Saul Alinsky

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Image:Saul Alinsky.jpg Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 Chicago, Illinois - June 12, 1972 Carmel, California) is generally considered the father of community organizing.

1 Biography and work
2 Students of Alinsky
3 Published works
4 Biography
5 External links

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Biography and work

A criminologist by training, Alinsky in the 1930s organized the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago (made famous by Upton Sinclair's The Jungle). He went on to found the Industrial Areas Foundation while organizing the Woodlawn neighborhood, which trained organizers and assisted in the founding of community organizations around the country. In Rules for Radicals (his final work, published one year before his death), he addressed the 1960s generation of radicals, outlining his views on organizing for mass power. A young Hillary Clinton was a major admirer, writing her undergraduate thesis on his work and ideas.

Author of Reveille for Radicals, Alinsky encouraged controversy and conflict, often to the dismay of middle-class activists who otherwise would sponsor his activism. [1] Alinsky is often credited with laying the foundation for confrontational political tactics that dominated the 1960s [2], but late in his life he encouraged holders of stock in public corporations to lend their votes to "proxies" who would vote at annual stockholders meetings in favor of social justice. While his confrontational style took hold in American activism, for a while at least, his call to stock holders to share their power with disenfranchised working poor never took hold in U.S. progressive circles.

Alinsky was a ferocious critic of a passive and ineffective mainstream liberalism. In Rules for Radicals, he argued that the most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired ends, and that an intermediate end for radicals should be democracy because of its relative ease to work within to achieve other ends of social justice.

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Students of Alinsky

Many important community and labor organizers worked and studied with Alinsky.

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Published works

Reveille for Radicals (1946, updated 1969)
John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography (1949) ISBN 0394708822
Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1972) ISBN 0394443411

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