Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky off the cover of Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky, His Life and Legacy by Sanford D. Horwitt.

Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 Chicago, Illinois - June 12, 1972 Carmel, California) is generally considered the father of community organizing.

Early Life, Family and Influences

Saul David Alinsky was born in Chicago on January 30, 1909, the child of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Benjamin and Sarah (Tannenbaum) Alinsky.

Though many Jews were active in the new socialist movement during his youth, his parents were not, instead they were strict Orthodox; their whole life revolved around work and synagogue.

Alinsky's parents were divorced when he was 18 and his father moved to California. For several years, he shuttled back and forth between them, living part of the time with his mother in Chicago and part of the time with his father in California.

In an interview with Playboy Magazine in 1972, Alinksy talked about what influenced his path to activism: "(And) poverty was no stranger to me, either. My mother and father emigrated from Russia at the turn of the century and we lived in one of the worst slums in Chicago; in fact, we lived in the slum district of the slum, on the wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks, about as far down as you could go. My father started out as a tailor, then he ran a delicatessen and a cleaning shop, and finally he graduated to operating his own sweatshop. But whatever business he had, we always lived in the back of a store. I remember, as a kid, the biggest luxury I ever dreamed of was just to have a few minutes to myself in the bathroom without my mother hammering on the door and telling me to get out because a customer wanted to use it. To this day, it's a real luxury for me to spend time uninterrupted in the bathroom; it generally takes me a couple of hours to shave and bathe in the morning — a real hang-up from the past, although I actually do a lot of my thinking there."

Alinsky had a passion for justice which originated from his experience growing up in Chicago's Jewish ghetto where he witnessed suffering during the Depression. It was his mother who influenced him most. Alinsky's son, David, once said, "...at the core of what motivated him was his mother, Sarah Rice...She taught him that...individuals must be responsible for other individuals and that you can't just walk away when you see something that's not right."

In the early 1930s, Alinksy married Helene Simon, with whom he had two children, a son and a daughter. She died in a drowning accident in 1947. He soon after married Ruth Graham; this marriage ended in divorce in 1970. When he died in 1972, he left behind a third wife, Irene.

Education and Beginnings

Alinsky returned from California to Chicago to study at the University of Chicago from which he earned a doctorate in archeology in 1930. Upon graduation, he won a fellowship from the university's sociology department which enabled him to study criminology.

With a freshly minted graduate degree in criminology from University of Chicago, Alinsky went to work for sociologist Clifford Shaw at the Institute for Juvenile Research. He was assigned to research the causes of juvenile delinquency in Chicago's tough "Back-of-the-Yards" neighborhood. In order to study gang behavior from the inside, Alinsky ingratiated himself with Al Capone's crowd, and came to realize that criminal behavior was a symptom of poverty and powerlessness.

Alinsky soon left his positions with the state agencies to cofound the Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council. This was his first effort to build a neighborhood citizen reform group, a form of activity which would earn Alinsky a reputation as a radical reformer.

Alinsky's hard-nosed politics were shaped by the rough and tumble world of late 1930's Chicago. Back then, the city, still in the grips of the Great Depression, was controlled by the Kelly-Nash political machine and by Frank Nitti - heir to Al Capone's Mafia empire.

Chicago

Few know it today, but Chicago was the birthplace of a powerful grassroots social movement that changed political activism in America. "Community Organizing" was pioneered in Chicago's old stockyards neighborhood by the soberly realistic, unabashedly radical Saul Alinsky.

The Back of the Yards

In 1936 Alinsky left his positions with the state agencies to cofound the Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council. This was his first effort at building a neighborhood citizen reform group, a form of activity which would earn Alinsky a reputation as a radical reformer. The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) is one of the oldest community organizations in America still functioning.

The Back-of-the-Yards was a largely Irish-Catholic community on Chicago's southwest side near the famous Union Stockyards, which had been deteriorating for many years. Alinsky organized his neighborhood council among local residents willing to unite to protest their community's decline and to pressure city hall for assistance. The council had great success in stabilizing the Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood and restoring the morale of local residents.

Alinsky had this to say, "My first solo effort was organizing the Back of the Yards area of Chicago, one of the most squalid slums in the country...I always felt that my own role lay outside the labor movement. What I wanted to try to do was apply the organizing techniques I'd mastered with the C.I.O. to the worst slums and ghettos, so that the most oppressed and exploited elements in the country could take control of their own communities and their own destinies. Up till then, specific factories and industries had been organized for social change, but never entire communities. This was the field I wanted to make my own — community organization for community power and for radical goals."

