In recent years a growing number of liberals—reflecting the wistful American notion that with enough money any problem can be solved—have been pushing for a federal “crash program” to remove the disabilities and deprivations that bar Negroes from full participation in American society. Yet expenditures for welfare assistance have been rising at a rapid rate in every large city, and without making a dent in the problem. Many of these expenditures, in fact, have either been wasted or have proved to be a positive disservice to the dependent poor. One need not agree with Julius Horwitz, the novelist who was once a welfare worker, that the whole system of public assistance is an “ugly, diseased social growth [that] must be removed from American life.” But few can argue with the studied judgment of Professor S. M. Miller of Syracuse University that “Welfare assistance in its present form tends to encourage dependence, withdrawal, diffused hostility, indifference, ennui.” For there is mounting evidence that the present welfare system is self-perpetuating—that far from relieving dependency, it encourages dependency.
Nor does the answer lie in expanding the number of social workers, settlement houses, mental-health clinics, and the like. In New York City, the Directory of Social and Health Agencies runs to 721 pages; social work is one of the city’s major industries. In the Harlem-Upper Manhattan area alone, there are, according to a study by the Protestant Council of the City of New York, some 156 separate agencies serving an estimated 240,000 people—roughly 40 per cent of the total population of the area. Without question, there are gaps here and there in the services offered, and many existing services are grossly inadequate. But it seems clear that the solution to Harlem’s problems does not lie in any extension of the present system.
What has gone wrong? First of all, social agencies and social workers have concentrated more on symptoms than on causes—and on symptoms seen and treated individually rather than in connection with other symptoms. This concern with symptoms has been a reflection, in good measure, of the social-work profession’s preoccupation with case work and the study and treatment of individual maladjustment. Unlike the early sociologists, many of whom were reformers, contemporary sociologists and social workers, as Lewis Coser points out, have focused their attention “predominantly upon problems of adjustment rather than upon conflict.” Their goal, that is, has been to teach maladjusted individuals to adjust to society as it is, rather than to change those aspects of society that make the individuals what they are. Social workers in particular have religiously followed Freud when they should have been listening to Emile Durkheim. For the troubles of the slum arise far less from individual neurosis (though certainly there is plenty of that) than from an objective lack of opportunity, from a social system that denies dignity and status to the individual.
The obsession with case work and individual pathology has had another unfortunate effect: the great bulk of resources, both financial and professional, have been devoted to “multi-problem families,” who not only make up a small proportion of the population of the slums, but who are also the people least likely to benefit from public assistance. The great majority of slum dwellers work hard for very little material reward; they try their best to raise themselves, and their children, out of the morass in which they have been caught. Their problem is not a lack of good intent, but simply that their best is not good enough. Accordingly, the anthropologist, Thomas Gladwin, has suggested that it might be useful to revive the old distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor (those who are truly antisocial in their behavior, destroying other people’s lives or property, trading in narcotics, etc.). The fact that the two groups live in the same neighborhood in much the same way reflects a common state rather than a common interest, and social welfare resources might be far more effective if directed at the deserving rather than the undeserving poor.
Ultimately, however, the failure of the enormous American social welfare effort stems from the same factor that has produced the political strain between Negroes and white liberals: the idea of doing things for Negroes instead of with them—an approach that destroys the dignity and arouses the hostility of the people who are supposed to be helped. A particularly candid expression of this patronizing frame of mind—“welfare colonialism,” as some critics call it—is found in a report published two years ago by Raymond M. Hilliard, director of the Cook County (Chicago) Department of Public Aid. In proposing that those on relief be deprived of their benefits unless they go to school, the report asserts: “Society stands in the same relation to them as that of parent to child. . . . Just as the child is expected to attend classes, so also the ‘child-adult’ must be expected to meet his responsibility to the community. In short, ‘social uplifting’—even if begun on the adult level—cannot expect to meet with success unless it is combined with a certain amount of ‘social disciplining’—just as it is on the pre-adult level.”
Small wonder, then, that these “child-adults” should hate the colonial administrators who come to “uplift” them through “social discipline,” or that they try to sabotage the disciplinarians’ program. One typical East Harlem adolescent put it as follows to Richard Hammer of the New York Times Magazine:
Most of them are rat fink types. They act like they think we’re not human. They think they’ve got all there is, and all they’ve got to do is to convert us to think and do what they think and do . . . Man, these jerks pop up in the morning with their little briefcases, and they cut out for their homes a hell of a way away around 5 or 6 at night, and that’s it. If you are ever nuts enough to go to one of them they hand you the old crap, “Now, son, you shouldn’t feel that way.”
