A Theology of Community Organizing

Power to the People

Chris Shannahan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134737475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The rising importance of community organizing in the US and more recently in Britain has coincided with the developing significance of social movements and identity politics, debates about citizenship, social capital, civil society, and religion in the public sphere. At a time when participation in formal political process and membership of faith groups have both declined dramatically, community organizing has provided a new opportunity for small community groups, marginalized urban communities, and people of faith to engage in effective political action through the developments of inter-faith and cross-cultural coalitions of groups. In spite of its renewed popularity, little critical attention has been paid to community organizing.

This book places community organizing within debates about the role of religion in the public sphere and the rise of public theology in recent years. The book explores the history, methodology, and achievements of community organizing, engaging in a series of conversations with key community organizers in the US and Britain. This volume breaks new ground by beginning to articulate a cross-cultural and inter-faith 'Theology for Community Organizing' that arises from fresh readings of Liberation Theology.

Part I
Experience

1
What Is Community Organizing?

Introduction

Broad-based community organizing represents a powerful movement for social change in the fluid world of the twenty-first century. Since Barack Obama took office as the forty-fourth President of the United States in 2009, it has attracted widespread media attention, but contemporary community organizing actually points to an ancient phenomenon. It is part of a heritage of organized civic engagement that stretches back many centuries, perhaps even to the Peasants’ Revolt in fourteenth-century England. Over the intervening centuries, the activism of the Levellers and the Diggers in seventeenth-century England, the labor organizing of early nineteenth-century trades unionists like the Tolpuddle Martyrs in Britain, the grass-roots democracy in early nineteenth-century America that enthralled Alexis de Tocqueville, the civil rights movement in the United States and the Indian movement for independence inspired by the nonviolent philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi prefigured the activism that characterizes community organizing today.¹ This rich backstory provides the often-unacknowledged ground on which broad-based community organizing began to build in the early 1940s in the United States. It is a story that underpins this book.

The fact that community organizing has taken on the mantle fashioned by earlier traditions of civic activism does not minimize its importance as a model of civil society politics, a generator of bridging and linking social capital and a vehicle used by marginalized communities working for social justice. Its relational methodology is well suited to the networked societies of the twenty-first century and has enabled it to fashion a model of intra-cultural and translocal civic activism that challenges those narrowly framed models of identity politics characterized by the introverted resistance identities explored by Manuel Castells and the ethnic absolutism described by Paul Gilroy.² In chapter 3, I ask if community organizing is sufficiently open to critical dialogue with other models of civic activism. At this point, however, it is important to reflect briefly on some comparable models of organized civic activism and the ways in which they are similar to and different from Alinsky-inspired organizing before turning to the story of broad-based community organizing in its US home. Since the late 1960s, such civic activism has included the development of feminist and womanist movements, the struggles for gay rights, the antiapartheid struggle and environmental activism.³ Here, however, I highlight just the patterns of organized civic activism that bear the closest resemblance to the methodology of community organizing.

Civic Activism: Three Examples

Debates about civil society stretch back as far as Aristotle’s reflections on the nature of citizenship in ancient Greece. However, as Michael Edwards notes, its emphasis on the sociological potential of loose associational life has gained powerful currency in a post-Cold War world where established models of civil society have been increasingly questioned.⁴ Whilst Edwards is right to note that the idea of civil society as a metaphor for an inclusive society strikes a particular chord in the translocal world of the twenty-first century, the relational model of political life to which he points is one that has shaped patterns of networked civic activism for much of the past century. Three examples of such activism highlight the line of tradition within community organizing stands: the civil rights, antiwar and drop-the-debt social movements.

