Group Strength : Ghettos Get Strategy for Urban Power

Organized people can beat organized money.

--Edward Chambers

executive director,

Industrial Areas Foundation

Although the state of Maryland had established a fund to guarantee home mortgages for low-income residents, the program foundered in black areas of Baltimore four years ago because the city’s banks would not participate.

Unable to get a meeting with the president of one bank--in which its member churches and individuals had $2 million on deposit--Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), a church-based citizen’s organization, decided that more direct action was needed.

Hundreds of its members descended on the bank, tying up teller lines as they patiently waited to change bills into coins or vice versa. Outraged management called police, who were met by a security guard demanding, “Arrest these people,” recalled Arnie Graf, the professional community organizer then working with the agency.

“On what charge?” asked the confused officer as he scanned the orderly line of largely middle-aged customers.

“Making change,” snapped the flustered guard.

Bank Officials Give In

The officers’ superiors ordered them back to the station, and the organization and four banks, including the one at which agency members stood in lines, ultimately signed an agreement that in the last four years has resulted in 553 inner-city Baltimore families buying their own homes.

Baltimoreans United’s tactic sprang straight from the fertile imagination of Saul D. Alinsky, the late “professional radical” and scourge of the Establishment, who founded the Industrial Areas Foundation in 1940 to organize poor communities.

Graf, a foundation organizer, described the tactic this summer in Los Angeles to illustrate for participants in a foundation training seminar how a broad-based organization can use “creative” strategies to “leverage itself into the arena of power.”

The 10-day seminar, one of three run by the foundation each year, could be called a school for radicals--a crash course in acquiring power through organizing techniques, strategy and leadership for “ordinary, everyday” people seeking ways to make their voices decisive in policies affecting their communities.

The 90 participants who assembled at Mount St. Mary’s College’s downtown campus fit anything but the stereotype of 1960s radicals. Most were priests, nuns and ministers whose parishes and congregations belong to groups in the foundation’s fledgling network of 16 “power organizations” in New York, Maryland, Texas and California.

Their syllabus was a sustained dose of a kind of domestic liberation theology for neglected populations, and they learned early on that Alinsky’s successors at the foundation still embrace their mentor’s creed as he described it nearly 20 years ago:

“The hell with charity,” Alinsky advised residents of poor communities. “The only thing you get is what you’re strong enough to get. So you’d better organize.

“The only way to upset the power structure is to goad them, confuse them, irritate them and, most of all, make them live by their own rules. If you make them live by their own rules, you’ll destroy them.”

Style Proves Effective

Foundation-organized groups have goaded and irritated sufficiently to launch a 5,000-home development in a devastated area of East Brooklyn, N.Y., convince Baltimore’s corporate community to guarantee a job for every high school graduate in that city who meets certain academic and attendance criteria, equalize the tax dollars spent on students in Texas and reduce auto insurance rates in East Los Angeles.

They may not have destroyed any power structures, but San Antonio’s Communities Organized for Public Service presided over a changing of the guard in 1981 as Latinos wrested political control from an entrenched Anglo leadership in that city. The group is generally acknowledged to be San Antonio’s strongest political force outside its business community.

Given the burned-out hulks of once promising organizations littering the landscape of social reform in America, the success of groups in the foundation’s network is something of an anomaly.

Leaders Are Developed

They accept no government money to finance organizing, develop their own leaders and boot them out should they decide to run for public office. They avoid dogma--liberal or conservative--as though it were a plague and take on only those issues that can result in their members gaining a sense of their own self-worth.

And where they have organized, they have been able to generate cooperation among Latinos, blacks and whites, Catholics and Protestants in developing attacks on what had appeared to be intractable problems.

Los Angeles’ United Neighborhoods Organization, representing 93,000 East Side families, and the South-Central Organizing Committee, with 44,000 families, have successfully taken on issues ranging from dirty supermarkets to exorbitant auto insurance rates.

They have pressured police into cracking down on drug trafficking, and they recently joined forces to lobby for a package of 16 anti-crime bills pending in the Legislature and to seek $10 million from the Olympics funds surplus to finance youth programs.

Confrontation Tactics

Their styles are often confrontational, and several years ago Mayor Tom Bradley walked out of a meeting with United Neighborhoods leaders. The United and South-Central groups now see Bradley as an ally, and last month the mayor shared the stage with a dozen California officials at a joint United and South-Central rally to win support for their anti-crime bills and their “Olympic legacy” program.

Political leaders were present, Bradley said, “not only because UNO and SCOC have organized the churches in the communities where they live and work, but the communities themselves. It is that kind of unity that will produce results every time.”

Although “Alinsky-style tactics” have become synonymous with confrontation among some social scientists, the foundation knows that confrontation cannot be sustained for too long. Groups in its network move from confrontation to conciliation, depending on conditions.

