ancient cities

14 Alinsky, Saul
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.
The Alinsky model of community organizing
was unique. The secret to the strategy was building
a neighborhood organization not one person at a
time but with groups of people. He called his
model an organization of organizations. When he
went into a neighborhood, he looked for the
churches, civic groups, garden clubs, veterans
organizations, and every other entity through
which people were already organized. Then he
brought those organizations together, dramatically
increasing the efficiency of the organizing effort.
The organization occupied a very important
place in Alinsky’s model. You did not organize
people just to win on an issue or two and then
disband. You organized in order to build an organization
that could sustain itself and provide institutionalized
power well into the future. The
organization was the vehicle that allowed poor
people to occupy a place in the political system.
The only way to build an organization of potentially
ideologically diverse organizations was for
the organizer to maintain a carefully honed, nonideological
stance. This produced one of the other
hallmarks of the Alinsky model—“cutting” an
issue. He did not go into neighborhoods with an
issue already selected. Instead, he listened to what
issues people cared about and then tried to organize
around them. This did not stop him from stirring
up people around an issue, but he was always
careful to find an issue that excited them. Finding
just the right issue that a group cared about, would
work for, and could win was one of the geniuses
of the approach. And, although Alinsky organizations
had a reputation for being confrontational
and conflict oriented, the goal was always for the
organization to obtain a win or cut a deal with
power holders. Alinsky-style organizations had a
reputation to protect, so they avoided action that
could be perceived as irresponsible or violent.
Perhaps the most important hallmark of the
Alinsky-style organization was the development of
the specialized role of community organizer. The
organizer is not a leader in the Alinsky model;
instead, the organizer’s job is to identify potential
leaders and build their skills, helping them identify
issues and organize around them. A truly effective
community organizer should be able to enter a
community, build leadership and structure an