Group Teaches Paths Toward 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 BUILD.

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

“Making change,” snapped the flustered guard.

The officers’ superiors ordered them back to the station, and the organization and four banks, including the one at which BUILD 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.