Posted on 09/04/2008 10:15:39 PM PDT by FreedomLives2008
| After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois (c) 1990 Illinois Issues, University of Illinois at Springfield ISBN: 0-9620873-3-5 Chapter 4 (pp. 35-40) of After Alinsky
Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City For three years Barack Obama was the director of Developing Communities Project, an institutionally based community organization on Chicago's far south side. He has also been a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, an organizing institute working throughout the Midwest. Currently he is studying law at Harvard University. "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City" was first published in the August/ September 1988 Illinois Issues [published by then-Sangamon State University, which is now the University of Illinois at Springfield]. By Barack Obama (c) 1990 Illinois Issues, Springfield, Illinois Over the past five years, I've often had a difficult time explaining my profession to folks. Typical is a remark a public school administrative aide made to me one bleak January morning, while I waited to deliver some flyers to a group of confused and angry parents who had discovered the presence of asbestos in their school. "Listen, Obama," she began. "You're a bright young man, Obama. You went to college, didn't you?"
I nodded. "I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer." "Why's that?"
" 'Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don't nobody appreciate you." She shook her head in puzzlement as she wandered back to attend to her duties. I've thought back on that conversation more than once during the time I've organized with the Developing Communities Project, based in Chicago's far south side. Unfortunately, the answers that come to mind haven't been as simple as her question. Probably the shortest one is this: It needs to be done, and not enough folks are doing it. The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and boardroom negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches. During the early years of the Civil Rights movement, many of these issues became submerged in the face of the clear oppression of segregation. The debate was no longer whether to protest, but how militant must that protest be to win full citizenship for blacks. Twenty years later, the tensions between strategies have reemerged, in part due to the recognition that for all the accomplishments of the 1960s, the majority of blacks continue to suffer from second-class citizenship. Related to this are the failures — real, perceived and fabricated — of the Great Society programs initiated by Lyndon Johnson. Facing these realities, at least three major strands of earlier movements are apparent.
First, and most publicized, has been the surge of political empowerment around the country. Harold Washington and Jesse Jackson are but two striking examples of how the energy and passion of the Civil Rights movement have been channeled into bids for more traditional political power. Second, there has been a resurgence in attempts to foster economic development in the black community, whether through local entrepreneurial efforts, increased hiring of black contractors and corporate managers, or Buy Black campaigns. Third, and perhaps least publicized, has been grass-roots community organizing, which builds on indigenous leadership and direct action. Proponents of electoral politics and economic development strategies can point to substantial accomplishments in the past 10 years. An increase in the number of black public officials offers at least the hope that government will be more responsive to inner-city constituents. Economic development programs can provide structural improvements and jobs to blighted communities. In my view, however, neither approach offers lasting hope of real change for the inner city unless undergirded by a systematic approach to community organization. This is because the issues of the inner city are more complex and deeply rooted than ever before. Blatant discrimination has been replaced by institutional racism; problems like teen pregnancy, gang involvement and drug abuse cannot be solved by money alone. At the same time, as Professor William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago has pointed out, the inner city's economy and its government support have declined, and middle-class blacks are leaving the neighborhoods they once helped to sustain.
Neither electoral politics nor a strategy of economic self-help and internal development can by themselves respond to these new challenges. The election of Harold Washington in Chicago or of Richard Hatcher in Gary were not enough to bring jobs to inner-city neighborhoods or cut a 50 percent drop-out rate in the schools, although they did achieve an important symbolic effect. In fact, much-needed black achievement in prominent city positions has put us in the awkward position of administering underfunded systems neither equipped nor eager to address the needs of the urban poor and being forced to compromise their interests to more powerful demands from other sectors. Self-help strategies show similar limitations. Although both laudable and necessary, they too often ignore the fact that without a stable community, a well-educated population, an adequate infrastructure and an informed and employed market, neither new nor well-established companies will be willing to base themselves in the inner city and still compete in the international marketplace. Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda. In theory, community organizing provides a way to merge various strategies for neighborhood empowerment. Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement these solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership — and not one or two charismatic leaders — can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions. This means bringing together churches, block clubs, parent groups and any other institutions in a given community to pay dues, hire organizers, conduct research, develop leadership, hold rallies and education campaigns, and begin drawing up plans on a whole range of issues — jobs, education, crime, etc. Once such a vehicle is formed, it holds the power to make politicians, agencies and corporations more responsive to community needs. Equally important, it enables people to break their crippling isolation from each other, to reshape their mutual values and expectations and rediscover the possibilities of acting collaboratively — the prerequisites of any successful self-help initiative.