The BYNC set the pattern for what is known as the Alinsky school of organizing. An outside organizer would work with local leaders to create a democratic organization where people could express their needs and fears, and gain improvements in their conditions via direct action. Membership in the council was based on organizations, rather than individuals, thus using the neighborhood's existing social institutions. The initial efforts of the council centered around basic organization and economic justice. Overcoming nationalistic hatreds in this ethnically diverse community, they managed to unite the Roman Catholic Church and radical labor unions in common cause.

In the 1950s the council turned to neighborhood conservation. They pressured local banks to release funds for mortgages and building upgrades; in the first year alone there were 560 home-improvement loans in this local area. Between 1953 and 1963, the council fostered the rehabilitation of 90 percent of the community's housing stock.

Industrial Areas Foundation

With this success behind him, Alinsky in 1939, with funds from the Marshall Field Foundation, established the Industrial Areas Foundation with himself as executive director to bring his method of reform to other declining urban neighborhoods. His approach depended on uniting ordinary citizens around immediate grievances in their neighborhoods and stirring them to protest vigorously and even disruptively.

The Woodlawn Organization

In the 1950s, racial discrimination greatly limited opportunities for advancement among Chicago's African-American residents. The previous decade had seen a huge influx of blacks from the South who were searching for economic opportunities in the North. The Woodlawn neighborhood welcomed these migrants, as well as refugees from redevelopment elsewhere in Chicago. Many brought with them anger at being displaced and channeled their energy in two directions. Many young men joined two new street gangs, the Blackstone Rangers and the East Side Disciples.

In 1959, other residents, in a coalition of churches, block clubs, and business owners, invited Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation into Woodlawn to organize the community against external control. Led by Rev. Arthur Brazier and then Leon Finney, the Temporary Woodlawn Organization (later renamed The Woodlawn Organization, or TWO) initiated a series of well-publicized protests against overcrowding in public schools, slum landlords, exploitative local merchants, and a University of Chicago plan to expand south into land occupied by recent arrivals. In the late 1960s, TWO gained national notoriety for participating in the Model Cities program and using a War on Poverty grant to train gang members for jobs.

As TWO developed, it engaged in less controversial activities. Unable to halt neighborhood deterioration in the seventies, TWO continued to provide service programs and survived to become a major player in the rebuilding of a new Woodlawn neighborhood at the end of the century.

National Works

Jail certainly played an important role in my own case. After Back of the Yards, one of our toughest fights was Kansas City, where we were trying to organize a really foul slum called the Bottoms. The minute I'd get out of the Union Station and start walking down the main drag, a squad car would pull up and they'd take me off to jail as a public nuisance. I was never booked; they'd just courteously lock me up. They'd always give me a pretty fair shake In jail, though, a private cell and decent treatment, and it was there I started writing my first book, Reveille for Radicals. Sometimes the guards would come in when I was working and say, "OK, Alinsky, you can go now," and I'd look up from my papers and say, "Look, I'm in the middle of the chapter. I'll tell you when I want out." I think that was the first and only time they had a prisoner anxious not to be released. After a few times like that, word reached the police chief of this nut who loved jail, and one day he came around to see me. Despite our political differences, we began to hit it off and soon became close friends. Now that he and I were buddies, he stopped pickin' me up, which was too bad — I had another book in mind — but I'll always be grateful to him for giving me a place to digest my experiences. And I was able to turn his head around on the issues, too; pretty soon he did a hundred percent somersault and became prolabor right down the line. We eventually organized successfully and won our major demands in Kansas City, and his changed attitude was a big help to that victory. [14]

In 1960 Alinsky moved to Rochester, New York, where his Industrial Areas Foundation organized local African American residents to pressure the city's largest employer, the Eastman Kodak Company, to hire more African Americans and also give them a role in picking the company's employees. Simultaneously he participated in a federally-funded leadership training institute at Syracuse University which had been created as part of the "war on poverty." [15]

Into the Middle Class

"Yes, and it's shaping up as the most challenging fight of my career, and certainly the one with the highest stakes. Remember, people are people whether they're living in ghettos, reservations or barrios, and the suburbs are just another kind of reservation — a gilded ghetto. One thing I've come to realize is that any positive action for radical social change will have to be focused on the white middle class, for the simple reason that this is where the real power lies. Today, three fourths of our population is middle class, either through actual earning power or through value identification." [16]

