Alinsky, Saul

Saul Alinsky is often referred to as the father of American community organizing, though his influence was felt mostly in the United States rather than in the rest of “America.” The civil rights movement was also important for generations of community organizers, but Alinsky was the strongest influence on neighborhood-based community organizing, which is the practice of bringing people together face to face to solve local problems and, sometimes, to change the distribution of power.

Alinsky was born in 1909 and grew up in Chicago, where the urban culture shaped his strategies of political action. As an undergraduate and then graduate student at the University of Chicago, he was greatly influenced by the crimi-nologists there. He found himself impatient with the academics' emphasis on studying community [Page 14]change and became more interested in actually creating change.

Consequently, in the late 1930s when he was supposed to be studying juvenile delinquency in Chicago's notorious Back of the Yards neighborhood, he found himself fascinated by the struggle of the stockyards workers there to form a union. Socializing with union organizers and learning their craft, he imagined using a similar vehicle to help neighborhoods gain political power. He then set out to organize the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, which would go on to win important improvements in city services for the neighborhood and contribute to the success of the stockyards workers' unionization struggle.

Alinsky's career took off from there as he traveled the country building neighborhood-based community organizing groups. He also wrote about his efforts, producing two important books on how to do community organizing: Reveille for Radicals (1969) and Rules for Radicals (1971). Yet, he was hardly a radical in the normal sense. Alinsky was firmly rooted in the U.S. tradition of democracy and believed that poor people could have as much influence over policy as anyone else as long as they organized effectively. He did have a reputation for promoting confrontation and conflict. His reputation once led to his immediate arrest in 1940 when he arrived in Kansas City. After numerous conversations, though, the police chief agreed to provide security for a major event organized by the Alinsky-style group there. Although he was personally confrontational, few of the community organizing efforts he spawned engaged in disruptive protest. He did, though, use an approach based on the power of numbers that posed the threat of disruption. Perhaps the most famous example of the use of such a threat was in 1964 when The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), one of the Alinsky-organized groups in Chicago, threatened to occupy all the toilets at O'Hare airport, the first ever “shit-in.” In response to the threat, Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley quickly called a meeting with TWO to reaffirm commitments on which he had previously reneged.

Alinsky had a rigidly anti-ideological approach to community organization. One of its weaknesses is that some of the organizations he built later turned undemocratic. In fact, when he died unexpectedly in 1972, on Alinsky's agenda was returning to the Back of the Yards neighborhood to start a new organization to overthrow the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, which had become racist and segregationist.

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