Saul Alinsky

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

In 1938, Alinsky left his last employment at the Institute for Juvenile Research, University of Illinois at Chicago, to become a full-time political activist. He raised funds for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and for southern sharecroppers, organized for the Newspaper Guild, fought evictions, and agitated for public housing. He worked alongside the CIO and its president John L. Lewis. Alinsky's idea was to apply organizing skills to the worst slums and ghettos so that oppressed communities could control their own destinies. With Joseph Meegan, a park supervisor, he set up the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) in the Chicago Stockyards area, rallying a mix of Catholic ethnics (Irish, Poles, Lithuanians, Mexicans, Croats) as well as African Americans to win concessions from local meatpackers, landlords, and city hall. In January 1946 the BYNC threw its support behind the first major walkout of the United Packinghouse Workers. In 1940, with support from Roman Catholic Bishop Bernard James Sheil and Chicago Sun-Times publisher and department-store owner Marshall Field, Alinsky founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a national community organizing network that partnered with religious congregations and civic organizations to build broad-based organizations and train local leadership. Alinsky wrote that in modern urban civilization, multitudes of people had been condemned to urban anonymity, which he saw as eroding the foundations of democracy.

Reader's Guide

Alinsky's significance lies in his development of community organizing as a practical method for poor and marginalized groups to gain political and economic power. His work through the IAF inspired later movements on both the left and right. Beginning in the 1990s, his reputation was revived by commentators on the political right as a tactical inspiration for the Republican Tea Party movement, and later, through indirect associations with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as the alleged source of a radical Democratic agenda. On the left, Alinsky has been criticized for an aversion to broad ideological goals, yet he has also been identified as an inspiration for the Occupy movement and campaigns for climate action. His 1971 book *Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer* remains a widely cited manual for activists. Alinsky's approach emphasized local democracy: organizers would facilitate, but local people had to lead and participate. Residents had to control their own destiny, gaining not only new resources but new confidence. As one observer put it, 'Saul knew that if I grab you by the shoulders and say do this, do that and the other, you're going to resent it. If you make the discovery yourself, you're going to strut because you made it.' Alinsky's legacy is contested, with different political factions claiming or rejecting his methods.

Did You Know?

• Alinsky studied in America's first sociology department at the University of Chicago under Ernest Burgess and Robert E. Park.
• For two years as a 'nonparticipant observer,' Alinsky claimed to have hung out with Chicago's Al Capone mob, who taught him 'the terrific importance of personal relationships.'
• Alinsky raised funds for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War before becoming a full-time activist in 1938.
• Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson said Alinsky's aims 'most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and dignity of the individual.'
• Alinsky considered himself an agnostic but when asked about his religion would 'always say Jewish.'