Alinsky, Saul (1909–1972)

U.S. founder of community organizations

Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Saul Alinsky did undergraduate and graduate work in sociology at the University of Chicago. He studied with Robert Park and E. W. Burgess, two founders of the Chicago School of sociology, and did field work with Clifford Shaw, who ran the Institute for Juvenile Research on the city's Near West Side. In his fieldwork, Alinsky interacted with the likes of Al Capone's gang. After working in the state penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois, Alinsky was assigned to help facilitate a community organization in the Back of the Yards, a lower-income neighborhood south of Chicago's stockyards. In building that organization, which became the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC), Alinsky was clearly influenced by Shaw, who believed community organizations ought to be built primarily through empowering local residents. Shaw and Alinsky offered an alternative to the settlement house model of community organization dominated by professional social workers and outsiders. Shaw favored stimulating a “by-the-bootstraps” self-help approach.

[Page 36]While following the indigenous organizing approach, Alinsky added larger structural economic issues to his model of organizing. He also used “action”—a form of visible protest against powerful individuals and institutions—to maximize media attention and embarrass his targets, who included some of the most powerful businesses and government officials of the day. He was heavily influenced by labor leaders, in particular the charismatic leader of the early Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), John L. Lewis (1880–1969). Lewis's CIO worked to organize the meatpacking workers in the stockyards just as Alinsky was helping establish the BYNC. Alinsky's interactions with the local CIO clearly influenced his continual interest in economic justice issues. Another key ingredient Alinsky brought to organizing was his ability to collaborate with the Catholic Church. In particular, his relationships with Bishop Bernard Sheil and Father Jack Egan proved to be instrumental in much of his work in Chicago and elsewhere.

While Alinsky's politics were always somewhat enigmatic, they were generally left of center. He sympathized with Communists and socialists, but never joined their organizations. Moreover, he was always opportunistic. An example was his assisting Lewis in supporting Wendell Wilkie, the Republican presidential nominee, against Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. Alinsky probably did not support Wilkie personally, but he wanted to cement his good relationship with Lewis, who was perhaps the most powerful labor leader in modern history.

In 1945, Alinsky published Reveille for Radicals. The book was an attack on liberal politics that called for a new set of “people's organizations” around the country as the vehicle for a new populism. Such groups were intended to fill a void left by overly selfinterested labor unions.

Alinsky established the Industrial Area Foundations (IAF) in the 1940s to support the establishment of people's organizations around the country. The IAF helped establish organizations in Kansas City, Missouri; St. Paul, Minnesota; Rochester, New York; and elsewhere. In Chicago, Alinsky helped establish the Organization for the Southwest Community (OSC) during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Alinsky encouraged—somewhat unsuccessfully—many of the organizations he helped establish, including BYNC and OSC, to adopt modest pro-integrative policies that he argued would slow racial transition. The issue of race and housing proved a key weakness in Alinsky's organizing strategy. In fact, BYNC became somewhat known as an antiintegrationist organization, and OSC became bitterly divided over the issue.

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