In general, the social workers and administrators remain aliens in a world they cannot understand and frequently do not even see. There is a large “youth center” in Harlem, for example, which provides counseling to some five thousand adolescents a year. Unbeknownst to the staff, the center was also a major contact point for the sale of narcotics—a fact discovered with ease by the Negro interviewers of HARYOU (Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited Inc., a federally supported research and demonstration program) when they began talking to the neighborhood kids.
The alienation of the welfare worker from the life of his clients is reinforced by the policing role the system requires him to play. In New York City, whose public relief administration is perhaps the most enlightened and sympathetic in the country, welfare workers are called “investigators,” which is indeed what they are: in New York, as almost everywhere else, the administration of welfare is mainly a matter of enforcing regulations. The result, as S. M. Miller puts it, is that “the poor, thought of as being ignorant, illiterate, and unimaginative, have developed a variety of ways of coping with the welfare worker.” They become “welfare-wise,” and so enforcement on the one side produces a “matching effort of evasion on the other.”
To be sure, many welfare workers resist the role of “social disciplinarians.” But whether they do or not, the system still undermines self-respect, increases dependency, and arouses hostility. Where the Negro is concerned, moreover, these failures are aggravated by an inability to grasp the most basic fact about behavior in the Negro slums. The slowness of “acculturation” among Negro slumdwellers is caused less by ignorance or apathy, than by an ingrained resistance to what Negroes call “going along with Mr. Charlie’s program”—and to go along with Mr. Charlie’s program is to betray your race. To compound matters, public officials, civic leaders, and foundation executives frequently draw up and publicize new programs for the downtrodden Negroes without bothering to consult those who are to be “uplifted.” In city after city, Negro leaders have taken to telling their putative benefactors that they refuse to be planned for as though they were “children” or “guinea pigs in sociological experiments.”
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What all this means is that Negroes, like every other group, can be helped in only one way: by giving them the means with which to help themselves. In the last analysis, the rejection by Negroes of the conventional offers of help—the resentment they show—springs less from injustice per se than from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. White philanthropy, white liberalism, white sympathy and support, no less than white bigotry and discrimination, have had the effect of preventing Negroes from standing on their own feet, from “exercising their full manhood rights,” to use W. E. B. DuBois’s phrase. What Negroes need more than anything else is to be treated like men—and to believe in their hearts that they are men, men who can stand on their own feet and control their own destinies. Consequently, Negroes will not be able to climb out of their slums en masse until they can act in their own behalf—until they are in a position to make or to influence the decisions that affect them—until, in a word, they acquire power.
But can this be done? Can Negroes be mobilized in the face of the apathy and anomie of the Negro slum? The answer, quite simply, is that it has been done—in the Chicago slum of Woodlawn. Created in 1960, The Woodlawn Organization is a federation of some eighty-five or ninety groups, including thirteen churches (virtually all those with any influence in the community), three businessmen’s associations, and an assortment of block clubs, neighborhood associations, and social groups of one kind or another; all told, the organizations represented in TWO have a membership of about 30,000. As the first broadly representative organization to be created in a Negro neighborhood, TWO is probably the most significant social experiment going on among Negroes in America today.
The existence of any coherent organization in Woodlawn would seem to be a complete anomaly. An oblong slum directly to the south of the University of Chicago campus, it contains between eighty-thousand and one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand people, depending on how the area is defined. Until the 1930’s, Woodlawn was part of the university community—a desirable residential area with broad shady streets, excellent transportation facilities, and a respectable admixture of private homes and apartment houses. The decline of the neighborhood began during the Great Depression, and accelerated during the postwar rush to the suburbs. Around 1950, Negroes from the neighboring Black Belt started moving in, and the trickle soon turned into a torrent as Woodlawn became the “port-of-entry” for Negroes migrating to Chicago from the South. Within a decade, Woodlawn had become a virtually all-Negro slum. Today, nearly 25 per cent of the area’s residents receive some form of welfare. They also pay an average of eighty-four dollars a month in rent—more than ten dollars above the city average—for an average housing unit of 2.2 rooms. There is a nourishing traffic in gambling, narcotics, and prostitution. The commercial business district is active but declining, with large numbers of vacant stores. In short, Woodlawn is precisely the sort of crowded, decaying, anomic neighborhood which social workers and urban planners assume can never help itself.