The development of the postwar civil rights movement in the United States can be symbolized by two distinct moments, one signifying legal struggle and the other nonviolent direct action. In 1954 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People took the case of Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka in Kansas to the US Supreme Court to prove that it was unconstitutional to maintain schools that were segregated on the basis of ethnicity. A year later, in December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the White section of a local bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was forced off the bus by the driver. Her moment of resistance gave rise to the Montgomery bus boycott which was led by the young Baptist pastor Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and supported by the Black churches of the town. Throughout the following decade, the organized activism of the civil rights movement revolved to a large degree around Gandhian principles of strategic nonviolent direct action.⁵ In his 1963 ‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail’ Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the central importance of carefully organized nonviolent direct action, echoing strands of the methodology of Saul Alinsky’s community organizing. However, alongside research, negotiation and direct action, King added another key element, that of ‘self-purification’.⁶ For King, unlike Alinsky, a firm ethical foundation for activism was vital if it was to be sustained. King suggested in his 1961 address ‘Love, Law and Civil Disobedience’ that this foundation was provided by ‘an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return’.⁷ For Alinsky and for many who built upon his community-organizing legacy, it was not selfless love but the identification of mutual self-interest that provided community organizations with direction and potency. It is true that the nonviolent civic organizing that characterized the civil rights movement under King was increasingly replaced with the ‘by any means necessary’ Black Power movement after his murder in 1968.⁸ However the continued importance of King’s ‘love ethic’ shaped the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson during the 1980s and his ongoing work within the Rainbow/PUSH coalition. It underpins the radically inclusive activism of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco and has found an online twenty-first century life in Civic Frame, a US-based network that draws on popular culture to forge liberative educational actions and civic engagement largely within the African-American community.⁹ The love or self-interest debate is one to which I will return in depth in chapter 5.

A second example of civic activism dates from the early 1960s to the present day. The antiwar movement that arose during the 1960s in protest about US involvement in the Vietnam War drew upon the model of mobilization embodied by the civil rights movement, particularly in relation to student opposition to the military draft. The antiwar movement in the United States drew together disparate political, religious, civil rights and students groups around a set of focused aims, much like broad-based community organizations. The generalized problem of opposition to the war was turned into a set of specific issues, enabling effective mobilization and targeted activism. Since the beginning of the US- and UK-led War on Terror arising from the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC, a similar model of organized antiwar activism has arisen in the United Kingdom through the emergence of the Stop the War coalition, which has drawn not only on socialist groupings but on a wide range of faith communities.¹⁰

A third example of organized civic activism relates to the emergence during the late 1990s of an international movement that called for the cancellation of unpayable debt in the global south by the year 2000. The beginning of a new millennium was to be a year of jubilee—a new start free from debt. Whilst this social movement embraced a diverse range of faith-based and political organizations the premise upon which it was built was found in the Hebrew Scriptures. Leviticus 25:10 commands the people of Israel to ‘consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants’. In this year, all debts were to be cancelled and property was to be returned to its original owners. In 1997 growing concern about international debt led to the founding of Jubilee 2000, which was backed by trades unions, refugee groups, aid agencies and faith communities. As a result of its broad base, Jubilee 2000 was able to mobilize over seventy thousand people in protest at the 1998 G8 summit in Birmingham, UK, to put pressure on the leaders of the world’s richest nations to cancel the debt owed by the world’s poorest countries. This campaign utilized the networks provided by faith communities to engage in a targeted campaign of letter writing to world leaders, turning a generalized problem into a specific issue around which strategic action could be planned. The social movement originally animated by Jubilee 2000 led to the emergence of Make Poverty History and the involvement of global pop stars at the Live 8 concerts ahead of the 2005 G8 summit in Scotland.¹¹ Moreover, it has since stimulated the development of the broader based Jubilee Debt Coalition and, in 2013, the Enough Food IF alliance.¹²

In later chapters, I consider two questions: First, does broad-based community organizing subsume other single-issue social movements within its multi-issue and long-term agenda? Second, has community organizing neglected the added value that a loose alliance with alternative modes of civic activism might add and thereby marginalized itself from other patterns of progressive action for social justice? However, in this chapter, as a prelude to these questions, I focus specifically on the historical development of the community organizing first articulated by Saul Alinsky in the Back of the Yards neighbourhood in Chicago, for it is his ideas and activism that stimulated the growth of contemporary community organizing in the United States and the United Kingdom. I will examine the methodology of the community organizing stimulated by Alinsky and the relationship between community organizations and faith groups. The pattern of community organizing that shaped the political philosophy of Barack Obama and directly influenced his first presidential campaign during 2008 connects directly with this Alinkskyite tradition. Consequently, exploration of this heritage is an important precondition for any critical understanding of contemporary community organizing and its relationship with models of progressive faith and political leadership in the twenty-first century.

