Saul Alinsky

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Saul Alinsky from 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) born in Chicago of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, grew up in the midst of poverty. The suffering and injustice he witnessed, coupled with his mother's strong influence of responsibility and justice, prompted him into social activism. He was one of the original pioneers of grassroots organizing, and his methods continue to be used long after his death.

Alinksy was a passionate believer that social justice could be achieved through American democracy, that it was meant to ensure the promises of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; the promises of his nation's Founding Fathers. His work, which inspired the community-organizing movement, continues to inspire and empower people to govern their own lives and to take ownership over their communities' situations.

A man both hated and revered, he is known as the father of community organizing. He utilized his tremendous organizational skills as well as his powerful personality to help secure liberty for many in impoverished and oppressed situations throughout the middle 1900s.

Mr. Alinsky died suddenly in 1972 of a heart attack at 63 years old.

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 moved back and forth between them, living variously in both Chicago and 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.

After earning a graduate degree in criminology, 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. Through this, he concluded that poverty and powerlessness were major forces in the resort to criminal behavior.

Chicago in the 1930's was still in the grips of the Great Depression. Controlled by the Kelly-Nash political machine and by Frank Nitti (heir to Al Capone's Mafia empire), it was a rough and tumble city. This is the world that shaped Saul Alinsky and his "hard-nosed" politics.

Chicago

Saul Alinsky pioneered a new face of political activism through his powerful grassroots social movement. The old stockyards neighborhood of Chicago was the birthplace of America's twentieth century phenomenon known as "Community Organizing".

The Back of the Yards

Alinsky left his positions with the state in order to cofound the Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council. This is one of the oldest community organizations in the country still in operation, and was Alinsky's first attempt to build neighborhood citizen reform group. His work here eatned him a reputation as a radical reformer.

A largely Irish-Catholic community on Chicago's southwest side near the Union Stockyards, the Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood had been deteriorating for years. Alinsky believed that a council made of local residents willing to unite in protest to their community's decline was necessary to pressure city hall for assistance. The Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council succeeded in stabilizing the neighborhood and restoring morale to the local residents.

Alinsky explained his beginnings with organizing, including his motivation:

"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."

What Alinsky formed with the BYNC set the pattern for what became known as the Alinsky school of organizing. A neighborhood's existing social groups were utilized - membership in a newly-formed council was based on organizations, rather than individuals. An organizer from outside the community would work with local leaders in setting up a democratic organization. This was a place in which people could freely express themselves, their situations, needs and fears. The initial efforts of the council centered around basic organization and economic justice. With such goals, the BYNC was successful in uniting the Roman Catholic Church and radical labor unions towards a common goal - the betterment of the community.

Neighborhood conservation became the focus of the council in the 1950s. They worked with local banks to provide funding for mortgages and building upgrades. In their first year of this effort, there were 560 home-improvement loans in the local area. The rehabilitation of 90 percent of the community's stock was fostered by the council during the ten years 1953-1963.

Industrial Areas Foundation

With the success of the Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council behind him, Alinsky was able to secure funding from the Marshall Field Foundation in 1939. With this, he established the Industrial Areas Foundation in order to expand his method of reform to other declining urban neighborhoods. His approach was dependent upon his ability to unite ordinary citizens around immediate grievances in their neighborhoods and inspire them in protest. He believed in the power of the grassroots community to effect change, if only they ceased to accept their plight and were willing to speak up loudly.

The Woodlawn Organization

Racial discrimination was strong in Chicago in the 1950s. The city's African-American residents had extremely limited opportunities for advancement. During the 1940s a huge influx of blacks from the South seeking better economic opportunities occurred in Chicago. The crowded neighborhoods were unofficially segregated, while slumlords controlled the situations of the new emigrants.

The Woodlawn neighborhood on the city's south side welcomed these newcomers, as well as others who were displaced by 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

Throughout the 1960s, Alinsky worked in numerous cities across America; organizing community-action groups in the black slums of Kansas City and Buffalo, and sponsoring and funding the Community Service Organization of Mexican-Americans in California, which was led by the Industrial Areas Foundation West Coast organizer, Fred Ross. The staff that was organized and trained by Alinsky's team included Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.

He had this to say of his time in Kansas City;

"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."

