Editing Saul Alinsky (section)

==Organizing==
===The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council===
In 1938, Alinsky gave up his last employment at the [[Institute for Juvenile Research]], [[University of Illinois at Chicago]], to devote himself full-time as a political activist. In his free time he had been raising funds for the [[International Brigade]] (organized by the [[Communist International]]) in the [[Spanish Civil War]] and for southern [[sharecropper]]s, organizing for the [[Newspaper Guild]] and other fledgling unions, fighting evictions, and agitating for public housing.<ref name="Sanders" /> He also began to work alongside the CIO ([[Congress of Industrial Organizations]]) and its president [[John L. Lewis]]. (In an "un-authorized biography" of the labor leader Alinsky wrote that he later mediated between Lewis and President [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] in the White House).<ref>{{cite book |last=Alinsky |first=Saul |date=2007 |orig-year=1949 |title=John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography |location=[[Whitefish, Montana]] |publisher=Kessinger Publishing |isbn=978-1-43259-217-2}}</ref>

Alinsky's idea was to apply the organizing skills he believed he had mastered "to the worst slums and ghettos, so that the most oppressed and exploited elements could take control of their own communities and their own destinies. Up until then, specific factories and industries had been organized for social change, but never whole communities."{{sfnp|Norden|1972|p=71}}

In the belief that if his approach succeeded in these neighborhoods, it could do so anywhere, Alinsky looked to the back of the [[Union Stock Yards|Chicago Stockyards]] (the area made infamous by [[Upton Sinclair]]'s 1905 novel ''[[The Jungle]]''). There with Joseph Meegan, a park supervisor, Alinsky set up the [[Back of the Yards]] Neighborhood Council (BYNC). Working with the archdiocese, the Council succeeded in rallying a mix of otherwise mutually hostile Catholic ethnics (Irish, Poles, Lithuanians, Mexicans, Croats . . .) as well as [[African Americans]] to demand, and win, concessions from local meatpackers (in January 1946 the BYNC threw its support behind the first major walkout of the [[United Packinghouse Workers of America|United Packinghouse Workers]]),{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|pp=199-20}} landlords and city hall. This, and other efforts in the city's [[South Side, Chicago|South Side]] to "turn scattered, voiceless discontent into a united protest" earned an accolade from [[Illinois governor]] [[Adlai Stevenson II|Adlai Stevenson]]: Alinsky's aims "most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and dignity of the individual."{{sfnp|Norden|1972|pp=71–72}}

In founding the BYNC, Alinsky and Meegan sought to break a pattern of outside direction established by their predecessors in poor urban areas, most notably the settlement houses. The BYNC would be based on local democracy: "organizers would facilitate, but local people had to lead and participate." Residents had to "control their own destiny" and in doing so not only gain new resources but new confidence as well.<ref name="Slayton 1996">{{cite web |url=https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=history_articles |title=Review of Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky, His Life and Legacy |first=Robert A. |last=Slayton |date=1996 |website=[[Chapman University]] Digital Commons |access-date=January 21, 2020}}</ref> "Some of Saul's real genius," according to one observer, was "his sense of timing and understanding how others would perceive something. Saul knew that if I grab you by the shoulders and say do this, do that and the other, you're going to resent it. If you make the discovery yourself, you're going to strut because you made it".{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|p=105}}

===The Industrial Areas Foundation===
{{See also|Industrial Areas Foundation}}
In 1940, with the support of Roman Catholic Bishop [[Bernard James Sheil]] and [[Chicago Sun-Times]] publisher and department-store owner [[Marshall Field III|Marshall Field]], Alinsky founded the [[Industrial Areas Foundation]] (IAF), a national community organizing network. The mandate was to partner with religious congregations and civic organizations to build "broad-based organizations" that could train up local leadership and promote trust across community divides.<ref name="IAF-WhoWeAre">{{cite web |url=http://www.industrialareasfoundation.org |title=Who We Are |website=Industrial Areas Foundation |access-date=January 21, 2020}}</ref> For Alinsky there was also a broader mission.

In what sixty years later, with publication of [[Robert D. Putnam|Robert Putnam]]'s ''[[Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community]]'',<ref>{{cite book |last=Putnam |first=Robert |date=2000 |title=Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community |location=New York |publisher=Simon & Schuster |page=19 |isbn=978-0-74320-304-3}}</ref> would have been understood as a concern for the loss of "social capital" (of the organized opportunities for conviviality and deliberation that allow and encourage ordinary people to engage in democratic process), in his own statement of purpose for the IAF, Alinsky wrote:
<blockquote>In our modern urban civilization, multitudes of our people have been condemned to urban anonymity—to living the kind of life where many of them neither know nor care for their neighbors. This course of urban anonymity...is one of eroding destruction to the foundations of democracy. For although we profess that we are citizens of a democracy, and although we may vote once every four years, millions of our people feel deep down in their heart of hearts that there is no place for them—that they do not 'count'.<ref>{{harvp|Horwitt|1989|p=105}}</ref></blockquote>

