Editing Saul Alinsky (section)

===The Student New Left===
{{Progressivism sidebar|expanded=activists}}At the beginning of the 1960s, in the first postwar generation of college youth, Alinsky appeared to win new allies. Disclaiming any "formulas" or "closed theories," [[Students for a Democratic Society]] called for a "new left ... committed to deliberativeness, honesty [and] reflection."<ref name="SDS_Port_Huron">{{cite web |url=http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html |title=The Port Huron Statement |author=[[Students for a Democratic Society]] |date=1962 |via=The Sixties Project |access-date=January 21, 2020}}</ref> More than this, the New Left seemed to place community organizing at the heart of their vision.

The SDS insisted that students "look outwards" beyond the campus "to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice." "The bridge to political power" would be "built through genuine cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new left of young people and an awakening community of allies." To stimulate "this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program in campus and community across the country,"<ref name="SDS_Port_Huron"/> in 1963, the SDS launched (with $5000 from [[United Automobile Workers]]) the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). SDS community organizers would help draw white neighborhoods into an "interracial movement of the poor". By the end of 1964, ERAP had ten inner-city projects engaging 125 student volunteers.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://libcom.org/files/sds.pdf |last=Sale |first=Kirkpatrick |author-link=Kirkpatrick Sale |date=1973 |title=SDS: The Rise and Development of The Students for a Democratic Society |location=New York |publisher=[[Vintage Books]] |pages=86–87 |via=Libcom.org}}</ref>

In the summer of 1964, [[Ralph Helstein]] of the [[United Packinghouse Workers of America|Packinghouse Workers]], one of the few labor leaders interested in the emergence of the New Left, arranged for Alinsky to meet SDS founders [[Tom Hayden]] and [[Todd Gitlin]]. To Helstein's dismay Alinsky dismissed Hayden and Gitlin's ideas and work as naive and doomed to failure. The would-be organizers were absurdly romantic in their view of the poor and of what could be achieved by consensus. Horwitt notes that "'[[Participatory democracy]],' the central concept the SDS's [[Port Huron Statement]], meant something fundamentally different . . . to what 'citizen participation' meant to Alinsky." Within community organizations Alinsky "put a premium on strong leadership, structure and centralized decision-making."{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|p=525}} 

When SDS volunteers set up shop in the "Hillbilly Harlem" of uptown Chicago, they crossed town to meet with Alinsky in Woodlawn.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Sonnie |first=Amy |url= |title=Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times |last2=Tracy |first2=James |date=2011 |publisher=Melville House |isbn=978-1-61219-008-2 |pages=33 |language=en}}</ref> They charged Alinsky with being "stuck in the past," and unwilling to confront white racism. To meet the challenge of growing black dissent following the August 1965 [[Watts riots]], King and his [[Southern Christian Leadership Conference]] (SCLC) had sought a victory in the North with the [[Chicago Freedom Movement]] (CFM). JOIN later claimed that they pushed whites on the race question "at every opportunity" and "even mobilized members to support Rev. [[Martin Luther King Jr.]]'s campaign to desegregate housing in Chicago in the summer of 1966".<ref>Sonnie & Tracy (2011), p. 44.</ref>

It is not clear that participation by Alinsky in the Chicago Freedom Movement was either offered or invited. Yet "Freedom Summer" in 1965 seemed to follow the Alinsky playbook: "The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a 'dangerous enemy'. The hysterical instant reaction of the establishment [will] not only validate [the organizer's] credentials of competency but also ensure automatic popular invitation".{{sfnp|Alinsky|1971|p=100}} The difficulty was that Daley's experience was such that that city hall could not be drawn into a sufficiently damaging confrontation. The mayor responded to the brutal reception for Freedom marchers in the white neighborhoods of Gage Park and Marquette Park with a judicious expression of sympathy and support. King balked at a further escalation—a march through the red-lined suburb of Cicero, "the Selma of the North"—and he allowed Daley to draw him into the negotiation of an open-housing deal<ref>{{cite book |last=Ralph |first=James R. |date=1993 |title=Northern Protest: Martin Luther King Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement |location=Cambridge, Massachusetts |publisher=Harvard University Press |isbn=978-0-67462-687-4 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/northernprotestm00ralp }}</ref> that was to prove toothless.<ref>{{cite book |last=Royko |first=Mike |date=1971 |title=Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago |location=New York |publisher=[[New American Library]] |page=158}}</ref> (After [[Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.|King's assassination]], Alinsky argued that Woodlawn was the one black area of Chicago that did not "explode into racial violence" because, while their lives were not "idyllic", with TWO people "finally" had a sense of "power and achievement").{{sfnp|Norden|1972|p=176}}

At the end of the sixties Alinsky complained that student activists had been more interested in "revelation" than in "revolution," and that their campus politics was little more than street theater.{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|p=528}} From the perspective of real social change, he regarded their outraging of middle-class sensibilities to have been a tactical mistake.<ref name="dedman">{{cite web |last=Dedman |first=Bill |author-link=Bill Dedman |date=March 2, 2007 |title=Reading Hillary Rodham's hidden thesis |url=https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna17388372 |access-date=January 21, 2020 |website=NBC News}}</ref>