The Legacy of Saul Alinsky

Paul Henderson and Harry Salmon suggest that ‘through his beliefs, thoughts and actions [Alinsky] … gave Community Organising an identity which it has retained, with only slight modifications, for more than 50 years’.¹³ Born in 1909 into an Orthodox Jewish family in Chicago, Alinsky worked for the Institute of Juvenile Research as a prison sociologist after leaving university before becoming a community organizer and researcher in the impoverished South Side Back of the Yards neighbourhood in Chicago amongst labourers in the meat-packing industry in 1938. His initial aim was limited to the establishment of a neighbourhood committee that would campaign for the recognition of a meat-packer’s trades union. The first public meeting of the network in 1939 drew over three hundred people from 109 local organizations. Alinsky sought to connect representatives of the nascent meat-packers trades union together with faith groups and community projects in the neighbourhood. It was at this meeting that the Back of the Yards Neighbourhood Council was established and contemporary community organizing was born. Buoyed by the success of such organized collective action and the recognition that it depended on the ongoing engagement of organizations rather than individuals, Alinsky, with the support of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, established the Industrial Areas Foundation in 1940, which became the hub of his community organizing for the rest of his life.

During his lifetime, Alinsky was a divisive figure, as Sanford Horwitt and also Jenifer Frost illustrate with reference to his tense relationship during the mid 1960s with the Students for a Democratic Society’s Economic Research and Action Project and the broader civil rights movement.¹⁴ Was Alinsky a radical prophet committed to the struggle for social justice or an amoral pragmatist for whom almost any means justified the end? Alinsky himself wrote relatively little, but what he did write does not offer a clear answer to this question. In Reveille for Radicals, he argued that true radicalism is founded on a deep and active commitment to the equality of all people and a willingness to engage in struggle wherever such equality is denied. In the same book, however, Alinsky also affirmed the central importance of self-interest and strategic conflict with other progressive activists who did not align themselves with the methodology he propounded and was dismissive of the practical value of any engagement with social theory: ‘The word “academic” is a synonym for irrelevant’.¹⁵ Such an approach continues to characterize much community organizing as I show in later chapters. Towards the end of his life, the same tension can be found in Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, where he argues that the purpose of community organizing is to give power to those who are disempowered, ‘to realize the democratic dream of equality’, whilst seemingly exhibiting a moral relativism in his assertion that the end of social justice justifies almost any means: ‘in war the end justifies almost any means.’¹⁶ Within Rules for Radicals Alinsky laid out a model of pragmatic radicalism. Almost forty years later such pithy assertions as ‘Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have’ or ‘Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it’ remain central to the methodology of much community organizing.¹⁷ In spite of such ambiguity, it is on the pragmatic radicalism of Alinsky and his understanding that effective activism depends on the building of a permanent people’s organization characterized by organized people, organized power and organized money that most contemporary community organizing rests. For Alinsky, activism almost inevitably dissolved into impotent idealism or single-issue social movements when such a permanent people’s organization was not present as a guiding force. It is on this foundation that key broad community organizations in the United States such as the Industrial Areas Foundation, ACORN, the Gamaliel Foundation, Pico National Network and the Direct Action and Research Training Centre (DART) have built since Alinsky’s death in 1972.

The story of community organizing in the United States revolves around the development of these organizations and their relationship with the Alinsky legacy, and so it is to them that I now turn. However, before I focus on this story, I want to sharpen my description of community organizing by outlining in brief what it is not. These are characteristics that I return to in my discussion of the ‘new politics’ in chapter 3. First, Alinskyite community organizing is not short-lived or spontaneous activism but is focused on long-term strategic change. Second, community organizing is not reducible to the mobilization of people around single issues because of its multi-issue agenda. Third, community organizing is not the same as advocacy because its aim is to empower people to speak and act for themselves (often...