Through the IAF, Alinsky spent the next 10 years repeating his organizational work--"rubbing raw", as the ''[[The New York Times|New York Times]]'' saw it "the sores of discontent"<ref name=":0">{{Cite news|last=Fowle|first=Farnsworth|date=June 13, 1972|title=Saul Alinsky, 63, Poverty Fighter and Social Organizer is Dead|page=46|work=New York Times|url=https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/06/13/80792597.html?pageNumber=46|access-date=January 9, 2022}}</ref> and compelling action through agitation--"from [[Kansas City metropolitan area|Kansas City]] and [[Detroit]] to the farm-worker [[barrio|barrios]] of Southern California."{{sfnp|Norden|1972|pp=59–60}} Although Alinsky always had rationalizations, his biographer Sanford Horwitt records that "on rare occasions" Alinsky would concede that not all of his mentored projects were "unequivocal successes". There was uncertainty about "what was supposed to happen after the first two or three years, when the original organizer and/or fund-raiser left the community council on its own." Recognizing that the IAF could not be "a holding for People's Organizations", Alinsky thought that one solution would be for community-councils, under their native leadership, to constitute their own inter-city fund-raising and mutual-assistance network. In the early 1950s, Alinsky was talking about "a million-dollar budget to carry us over a three-year plan of organization through the country." The usual corporate and foundation funders proved decidedly cold to the idea.{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|pp=263–265}}

Successes could also be problematic. In Chicago, the Back of the Yards Council set itself against housing integration and offered no objection to a pattern of "urban renewal" with which Alinsky professed himself "fed-up": "the moving of low-income and, almost without exception, Negro groups and dumping them into other slums," in order to build houses for middle-income whites. There being "no substitute for organized power," Alinsky concluded in 1959 that what the city needed was a powerful black community organization that could "bargain collectively" with other organized groups and agencies, private and public.{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|pp=367–368}}

===Mentoring in The Woodlawn Organization===
With the groundwork prepared by his deputy [[Edward T. Chambers]], Alinsky began mentoring The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), based in the [[Woodlawn, Chicago|Woodlawn]] community area on Chicago's [[South Side, Chicago|South Side]]. Like other IAF organizations, TWO was a coalition of existing community entities, local block clubs, churches, and businesses. These groups paid dues, and the organization was run by an elected board. The TWO moved quickly to establish itself as the "voice" of the black neighborhood, mobilizing, developing and bringing up new leadership. An example was [[Arthur M. Brazier]], the first spokesperson and eventual president of the organization. Starting out as a mail carrier, Brazier became a preacher in a store front church, and then, through TWO, emerged as a national spokesman for the [[Black Power]] movement.<ref>{{cite book |last=Brazier |first=Arthur M. |date=1969 |title=Black Self-Determination: The Story of the Woodlawn Organization |location=Grand Rapids, Michigan |publisher=William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.}}</ref>

In 1961, to show city hall that TWO was a force to be reckoned with, Alinsky combined "two elements—votes, which were the coin of the realm in Chicago politics, and fear of the black mass" by bussing 2,500 black resident citizens, down to city hall to register to vote.<ref>Slayton (1998)</ref>{{fcn|date=June 2023}}

Through TWO, Woodlawn residents challenged the redevelopment plans of the University of Chicago. Alinsky claimed the organization was the first community group not only to plan its own urban renewal but, even more important, to control the letting of contracts to building contractors. Alinsky found it "touching to see how competing contractors suddenly discovered the principles of brotherhood and racial equality." Similar "conversions" were secured from employers elsewhere in the city with mass shop-ins at department stores, tying up bank lines with people exchanging pennies for bills and vice versa, and the threat of a "piss-in" at Chicago [[O'Hare International Airport]].{{sfnp|Norden|1972|p=169}}

For Alinsky the "essence of successful tactics" was "originality." When [[Richard J. Daley|Mayor Daley]] dragged his heels on building violations and health procedures, TWO threatened to unload a thousand live rats on the steps of city hall: "sort of share-the-rats program, a form of integration": 
<blockquote>Any tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag itself. No matter how burning the injustice and how militant your supporters, people get turned off by repetitious and conventional tactics. Your opposition also learns what to expect and how to neutralize you unless you're constantly devising new strategies.</blockquote>
Alinsky said that he "knew the day of sit-ins had ended" when the executive of a military contractor showed him blueprints for the new corporate headquarters. "'And here', the executive said, 'is our sit-in-hall. [You will have] plenty of comfortable chairs, two coffee machines and lots of magazines . . . '". "You are not going to get anywhere", Alinsky concluded, unless you are "constantly inventing new and better tactics" that move beyond your opponent's expectations.{{sfnp|Norden|1972|p=39}}

===FIGHT, Rochester, NY===
In the 1960s, Alinsky focused through the IAF on the training of community organizers. The IAF assisted Black community organizing groups in Kansas City and Buffalo, and the [[Community Service Organization]] of Mexican Americans in California, training, among others, [[Cesar Chavez]] and [[Dolores Huerta]]. 

