuating their protests with promises to devise creative solutions to any problems emerging from the shorter school day.

In the end, most schools capitulated, after which the parents' enthusiasm waned. No solutions were created, and eventually most of the organizers who had led the protests, found other jobs and left the community.

"Organizing in poor communities is never a smooth and easy process," says Sheila Radford Hill, a veteran organizer for the Chicago Area Project — a city wide group founded by Alinsky's early associate, Clifford Shaw, to combat juvenile delinquency. "Often you have to set reachable goals and settle for smaller victories along the way."

In general, Alinsky-style groups have had only short-lived success in poor communities where there are few stable church or civic groups to hook into. An even greater failure has been their inability to coalesce groups from different neighborhoods. Part of the problem stems from existing turf squabbles and rivalries. But tensions often are fostered when organizations compete for grants, newspaper headlines and even members. "Sometimes there's a tendency to get into competitive matches," says Shel Trapp, who together with Gale Cincotta organized National People's Action, a network of community organizations based in Chicago. "All too often, Alinsky-style groups get too parochial."

The problem is fiercest in changing neighborhoods when whites, for instance, resist blacks, or Mexicans ostracize Puerto Ricans. Indeed, one of Chicago's strongest organizations —UNO, Back of the Yards — emerged precisely because Hispanics and blacks felt locked out of existing organizations. Alinsky described the process as a struggle between the "Have-Not's" and the "Have-a-Little-and-Want-More's."

"Too often I've seen the have-nots turn into haves and become just as crummy as the haves they used to envy," Alinsky told Harper's. "Some of the fruit ranchers in California steam around in Cadillacs and treat the Mexican-American field hands like vermin. Know who those bastards are? They're the characters who rode west in Steinbeck's trucks in The Grapes of Wrath."

And then there is the question of bigotry. "I can not say that an Alinsky group has ever organized black and white communities into one," says the Rev. Arthur Brazier, founding president of The Woodlawn Organization and pastor of the Apostolate Church of God on the city's south side. "People don't organize for the sake of organizing. They organize around specific purposes. And I haven't seen any efforts along those lines."

That may be an understatement. For when it came to racial hostilities, Alinsky by his own admission was almost helpless. He condemned bigotry, yes. And he supported the concept of integration. One of his most noble, ambitious endeavors, the Greater Southwest Side Organization, even attempted during the late 1960s and early 1970s to stem the massive resegregation of several neighborhoods just west of the city's Dan Ryan Expressway.

But Alinsky dismissed as naive any effort to organize against racism. "Look at a community like Cicero, Illinois," he said in the Harper's interview. "You don't start out right off the bat by saying, 'Racists are banned from this organization, and we're going to fight for the right to bring blacks in here.' If you do that, they'll all walk out on you and you'll have nobody to communicate with. So you avoid the race issue. You leave it alone. You know that once you have them organized on other issues, the situation will change."

And so it was that Alinsky or his disciples organized groups in black or white communities, but could never unite these organizations as one. If blacks and whites came together over a cause of common concern — as they did in the early 1970s with

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opposition to the Crosstown Expressway, a massive project proposed by Mayor Richard J. Daley that would have obliterated several communities — the union crumbled after the issue disappeared. And all too quickly hatred and animosity bubbled to the surface, as in the mayoral election of 1983. Even Alinsky, toward the end of his life, acknowledged that bigotry limited his effectiveness as an organizer, particularly among blacks. "All kinds of walls are up now, which in some ways are as bad as the old segregationist walls," Alinsky said in Harper's. "Right now you have blacks saying, 'Whitey get lost.' So, I accept that fact that today, in spite of my record, my white skin disqualifies me from the kind of direct organizing work I've done in Chicago and Rochester [New York] and other [black] ghettos. In this climate, I'm convinced that all whites should get out of the black ghettos. It's a stage we have to go through."

Not surprisingly, by the end of the 1960s, Alinsky pledged to turn his attention to the plight of white middle class. "Suppose you could get all the blacks, Mexican-Americans, poor whites and Puerto Ricans organized," Alinsky said in Harper's. "That would be maybe 55 million people by the end of the 1970s. But the population will be around 225 million by then, so the poor will still be a minority who need allies, and they'll have to find supporters among the three-quarters of our people who are middle class. . . . In some ways, the middle-class groups are more alienated than even the poor. There aren't any special funding programs for them. They don't have any special admissions to universities. They don't have a special anything, except getting constantly clobbered by taxes and inflation. These people are just thrashing around in their own frustrations."

Today, many organizers wrestle with the same dilemmas. Some, like Trapp and Cincotta, have made impressive strides. In 1976, their group, National People's Action, lobbied locally and nationally and forced Congress to pass the Community Reinvestment Act. The law, condemned by many bankers as blackmail, compels banks to set aside a portion of their holdings for inner-city mortgages and business loans. Last September, the law enabled the Greater Roseland Coalition for Community Control to force a nearby bank to guarantee $20 million in loans for their working-class black, south-side neighborhood.

Other activists, like Heather Booth, have attempted to wed Alinsky grass-roots activism with the sophisticated mass-marketing techniques of corporate America. A former civil rights activist, Booth never trained under Alinksy, but she has read his books. Booth settled in Chicago in the late 1960s and formed the Midwest Academy, a training school for organizers, and Citizen Action, a nationwide coalition of groups whose interests range from foreign policy to utilities. Citizen Action organizers go door to door in communities across the country, putting together mailing lists and phone banks that can be tapped for elections or congressional hearings, like the recent hearings over Robert Bork's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"There are limitations to parochial Alinsky organizing, particularly when our lives are affected by decisions made on a national or international level. Whether we send our children to fight in Central America is just as important to most people on Main Street as a toxic plant in the backyard," says Booth. "We also have to take into consideration demographic trends. There are more families with two working parents. How do you reach them? You need new approaches, you have to take advantage of new technologies. It isn't that we're doing away with Alinsky's tactics. I think of it as growth."

Chambers, too, has altered his mentor's teachings. After Alinsky died, Chambers moved the Industrial Areas Foundation from Chicago to New York, in part, to assist a chapter there that was struggling. "Saul wasn't perfect, but we learn from our mistakes," says Chambers. "For one thing we stay with our groups. Saul used to organize them and leave them alone. We didn't have the resources to stick with them, and we also hoped that after a few years they would exist as independent self-sufficient entities. But, you know what happens. Leadership changes. Have-nots become haves. Some organizers don't want to leave, and they turn the group into their own little power base."

Chamber's also updated many of Alinsky's precepts: "We're rotating organizers now. We've moved guys from New York to Minnesota. That keeps them fresh, keeps them from burning out. And another thing, we pay them more. They make as much as $50,000. No more of the days when you worked for free and wore a hair shirt. This should be a career job. I'm the oldest at 56, and there's a big group of organizers in their 40s."

But some fundamentals have not changed since the early days in the Back of the Yards. To succeed, an organization must be firmly rooted in its community. "We only go to communities that want us," Chambers says. "They have to invite us. And we say, 'Fine, you want us? Here's the bill.' They have to finance us themselves through dues. We don't take foundation money. Foundations only give you money with strings attached. Sure, it works in poor communities. They've got money for cigarettes, candy and alcohol, don't they? Well, they can pay dues too. I'm in Baltimore now, celebrating the anniversary of Build. It's based in a poor black community, and it's 10 years old and going strong. So, you see, we're fighting. We're making progress. We're learning. The struggle hasn't gone away."

Journalist Ben Joravsky is coauthor of Race and Politics in Chicago and has been covering neighborhood issues in The Chicago Reporter and the Reader for many years.

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