I think it is time to write another post in defense of Saul Alinsky. Saul Alinsky was a hero of mine for a time in the 1960s. First, some background.
I came of age in the 1960s. Just as it was in 2008, change was in the air all throughout the 1960s. Young Americans wanted to be involved in changing things. Folk singers like Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan inspired us. The assassination of JFK rocked us. Some of us wanted to overcome against racial discrimination. Some of us wanted to stop communism. Some just wanted to give the middle finger to the establishment, smoke pot, have sex, and run to Canada to avoid the draft.
I was raised in a conservative Republican family whose hero was Dwight David Eisenhower. Growing up in Iowa my family had great respect for the farmers who grew things. I knew no blacks, but my hero was a black basketball player. Dwight Eisenhower brought to our attention the fact that there was discrimination against blacks. It was he, remember, who sent troops into Arkansas to make sure that black children could go to Little Rock High School.
I won an athletic scholarship to attend Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. It was a school operated by the Southern Baptist Convention. I had been raised in the Methodist church. My dad was an usher. It was a very conservative, somber place where we attended every Sunday. When I got to Texas, I started to attend Baptist churches. I was amazed at the joyous singing. People really seemed to love Jesus Christ and want to follow Him. I did, too. I was baptized and immersed myself in learning about the Bible and Jesus. I took Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, as my foreign language.
To be a follower of Christ is to be radicalized. You get a different set of values. You become interested in serving others. You know a joy that permeates your life. You see things that are wrong, and you want to change them. You ask questions. One of Saul Alinsky's trademark ideas is a question mark turned upside down into a plowshare that upends settled soil. Why are there no blacks in our churches, I asked. Why are there no blacks on the basketball team? Why are there separate drinking fountains?
I enrolled in Army ROTC and completed my first two years. When my mom found out I wanted to take the advance courses in my junior and senior years, she, unbeknownst to me, contacted our family pediatrician who had treated me for severe allergies as a child. He wrote a letter to the draft board, and I was classified 4F, making me ineligible for the draft. I continued on to graduate with a B.A. degree in psychology, with a minor in history. I was elected President of the Baptist Student Union and won an award at graduation as the outstanding male graduate.
My first job out of college was as a caseworker in a child welfare department. At night I would watch the national news on television. Two topics dominated the national news, Viet Nam, and Civil Rights. Although Walter Cronkite is remembered as America's anchorman, my favorites were Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. I particularly liked Brinkley's sense of humor. However, at coffee the next morning if I would mention something I saw the night before on the Huntley-Brinkley Report, my supervisors would caution me not to watch "Frontley-Pinkley." (Frontley stood for "Communist front", and Pinkley also stood for Communist).
Then, there was the stunning assassination of JFK in Dallas. The Dallas Morning News reported that some Texans actually celebrated. I wanted out. I made plans to go to graduate school at The University of Kansas, a nice kind of halfway point compromise between Iowa and Texas.
As I began my studies to earn a Masters degree in Social Work, I learned that in that profession there were three pathways of emphasis. One was working with individual clients as a kind of junior psychiatrist. Another was to work with groups of clients. A third was community organizing. I didn't see myself as a junior psychiatrist, so I gravitated toward the groupwork and community organizing pathways.
During my second year I had a field placement at an elementary school. The principal referred to me every student who was considered by him to be a behavior problem. Instead of working one-on-one with the students, I worked with them as a group, and also with their parents. We put on a play for the school on Abe Lincoln's birthday. The baddest, biggest, blackest kid in the school was Abe Lincoln. Later in the year, a girl in the group won the school spelling bee. None of the kids' parents had ever been involved with the school, but they did begin to get involved.
After earning my Master of Social Work degree, my first job was Director of a counseling center in the Kansas City, Kansas ghetto. The funding came from LBJ's War on Poverty. My office was located in a Lutheran Church, then later in a Catholic school. The civil rights movement was in full sway. While Martin Luther King led the movement in the South, Saul Alinsky did so in the North, from Rochester, New York to Chicago, to Kansas City, to California.
Martin Luther King was assassinated. The ghettoes erupted in violence. Non-violence gave way to Black Power. On the one year anniversary of King's assassination, my wife and I crossed the bridge over to Kansas City, Missouri to go out to dinner. A police car pulled us over. We waited for a long time for the officer to get out of his car. When he finally did, he informed me that he would have to take me to the jail and book me. I asked why? He said because I had accumulated a ton of parking tickets. I told him that was not true. Then I remembered: I had cosigned for a black teen to purchase a car. The car was in my name. The boy was the son of one of my workers at the counseling center.
This was the second and last time in my life I was booked into a jail. The first time was when one day in high school a kid named Mohammed Sadden had greeted me one morning and informed me that my girlfriend was a "slut." I swung at him and we scuffled for a while before agreeing to meet each other across the street on the lawn of the Lutheran Church after school. We did, along with most of the spectating student body, and the cops were called, after about 20 minutes of our brawl.
Back to Kansas City. After being booked into jail, I was put in a "bullpen," with about fifteen other guys. A cop brought in an inebriated black man, then wound up and punched the man as hard as he could right in the gut. I asked another officer if it was true that a person could get one phone call. He said yes. I called a Methodist minister who I knew was counseling Chief of Police Kelly on how to deal with groups like the Black Panthers. He called the Chief, I was released, and the cop who slugged the inebriated black man was fired a few days later.
The Methodist minister was one of a coalition of Christian ministers who had invited Saul Alinsky to come to Kansas City. One of the main reasons was to help the community deal with incidents of police brutality. Word got out about my experience witnessing police brutality, and the man himself, Saul Alinsky, wanted to meet me. I invited him to my house for dinner, spent a very enjoyable evening talking with him, and drove him back to his hotel.
Saul Alinsky was all about the least of these, the discriminated against, the ones Jesus wanted to reach. Alinsky was about empowering people, getting them to stand up for themselves. Unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who studied Alinsky's tactics and used them to promote themselves and their own agendas, Alinsky was about empowering poor people. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have used Alinsky's tactics to make Republicans the enemy. Alinsky would come into a community, find out who was most hated, such as a Chief of Police, a Superintendent of Schools, a County Commissioner, and then purposely make himself the enemy of that hated person, thereby gaining the trust of the people he was trying to organize. Invariably, he was invited by coalitions of Christians; Catholics and protestants united, unlike Obama's promotion of ties with Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian mullahs. Alinsky died a few years after my one evening with him, and that was my last and only contact with him.
Often I read various conservative pundits writing about Alinsky. They make him out to be evil. He was not. He was a man who loved and stood with and for the least of these, the exploited and the discriminated against. Because Obama and Hillary studied his tactics and used them to promote their own rises to power, Alinsky is considered guilty by association. It isn't fair.