In July 1964, a [[1964 Rochester Race Riot|race riot]] broke out in [[Rochester, New York]], which Alinsky said was owned "lock stock and barrel" by [[Eastman Kodak]], whose only contribution to race relations was "the invention of color film".{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|p=493}} In the wake of the riots, the Rochester area churches, together with black civil rights leaders, invited Alinsky and the IAF to help the community organize. With the Reverend [[Franklin Florence]], who had been close to [[Malcolm X]], they established FIGHT (Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today).

Concluding that picketing and boycotts would not work, FIGHT began to think of some "far-out tactics along the lines of our O'Hare shit in." This included a "fart-in" at the [[Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra|Rochester Philharmonic]], Kodak's "cultural jewel." It was a proposal Alinsky considered "absurd rather than juvenile. But isn't much of life kind of a theater of the absurd?" No tactic that might work was "frivolous." Following a disruption of its annual stockholders' convention in April 1967 assisted by [[Unitarian Universalist Association|Unitarians]] and others assigning FIGHT their proxy votes (Alinsky had called on them to "put your stock where your sermons are"), Kodak recognized FIGHT as a broad-based community organization and committed, through a recruitment and training program, to black employment, in June 1967. A retired public affairs officer for Kodak later said, "Alinsky and the people who exploited the situation were looking for attention," and claimed Kodak had already undertaken or was developing a lot of the programs that community activists sought. "We were working on it."{{sfnp|Norden|1972|pp=173, 176–177}}<ref>{{cite news |url=https://eu.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2014/07/19/franklin-florence-dorothy-hall-kodak-fight/12853477/ |title=Riots spawned FIGHT, other community efforts |first1=James |last1=Goodman |first2=Brian |last2=Sharp |date=July 20, 2014 |newspaper=[[Democrat and Chronicle]] |access-date=January 21, 2020}}</ref>

===Community action in the federal War on Poverty===
While in Rochester, Alinsky had been employed four-days a month at the federally-funded Community Action Training Center at [[Syracuse University]].{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989}}{{pn|date=June 2023}} The 1964 [[Economic Opportunity Act]], passed as a part of [[Lyndon B. Johnson]]’s [[War on Poverty]], committed the federal government to promoting the "maximum feasible participation" of targeted communities in the design and delivery of anti-poverty programs.<ref>{{cite book|last=Capp|first=Glenn R.|title=The Great Society A Sourcebook of Speeches|year=1967|publisher=Dickenson Publishing Company, Inc.|location=Belmont, CA|pages=164–174}}</ref>

This appeared to acknowledge what Alinsky insisted was the key to social and economic deprivation, "political poverty":<blockquote>Poverty means not only lacking money, but also lacking power. ... When ... poverty and the lack of power bar you from equal protection, equal equity in the courts, and equal participation in the economic and social life of your society, then you are poor. ... [An] anti-poverty program must recognise that its program has to do something about not only economic poverty but also political poverty<ref name="Alinsky 1965">{{cite journal |last1=Alinsky |first1=Saul |title=The War on Poverty--Political Pornography |journal=The Journal of Social Issues |date=1965 |volume=22 |issue=1 |pages=41–47 |doi=10.1111/j.1540-4560.1965.tb00482.x}}</ref></blockquote> Alinsky was sceptical of Community Action Program (CAP) funding under the Act doing more than provide relief for the "welfare industry": "the use of poverty funds to absorb staff salaries and operating costs by changing the title of programs and putting a new poverty label here and there is an old device". If it was to achieve more than this, there had to be meaningful representation of the poor "through their own organised power".<ref name="Alinsky 1965" />

In practice this would mean that the federal sponsor for community action, the [[Office of Economic Opportunity]] (OEO), should bypass city halls and either fund existing militant organisations such as FIGHT in Rochester (although these could never allow the federal government to be their core funder) or, in communities not already organized, seek out local leadership to initiate the process of building a resident organization. Amendments to OEO funding in the summer of 1965 ruled out any such "creative federalism". These gave city halls the right to select the official Community Action Agency (CAA) for their community and reserved two-thirds of the CAA boards for business representative and elected officials.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Davidson |first1=Roger |title=The War on Poverty: Experiment in Federalism |journal=The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science |date=1969 |volume=385 |issue=Evaluating the War on Poverty |pages=1–13 |doi=10.1177/000271626938500102 |jstor=1037532 |s2cid=154640268 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1037532}}</ref> There was no prospect of a federal mandate favoring Alinsky's organizing model.

The one-year OEO grant for the program at Syracuse that had hired Alinsky was not renewed.{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|p=48}} When the program trainees began organizing residents against city agencies, the mayor withdrew cooperation.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Kifner|first=John|date=15 January 1967|title=Saul D. Alinsky; A Professional Radical Rallies the Poor|url=http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/01/15/133018222.html?pdf_redirect=true&site=false|access-date=2022-01-09|website=timesmachine.nytimes.com|language=en}}</ref>