Yet Woodlawn is helping itself; it is taking concerted action toward a variety of goals. The impetus for The Woodlawn Organization came from three Protestant ministers and a Catholic priest, who had “worn out the seats of several good pairs of trousers attending an uncountable number of meetings held to ‘do something about Woodlawn.’” After investigating various approaches to community organization, the clergymen “took the plunge,” as two of them put it, and invited Saul D. Alinsky, executive director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, to help organize the Woodlawn community.
A sociologist and criminologist by training, Alinsky is a specialist in creating mass organizations that enable “the so-called ‘little man’ [to] gather into his hands the power he needs to make and shape his life.” In the late 1930’s, he was a leading force in the creation of Chicago’s Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council, which turned the stockyards area into one of the most desirable working-class neighborhoods in the city. Subsequently he established the Industrial Areas Foundation. a non-profit organization which has by now been called in by some forty-four groups across the country.
Though George N. Shuster is president of IAF and other notable figures from labor, management, politics, and religious affairs sit on its board of directors, Alinsky himself is nothing if not controversial. At various times, Alinsky (who is Jewish) has been attacked as a Communist, as a fascist, as a dupe of the Catholic Church and the mastermind of a Catholic conspiracy, as a racist, as a segregationist, and as an integrationist whose aim is to “mongrelize” Chicago. Certainly no one in recent memory has had as great an impact as Alinsky on the city of Chicago; and no one in the United States has proposed a program of action better calculated to rescue slum dwellers—Negroes or whites—from poverty and degradation. For Alinsky is that rarity in American life, a superlative organizer, strategist, and tactician who is also a social philosopher.
Alinsky really believes that the helpless, the poor, the badly educated can solve their own problems if given the chance and the means—that they have the right to decide how their lives should be run and what services they require. “I don’t believe that democracy can survive, except as a formality,” he has written, “if the ordinary citizen’s part is limited to voting—if he is incapable of initiative and unable to influence the political, social, and economic structures surrounding him.”
However, the individual can influence these structures in his own behalf only if he has power. As Alinsky sees it, there are two sources of power: money and people. Since the residents of Woodlawn and similar areas do not have money, their only source of power is themselves—and the only way they can draw on that power is by organizing. “The only reason people have ever banded together,” Alinsky baldly states, “and the only reason they ever will, is the fact that organization gives them the power to satisfy their desires or to realize their needs. There never has been any other reason. . . . Even when we talk of a community lifting itself by its bootstraps, we are talking of power. It takes a great deal of power to lift oneself by one’s own bootstraps.” Needless to say, this kind of frankness offends a good many people who regard any open discussion of power as somehow lacking in taste.
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Most efforts at organizing slum neighborhoods fail, Alinsky argues, not because of the nature of the community but because of the objectives and methods of the planners. The conventional appeal to the interests of homeowners in conserving property values, for instance, is useless in a community like Woodlawn. and even “civil rights” is too abstract. “The daily lives of Woodlawn people,” an early Alinsky memo suggested, “leave them with little enorgy or enthusiasm for realizing principles /?/ themselves will derive little practical benefit. They know that with their educational and economic handicaps they will be exceptions indeed if they can struggle into a middle class neighborhood or a white collar job.” Instead of the conventional middle-class incentives, then, Alinskv uses the traditional appeal of trade-union organization: that is, to the self-interest of the local residents and to their resentment and distrust of the outside world. And following union practice, he seeks out and develops a local leadership to embody and direct this appeal.
But just as no factory could ever be organized without pressure and guidance from the outside, so no slum can be organized without a good deal of outside assistance. The mean and difficult job of building the organization must be handled by professionals who know how to deal with the apathy of the slum and who can find a way of bringing its disparate fragments together into a working whole. For more often than not, the indigenous leaders of the slum area are out of touch with one another, and only very rarely do they possess the skills to set up a large organization and keep it running.
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At the same time, however, the Industrial Areas Foundation is out to make the local community self-sufficient: Alinsky will not enter a community until he is assured that a workable cross-section of the population wants him, and he invariably insists that the community itself, no matter how poor, take over full responsibility for financing the new organization within a period of three years. Alinsky has a standard way of dramatizing the importance of financial independence. There is usually a convention at which the new group formally approves the constitution which has finally been hammered out. Alinsky will take a copy of the document, look at it briefly, and then flick it to the floor. “This constitution doesn’t mean a damned thing. As long as the IAF organizers are on my payroll they’ll do what I damn well tell them to do and not what it says on any paper like that.” After a shocked silence, someone in the audience will inevitably protest: “I thought you were on our side!” “I am,” Alinsky answers back. “But think of the number of people who’ve come down here telling you the same thing, and how many turned out to be two-timing, double-crossing s.o.b.’s. Why should you trust me? The only way you can be sure that the aims in that constitution are carried out is to get the organizers off my payroll and onto your payroll. Then you can tell them what to do, and if they don’t do it, you can fire them and get someone who will.”