By using this approach, the Developing Communities Project and other organizations in Chicago's inner city have achieved some impressive results. Schools have been made more accountable-Job training programs have been established; housing has been renovated and built; city services have been provided; parks have been refurbished; and crime and drug problems have been curtailed. Additionally, plain folk have been able to access the levers of power, and a sophisticated pool of local civic leadership has been developed. But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well. One problem is the not entirely undeserved skepticism organizers face in many communities. To a large degree, Chicago was the birthplace of community organizing, and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts. Many of the best-intentioned members of the community have bitter memories of such failures and are reluctant to muster up renewed faith in the process. A related problem involves the aforementioned exodus from the inner city of financial resources, institutions, role models and jobs. Even in areas that have not been completely devastated, most households now stay afloat with two incomes. Traditionally, community organizing has drawn support from women, who due to tradition and social discrimination had the time and the inclination to participate in what remains an essentially voluntary activity. Today the majority of women in the black community work full time, many are the sole parent, and all have to split themselves between work, raising children, running a household and maintaining some semblance of a personal life — all of which makes voluntary activities lower on the priority list. Additionally, the slow exodus of the black middle class into the suburbs means that people shop in one neighborhood, work in another, send their child to a school across town and go to church someplace other than the place where they live. Such geographical dispersion creates real problems in building a sense of investment and common purpose in any particular neighborhood.
Finally community organizations and organizers are hampered by their own dogmas about the style and substance of organizing. Most still practice what Professor John McKnight of Northwestern University calls a "consumer advocacy" approach, with a focus on wrestling services and resources from the ouside powers that be. Few are thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities, both in terms of money and people, that already exist in communities. Our thinking about media and public relations is equally stunted when compared to the high-powered direct mail and video approaches successfully used by conservative organizations like the Moral Majority. Most importantly, low salaries, the lack of quality training and ill-defined possibilities for advancement discourage the most talented young blacks from viewing organizing as a legitimate career option. As long as our best and brightest youth see more opportunity in climbing the corporate ladder-than in building the communities from which they came, organizing will remain decidedly handicapped. None of these problems is insurmountable. In Chicago, the Developing Communities Project and other community organizations have pooled resources to form cooperative think tanks like the Gamaliel Foundation. These provide both a formal setting where experienced organizers can rework old models to fit new realities and a healthy environment for the recruitment and training of new organizers. At the same time the leadership vacuum and disillusionment following the death of Harold Washington have made both the media and people in the neighborhoods more responsive to the new approaches community organizing can provide. Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the traditional black churches. Possessing tremendous financial resources, membership and — most importantly — values and biblical traditions that call for empowerment and liberation, the black church is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape of cities like Chicago. A fierce independence among black pastors and a preference for more traditional approaches to social involvement (supporting candidates for office, providing shelters for the homeless) have prevented the black church from bringing its full weight to bear on the political, social and economic arenas of the city.
Over the past few years, however, more and more young and forward-thinking pastors have begun to look at community organizations such as the Developing Communities Project in the far south side and GREAT in the Grand Boulevard area as a powerful tool for living the social gospel, one which can educate and empower entire congregations and not just serve as a platform for a few prophetic leaders. Should a mere 50 prominent black churches, out of the thousands that exist in cities like Chicago, decide to collaborate with a trained organizing staff, enormous positive changes could be wrought in the education, housing, employment and spirit of inner-city black communities, changes that would send powerful ripples throughout the city. In the meantime, organizers will continue to build on local successes, learn from their numerous failures and recruit and train their small but growing core of leadership — mothers on welfare, postal workers, CTA drivers and school teachers, all of whom have a vision and memories of what communities can be. In fact, the answer to the original question — why organize? — resides in these people. In helping a group of housewives sit across the negotiating table with the mayor of America's third largest city and hold their own, or a retired steelworker stand before a TV camera and give voice to the dreams he has for his grandchild's future, one discovers the most significant and satisfying contribution organizing can make. In return, organizing teaches as nothing else does the beauty and strength of everyday people. Through the songs of the church and the talk on the stoops, through the hundreds of individual stories of coming up from the South and finding any job that would pay, of raising families on threadbare budgets, of losing some children to drugs and watching others earn degrees and land jobs their parents could never aspire to — it is through these stories and songs of dashed hopes and powers of endurance, of ugliness and strife, subtlety and laughter, that organizers can shape a sense of community not only for others, but for themselves.
- END - Chapter 4 - |
He married into it.
Michelle Obama is the one with the black Chicago connections. Her old man goes way back.
The FBI is crawling all over Cuyahoga County, Ohio, for that very reason.
I disagree. He could have done all of that without his Black Studies major at Occidental College.
Straight power-grabber wouldn’t have taken a chance of leaving the racist narrative and he did.
Premise #1 is wrong and scary. What kind of power? It's B.S. too.
Here is an example of how a community can re-gentrify. West Hollywood. It used to be fairly seedy, not upscale at all. The older apartment buildings were populated with older residents, many of them ex-European Jews. The streets were filled with quaint second hand stores and the like. Once the gay movement started "coming out," and Santa Monica Boulevard picked up (whoops, pun), individual gay men started pumping money into new clubs, restaurants, bars, and shops. The apartments and small homes began to be fixed up and the whole place became re-gentrified. A lot of West Hollywood is not strictly gay, either. It's centrally located and plenty of upscale shops and restaurants are scattered throughout.
