The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century by Peter Dreier

Author:Peter Dreier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781568586946
Publisher: Nation Books

Saul Alinsky (1909–1972)

CREDIT: Associated Press

AFTER RIOTS erupted in the Rochester, New York, ghetto in the summer of 1964, an interracial group of clergy approached organizer Saul Alinsky to help them build a power base among low-income African Americans and challenge the influence of the city’s dominant employer, Eastman Kodak, which employed only 750 blacks out of 40,000 employees. (Alinsky quipped that “the only thing Kodak has done on the race issue in America is to introduce color film.”) After several months of meetings, local residents founded Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today (FIGHT), a community organizing group, to take on Kodak. But after the company refused to create a training and hiring program for black residents, FIGHT upped the ante. A number of FIGHT members and their churches purchased Kodak stock and pledged to attend the company’s annual shareholder meeting. Kodak tried to keep protesters at a distance by holding the meeting in New Jersey, but FIGHT brought a thousand people to the meeting 600 miles away. Their action gained national media attention.

Following this, Alinsky threatened to bring 100 black people to a Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra concert after treating them to a banquet of nothing but huge portions of baked beans. The idea was to conduct the nation’s first “fart-in” to embarrass Kodak, a major Philharmonic sponsor. Fortunately for the Philharmonic, FIGHT did not have to resort to that tactic, because Kodak agreed to implement the jobs program.

The battle in Rochester was typical of Alinsky’s approach, which was to employ any tactic that would work to bring powerful politicians and corporations to the negotiating table with ordinary people. As he wrote in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals, “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

Alinsky reshaped activism and politics in America by transferring some of the tactics of grassroots organizing from shop floors and factories to urban neighborhoods and congregations. Alinsky was widely known in the 1960s as an “agitator” and a “troublemaker,” but his fame had faded somewhat (except among progressive activists) until 2008, when Republicans revived his reputation by linking Alinsky to both the major Democratic Party candidates for president. In the late 1960s Hillary Clinton had spent time with Alinsky and had written her senior thesis at Wellesley College about him. Conservatives mined her report to uncover flattering comments about Alinsky in order to tarnish her as a radical.

But the GOP honchos took even larger swipes at Barack Obama, who had been a community organizer for three years in Chicago and had acknowledged being influenced by Alinsky’s writings and ideas. In her September 2008 speech accepting the GOP vice presidential nomination at the Republican convention in St. Paul, Alaska governor Sarah Palin said, “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” A few days later, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani sought to link Obama with what

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