“If you don’t depolarize, it eats away at you,” said Larry McNeil, the foundation’s supervising organizer for United Neighborhoods and South-Central. “We’re not in the business of teaching hate.”

Embracing 19th-Century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s philosophy, the foundation organizers teach: “We have no permanent allies and no permanent enemies. Just permanent interests.”

Guarantees for Mortgages

Baltimoreans United, for example, used confrontation to persuade bankers to provide state-guaranteed mortgages. At the same time, however, it was involved in months of delicate and often frustrating negotiations that resulted in Baltimore’s corporate community agreeing to guarantee jobs for graduates of the city’s high schools.

“Already 100 corporations have signed up to hire graduates who maintain a B average and 95% attendance,” Graf said. “By next summer, another 100 corporations will be involved.”

The program does officially started this month, but 141 graduates were hired after a trial run this summer. Committees of parents, teachers, students and corporate personnel managers at each school are revising curricula and developing plans for the program.

Baltimoreans United sees the agreement as nothing less than an opportunity to rebuild Baltimore’s school system, which is 85% black, and Graf said the jobs are the “carrots” necessary to do the job.

Although other institutions have pretty much abandoned barrios and ghettos, churches are still there, the the foundation’s executive director, Edward Chambers, noted. . “So if you’re going to build an organization in those places,” he said, “you build around that. We use churches because they are the best thing available, and they have people in place who are loyal to those institutions.”

Organizational Period

Typically, the foundation’s organizers spend two to three years working in an area before launching a new organization. Before they set foot in a town, however, they require the sponsoring churches to raise about $200,000 to pay for the organizing drive.

“It’s hard enough to build these organizations without the distraction of having to go raise money,” Chambers said. “We try to raise money for two or three years of daylight out in front of us, and in the process we teach these folks how to put their own dues up. It gives them fiscal continuity and independence, and we’ve learned that from trial and error.”

More than one pastor has walked out of initial meetings with the foundation’s organizers when the $200,000 budget requirement was brought up, but those who remained obviously did so with a commitment that they were willing to back up with dollars, about $10 per family per year.

And those parishes, congregations and families get an education in using power by learning how to act in their own self-interest, a role many initially find uncomfortable.

“Just the term ‘self-interest’ sounds selfish, manipulative and dirty,” said Rosalie Gurrola, a high school counselor and member of United Neighborhoods in East Los Angeles.

“You sort of relate power to what politicians do to the people, to what the rich do to the poor,” said Maria Luisa Vasquez, a first-grade teacher who belongs to the Metropolitan Organization in Houston.

Discomfort Goes Away

Both, however, said their discomfort with concepts of power and self-interest gradually dissolved as they became more active in their respective organizations.

Vasquez played a key role in registering 16,000 voters in Houston last year--part of 150,000 registered statewide by foundation groups--to pass a bond issue providing $200 million in capital improvements for her part of town.

“Before we registered those new voters, people in power wouldn’t even give us the time of day,” she said. “But after we were able to get all those people out to vote for the bond issue, all of a sudden public officials started calling and wanted to meet with us.”

Gurrola recalled fuming over the poor quality of merchandise and long check-out lines at an East Los Angeles supermarket. “I got mad,” she said. “How dare anybody treat me like that?”

United Neighborhoods members confronted the market’s manager, the conditions were corrected and Gurrola’s “sense that you could do something” was strengthened.

“I now know darned well that I’d better act on my self-interest,” she said. “Politicians and corporations act on theirs all the time.”

Their victories, like those experienced in Baltimore, “have been personal victories because we’re talking about people who perceived themselves originally as powerless,” said Baltimoreans United member Father Don Sterling, pastor of St. Cecilia’s Roman Catholic Church in Baltimore. “We see the power that comes in numbers.”

Matter of Education

The biggest hurdle to organizing, Chambers said, “is the mistraining and miseducation that parents and schools do to young men and women. They don’t communicate to people that they are important, that they have something to offer, that they are somebody. And they don’t expose them to diversity.”

“People don’t think they have a right to power,” Graf said at one seminar workshop. “Who teaches you that power is negative? Those with power.”

Father Warner Traynham, rector of Los Angeles’ St. John’s Episcopal Church, which belongs to South-Central Organizing Committee, jokingly calls the foundation’s organizing technique “enlightened Machiavellianism,” but he had no discomfort with “the concept of power or self-interest as they were presented” at the seminar.

Foundation organizers reject Traynham’s jest, saying that Machiavelli laid down principles enabling the “haves” to hold on to what they have--principles without the redeeming virtue of social justice.

In Texas, for example, where the foundation has organized nine groups in a network that is emerging as a potent force in statewide politics, Roman Catholic bishops see those organizations “as a real vehicle for the church’s strong social justice tradition, which they take seriously,” said Ernesto Cortes Jr., the foundation’s supervising organizer for the state.