The next major battle occurred in Rochester, New York, the home of Eastman Kodak. In mid-1964 there was a bloody race riot that resulted in widespread burnings, injuries and deaths. The city's black minority, casually exploited by Kodak, finally exploded in a way that almost destroyed the city, and the National Guard had to be called in to suppress the uprising. Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation successfully organized local African American residents to pressure Eastman Kodak to hire more blacks and give them a role in picking the company's employees. With the assistance of a dynamic local black leader, the Reverend Franklin Florence, who'd been close to Malcolm X, they formed a community organization called FIGHT — an acronym for Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today. Also established was Friends of FIGHT, an associated group of some 400 dues-paying white liberals, which provided funds, moral support, legal advice and instructors for community training projects.

Simultaneously he participated in a federally-funded leadership training institute at Syracuse University which had been created as part of the "war on poverty."

Into the Middle Class

In the early 1970s, Alinsky began directing his efforts to organizing the middle class, believing it to be the arena where the future of the country would be decided. With education, he believed, the white middle class in America would mobilize as one of the most effective instruments for social change the country had ever known; and that change would benefit not only themselves, but all disenfranchised — blacks, chicanos, poor whites.

He said in his Playboy Magazine interview of 1972,

"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."

Admirers and Detractors

Alinsky's ability to organize, determination to succeed, and his toughness labeled him an enemy to many in the status quo. His reputation preceeded him; often he would be arrested as he entered a city, whether stepping off a plane or driving over a bridge. He tended to be either loved or hated, never anywhere in the middle.

"No matter how bad things may look at a given time, you can't ever give up. We're living in one of the most exciting periods of human history, when new hopes and dreams are crystallizing even as the old certainties and values are dissolving. It's a time of great danger, but also of tremendous potential."

This voice of hope made Alinsky, by the late 1960s, 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.

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.

Books by Saul Alinsky

• Alinsky, Saul, Reveille for Radicals, New York, Vintage Books, 1946 & 1969, ISBN 0679721126
• Alinsky, Saul, John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography New York, Vintage Books, 1970 ISBN 0394708822
• Alinsky, Saul, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals New York, Random House, 1971 ISBN 0394443411 (Vintage books paperback: ISBN 0679721134)
• Alinsky, Saul, From citizen apathy to participation, Chicago, Industrial Areas Foundation, 1957 OCLC 24273370
• Alinsky, Saul, Reveille for Radicals, Vintage; Reissue edition, October 23, 1989.

ISBN 100679721126 and ISBN 139780679721123

Resources

Online Sources

• The Democratic Promise (Independant Television Service). 2006. The Life of Saul Alinsky Retrieved January 4, 2008.
• Encyclopedia of World Biography; Thomson-Gale, 2005-2006. Saul David Alinsky Book Rags Research Site Retrieved January 4, 2008.
• Slayton, Robert. 2005. Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago: Chicago Historical Society. Retrieved January 23, 2008.
• The Pratt Center for Community Development The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) Chicago, IL Retrieved January 23, 2008.
• Seligman, Amanda. 2005. Woodlawn The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago: Chicago Historical Society Retrieved January 23, 2008.

Print Sources

Books about Saul Alinsky

• 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
• Finks, P. David, The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky New York Paulist Press, 1984 ISBN 0-809-12608-7
• 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)
• Lancourt, Joan E., Confront or Concede, the Alinsky Citizen-Action Organizations Lexington, Mass., Heath 1980, ISBN 0-669-02715-4
• Reitzes, Donald Charles & Reitzes, Dietrich C. The Alinsky legacy: alive and kicking, Greenwich, CT JAI Press, 1987, ISBN 0-892-32722-7

Subject related

• Delgado, Gary, Organizing the Movement: The Roots and Growth of ACORN, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1986 ISBN 0-877-22393-9
• 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)
• 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
• 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)
• Silberman, Charles E. Crisis in Black and White, New York, Random House 1964, OCLC 387627
• Slayton, Robert A., Back of the Yards:The Making of a Local Democracy, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986, ISBN 0-226-76198-3

External links

• Jim Britell, June 1, 2005, What Would Saul Alinsky Do?", Native Forest Council, observed December 19, 2006.
• "Mere tolerance is not enough", Some excerpts from Reveille for Radicals, observed December 19, 2006.
• Mark Edward Santow, University of Pennsylvania, 2000, Dissertation: Saul Alinsky and the dilemmas of race in the post-war city., ScholarlyCommons at Penn Library, (Penn Library, University of Pennsylvania}, observed December 19, 2006.

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