I don't believe they ever needed a community organizer. Earners decided to spend their money fixing up their own places. The reverse of the "broken window theory" is also true. The more people care for their neighborhoods, the better they become.
So people paid him to learn the cadence and beauty of black American life, something he did not grow up with, so that he could learn it and possibly use it against the population for his own personal aggrandizement?
I don’t know if you’ve seen this letter written by Alinsky’s son praising Obama’s convention.
“Son sees father’s handiwork in convention”
It’s probably posted here already, but just in case someone didn’t see it.
I’m very impressed that you located this, and just at the moment when everyone is asking what community organizing is, we have an answer from the horse’s mouth.
You should consider posting #20 as its own article. It’s very well written.
This is on its face a written report by Obama to explain and justify his part in “community organizing.”
Why was it written in the first place?
As a personal recounting? As an academic report? As justification for grant money going to this particular instance of “community organizing”.
For a basis of applying for other funds in similar or related endeavors?
Or was it a combination of these and perhaps other reasons....
This “report” actually says nothing about, for instance, the hours that Obama put physically into this operation, endeavor, or whatever.
It speaks in lengths of intentions,of observations, of sociological themes. But there is nothing really of specific outcomes in specific instances - such as neighborhood “X” in location “Y”.
It was at this time, many will recall, that Obama, as self-noted in his written memoirs, was enthusiastically involved in, among other things, alcohol and narcotics including cocaine.
Can someone forward this to the Hannity and Rush and Levin and Ingraham types?
Cheers!
In California “community organizer” has been the catch-phrase for “community radical” since the early 1960s. It perfectly characterizes such people as Khalid Mustafa (the Black Muslim whose former name escapes me) who was mentor to the Black Panther leadership. While many Panthers are dead, in jail, or have dropped out, some made it in politics in Oakland and Berkeley. And Mustafa now plays a major role in the Islamist movement in the USA and even represents certain Saudi interests. In particular, I can’t think of a single organizer in the Black or Chicano movements who was able to offer and implement policies that would allow their community to progress. And that includes the feckless Cesar Chavez.
bump
'Community Organizer' means so much more then the ‘no executive responsibility’, it opens the door to Obama’s radical leftist/communist roots and philosophy of life which Obama and Axelrod do not want the American people to know about.
L. DAVID ALINSKY (son) sees Saul Alinsky’s (radical leftist father) handiwork in Obama convention http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2008/08/31/son_sees_fathers_handiwork_in_convention/
“The Democratic National Convention had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style. Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness.”
L. DAVID ALINSKY in letter to Boston Globe
THE FRONT PAGE OF ALINSKY'S BOOK GIVES INSIGHT INTO THE MIND OF ALINSKY front page of leftist radical Saul Alinsky’s book here (David Alinksy's Father):
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/hillary-clintons-idol-saul-alinsky-and-satan
ACORN is known for having a very dirty record, voter fraud being one of its favorite activities:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=obama+acorn+voter+fraud&aq=3&oq=Obama+ACORN.
Community Organizing underlines and promotes self-conceptualization as “victim” which is another way of saying “powerless.” If you convince people they are powerless, they will become powerless. They will lose all initiative and creativity. This is the cruel reality of Obama’s approach. While speaking dreamily of planetary miracles and abatement of the oceans, he in fact is beating African-Americans into the ground. Instead of lauding their successes, he glories in the failures. He has already done enormous damage to the African-American psyche.
I was a “Community Organizer” of sorts in Newark 35 years ago, spending a year coaching basketball and working with youth clubs and starting a few in Black churches. Like many conservative-voting Americans, I'm very happy when I see African-Americans making their way to success. I want to see more of it, but Obama is not encouraging self-reliance, he's encouraging government-reliance and that is a highway to hell for Black America.
There is a whole book and this part from Barack is only Chapter 4. The rest of the book is no longer available when you click on the link.
Roving bands of gay men have done more for urban renewal than any government program.
You can see that in every decaying area. From what I hear, there are many neighborhoods in NY that experienced spiking home values from the very example you presented.
However, I think it misses the mark in terms of strategy: Once such a vehicle is formed, it holds the power to make politicians, agencies and corporations more responsive to community needs.
IMO, they should be organizing to work together to solve the problems themselves, rather than to bring political pressure. Most white towns and suburbs have figured out how to do it themselves, without help from the State or the Feds (who tend to cause more grief than help).
Read his mother’s biography on Wikipedia.
She immersed him in Black American culture at an early age, and he is not connected to historical black American culture at all - his father was from Kenya. He isn’t African-American, per say, but an American with Kenyan roots.
He was immersed in black American history and at first glance, it appears it was a cover to “pass” as an American black. I’m betting his mother had been grooming him from the get-go.
You are right, I think it is time to pull out.
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