Alinsky, Saul (1909–1972)

U.S. reformer

Saul Alinsky was a charismatic founder of community organizations in cities across the United States.

He is widely credited with developing a style of aggressive community organizing that confronts powerful interests and seeks to build political power among grassroots constituencies. Alinsky used the “action”—a form of visible protest against powerful people and institutions—to maximize media attention and embarrass his targets. He focused on organizing residents of lower-income neighborhoods to help them build political and economic power. He was perhaps best known for co-founding the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) in Chicago in a neighborhood south of the Chicago Stockyards and the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a national trainer of community organizers. The BYNC became a substantial political force in Chicago and one of the few organizations that could stand up against the city's political machine.

Alinsky was born in the Maxwell Street area of Chicago—a crowded immigrant community on Chicago's Near West Side. His father was an orthodox Jew who had emigrated from Russia to New York and then to Maxwell Street, where he was remarried to Sarah Tannenbaum, Alinsky's mother. When Saul was about six, his family moved to the more middle-class Douglas Park-Lawndale area on the city's West Side. His mother and father divorced when he was about thirteen.

In 1926, Alinsky entered the University of Chicago and studied in the renowned sociology department. Alinsky struggled in his first two undergraduate years and was put on academic probation. In his junior year he took a course in social pathology with E. W. Burgess, who, along with Robert Park, was a founder of the Chicago School of Sociology. Alinsky also met Helene Simon from Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, at the university. She later became his wife.

After graduating in 1930 Alinsky remained at the University of Chicago to do graduate work in sociology. During this time he began to do fieldwork with Clifford Shaw, who ran the Institute for Juvenile Research on the city's near West Side, in the same neighborhood in which Alinsky was born. In his fieldwork Alinsky interacted with the likes of Al Capone's gang. In 1933 Alinsky began working for the Institute for Juvenile Research at the Illinois State [Page 26]Penitentiary in Joliet, an hour and a half southwest of Chicago. It was a tough place, and no doubt his experiences there had something to do with the development of the tough, openly confrontational style for which he became known.

Saul Alinsky (extreme left) on the picket line of the United Packing House Workers at the Chicago stockyards on 16 January 1946.

Bettman/Corbis; used with permission.

Alinsky had clearly been left of center in terms of political ideology but had not been particularly active in politics at a young age. His hatred of the German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and fascism led him to support the antifascist International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. However, he never became a member of the Communist Party, as did some of his activist contemporaries.