‘Have Gun, Will Travel’

Until the late 1960s, Industrial Areas operated with a kind of “have gun, will travel” approach, dropping into a city, putting an organization together from, say, block clubs, and maintaining a very loose relationship with those groups.

Groups in cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, Rochester and Buffalo petered out, and Chambers said he then convinced Alinsky to “structure the thing and figure out how we train people in what we know about organizing.” Alinsky agreed to establish a training institute, and every group organized in the last 11 years is still operating.

Organizations in the foundation’s network operate with a collective leadership that is held accountable through a continuous process of evaluation. Before taking on an issue, members research it and the individuals involved until “they own the data,” McNeil said.

They eschew whole categories of would-be leaders, such as “prominent, credentialed experts,” those “know-it-alls” who first want to seize control of the organization and then tell it what to do, even foundation organizers.

“There’s no point in organizing people to become dependent on someone else,” McNeil said.

‘Trouble Makers’ Sought

Instead they seek out “trouble makers,” individuals with enough ego to become angry as United Neighborhoods’ Gurrola did about conditions in the East Los Angeles supermarket.

Organizers see themselves as being on a talent search--identifying individuals with imagination, agitators capable of stirring people up, those whose sense of humor is evidence that they are not trapped in the minutiae of daily survival.

Because those qualities are rarely, if ever, found in one individual, groups in Industrial Areas’ network choose collective rather than charismatic leadership.

In their early stages, foundation-organized groups rarely see their self-interest in such broad abstractions as jobs, education and housing. More often than not, they’re concerned about a dirty supermarket, crime around liquor stores or drug trafficking in their neighborhood.

Each member church is assigned a quota of individuals to deliver at carefully orchestrated public “actions.” As the organization grows, members who were once awe-struck by minor bureaucrats develop a poise enabling them to negotiate successfully with mayors, governors and heads of corporations.

Something Grows in Brooklyn

East Brooklyn Churches, for example, originally organized around getting city officials to replace 1,000 street signs ripped down by vandals, but they since have succeeded in launching a housing development that “saner”--or less visionary--individuals may never have undertaken.

Upon first seeing the “abandoned, rubble-filled 60-square blocks of East Brooklyn,” Chambers couldn’t help but wonder: “How do you organize something like this?”

His staff persuaded him to move the foundation’s headquarters from Chicago to Huntington, N.Y., and the foundation set about organizing East Brooklyn Churches in 1979.

Chambers, 55, cut his community organizing teeth in the 1950s under Alinsky’s tutelage and succeeded his mentor as the foundation’s head when Alinsky, who learned his organizing from labor leader John L. Lewis, died in 1972.

Worried About Catholics

As worrisome as the prospect of organizing East Brooklyn was to Chambers, he was even more troubled by the thought that failure would spell the foundation’s doom. He had nightmares that Roman Catholic bishops in New York would be on the phone to their counterparts around the country warning them to stay away from foundation organizers if “those madmen” ever darkened their doorways.

The organization recruited I. D. Robbins, a wealthy retired builder and former newspaper columnist, who believes that ravaged inner cities are an opportunity to develop subdivisions just as potato fields were sites for such projects after World War II.

East Brooklyn Churches then scrambled to collect $5 million from Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians and black Baptists as a five-year loan to launch the project--called Nehemiah after the Old Testament prophet sent to rebuild Jerusalem after Jews were released from captivity in Babylon.

Still, the churches needed free land and $10 million from New York Mayor Ed Koch to subsidize the 5,000 single-family row houses, but bad blood existed between the foundation and Koch, going back to a stormy meeting with a foundation group in Queens. The mayor had walked out of the meeting.

Brooklyn’s Roman Catholic Bishop Francis J. Mugavero brokered a meeting with Koch, and when the mayor told Mugavero that he did not have the money, the bishop responded: “I’ll tell you what. You steal the $10 million, and I’ll absolve you.”

Tactic Proves Effective

Koch broke out in laughter, Chambers said, but he came through with the money and land. Nehemiah has built more than 400 homes selling for $41,000 each, half the price of comparable homes in other parts of the city, and 27 Nehemiah houses are going up each week.

Nehemiah is a case of a seemingly impossible project working because it was planned at the local level by a strong community organization rather than dictated in Washington, foundation organizers say, and it has attracted attention from Washington policy makers as well as from representatives of several foreign governments.

And the foundation is attracting a second look from churches in cities like Chicago, where it once operated. Although Father Daniel F. Montalbano of Chicago’s St. Sebastian Roman Catholic Church is not a member of a foundation group, he attended the Los Angeles training seminar to learn organizing techniques. As the seminar drew to a close, he remarked: “The archdiocese is thinking about inviting IAF back into Chicago. They do what they do better than anyone else.”