Folk Hero

By the late 1960s, Alinsky had become a folk hero to America's young campus radicals. In 1969, he set up a training institute for organizers and wrote Rules for Radicals, in which he urged America's youth to become realistic, not rhetorical radicals. In 1970, Time Magazine hailed Alinsky as "a prophet of power to the people," contending that Alinsky's ideas had forever changed the way American democracy worked. [17]

Legacy

A passionate believer that social justice could be achieved through American democracy, Saul Alinsky methodically showed the "have-nots" how to organize their communities, target the power brokers and politically out-maneuver them. The lessons he taught people about the nature of power, imparted dignity to the poor and helped create a backyard revolution in cities across America. His work influenced the struggle for civil rights and the farm workers movement, as well as the very nature of political protest. He was a mentor to several generations of organizers like Ed Chambers, Fred Ross and Cesar Chavez. Alinsky's still thriving Industrial Areas Foundation became the training ground for organizers who formed some of the most important social change and community groups in the country. [18]

Students of Alinsky

Many important community and labor organizers who come from the 'Alinsky School' of thought.

• Tom Gaudette
• Ed Shurna
• Jack Egan
• Michael Gecan
• Fred Ross
• Ed Chambers
• David Knowlton
• Cesar Chavez
• Samantha Gutglass

References and Further Reading

BOOKS ABOUT SAUL ALINSKY

• Horwitt, Sanford D., Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky his Life and Legacy, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1989 ISBN 0-394-57243-2 (Vintage Books paperback: ISBN 0-679-73418-X)

• Finks, P. David, The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky New York Paulist Press, 1984 ISBN 0-809-12608-7

• Lancourt, Joan E., Confront or Concede, the Alinsky Citizen-Action Organizations Lexington, Mass., Heath 1980, ISBN 0-669-02715-4

• Bailey, Robert Jr., Radicals in urban politics: the Alinsky approach Chicago, Unversity of Chicago Press, 1974 ISBN 0-226-03452-6

• Ballard, Kevin D., Saul Alinsky, philosopher, radical and educator: an examination of the ideas of Saul Alinsky Thesis/dissertation/manuscript, 1982, OCLC 40629229

• Reitzes, Donald Charles & Reitzes, Dietrich C. The Alinsky legacy: alive and kicking, Greenwich, CT JAI Press, 1987, ISBN 0-892-32722-7

BOOKS BY SAUL ALINSKY

• Alinsky, Saul, Reveille for Radicals, New York, Vintage Books, 1946 & 1969, ISBN 0-679-72112-6

• Alinsky, Saul, John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography New York, Vintage Books, 1970 ISBN 0-394-70882-2

• Alinsky, Saul, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals New York, Random House, 1971 ISBN 0-394-44341-1, (Vintage books paperback: ISBN 0-679-72113-4)

• Alinsky, Saul, From citizen apathy to participation, Chicago, Industrial Areas Foundation, 1957 OCLC 24273370

SUBJECT-RELATED

• Slayton, Robert A., Back of the Yards:The Making of a Local Democracy, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986, ISBN 0-226-76198-3

• Silberman, Charles E. Crisis in Black and White, New York, Random House 1964, OCLC 387627

• Jablonsky, Thomas J., Pride in the Jungle: Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 ISBN 0-801-84335-9

• Freedman, Samuel G., Upon This Rock, The Miracles of the Black Church New York, Harper Perennial, 1993 ISBN 0-060-16610-X - (chronicles East Brooklyn Congregations and one of their leaders, Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood)

• Rogers,Mary Beth, Cold Anger: A Story of Faith and Power Politics, Denton, Texas, University of North Texas Press, 1990 ISBN 0-929-39813-0 - (chronicles Ernie Cortes and the Texas IAF organizations)

• Delgado, Gary, Organizing the Movement: The Roots and Growth of ACORN, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1986 ISBN 0-877-22393-9

External links

• Interview with Alinsky, published in Playboy in 1972. The interview is in twelve parts. The entire text is copied onto one page, here.
• Website of a documentary about Alinsky and his legacy, Democratic Promise.
• Some excerpts from Reveille for Radicals.
• Dissertation: Saul Alinsky and the dilemmas of race in the post-war city.

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