The actual work of creating The Woodlawn Organization began in the spring and summer of 1960, eighteen months after the four ministers had called on Alinsky for help. A formal request to IAF now came from the Greater Woodlawn Pastors Alliance, supported by most other groups of any significance in the community, and subsidized by grants from the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, the Presbyterian church of Chicago, and the Schwarzhaupt Foundation.
How do you begin organizing an area like Woodlawn? Nicholas von Hoffman, chief organizer at the time for the IAF, says with studied casualness, “I found myself at the corner of 63rd and Kimbark and I looked around.” What he was looking for were grievances—the basic agent in the Alinsky process of community organization. It didn’t take much looking or listening to discover that a major source of complaints was the cheating and exploitation suffered in some of the neighborhood stores. In Woodlawn, as in most low-income areas, credit-purchasing is a pervasive trap. According to Dr. Leber, there were instances of customers being charged interest rates as high as 200 per cent; second-hand merchandise was sold as new; and prices bordered on outright piracy—for example, a six-dollar diamond clip in a gaudy ring setting would be sold for two-hundred-and-fifty dollars, with a “Certificate of Guarantee” attesting that it was a real diamond. Other merchants also took whatever advantage they could of their ignorant customers: thus, food stores regularly gave short weight, overcharged, and in a few cases even rigged their cash register to produce false totals.
Before very long, enough such complaints had piled up to create an issue—one, moreover, on which the legitimate businessmen in the area could unite with the consumers. TWO promptly set up a committee of prominent members of the Businessmen’s Association, several ministers, and some of the indigenous leaders of the Woodlawn area. (A leader, in Alinsky’s definition, is anyone with a following—anyone, be he bookie, barber, minister, or businessman, to whom residents turn for help.) Together they worked out a Code of Business Ethics covering credit practices, pricing, and advertising. To implement the Code, TWO set up a Board of Arbitration made up of four representatives from the Businessmen’s Association and four from consumer groups; wth an impartial chairman from outside the community.
The next stage was to publicize the Code and the new organization. To these ends, a big parade was staged in which nearly one-thousand people, singing and carrying signs, marched through the Woodlawn business section; the demonstration created enough of a stir to make the front pages of most of the Chicago newspapers. The following Saturday, a registered scale and an adding machine were set up at a nearby Catholic church. Shoppers from the suspected markets brought their packages directly to the church, with the result that false weights and false totals were exposed, and most of the offending merchants agreed to comply with the “Square Deal” code. Those who did not were harassed by leaflets distributed throughout the community. Within a few weeks, the “Square Deal” campaign had succeeded in eliminating a considerable amount of exploitation and chicanery. More importantly, it had made the residents of Woodlawn aware that the new organization indeed existed and that it could improve some of the circumstances of their lives.
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Moving quickly to harness the enthusiasm they had aroused, the IAF staff next began to organize rent strikes. A tenant’s group was formed wherever a substantial majority of tenants could be persuaded to act together against building code violations—broken windows, defective plumbing work, creaky staircases, inadequate heat, vermin, etc. In each case the owner was given a period of time to make repairs; if it ran out before action had been taken, TWO called a rent strike: rents were withheld from the landlord and deposited in escrow in a special bank account. If a landlord still remained recalcitrant, groups of pickets were dispatched to his own home, where they marched with placards that read: “Your Neighbor is a Slum Lord.” The picketing provided an outlet for anger and also gave the Woodlawn residents concerned a rare opportunity to use their color in an affirmative way. For as soon as the Negro pickets appeared in a white suburban block, the landlord would be deluged with phone calls from angry neighbors demanding that he do something to call the pickets off. In response to such pressure, some landlords agreed within a matter of hours to make repairs.
Another early focus for action were overcrowded and segregated schools. When William G. Caples, president of the Board of Education, refused to meet with TWO to discuss their complaints—he denounced the organization as “the lunatic fringe”—a delegation of eighteen Protestant and Catholic pastors staged a sit-in at the executive offices of Inland Steel, where Caples was vice-president in charge of public relations; other TWO members circled the building carrying placards denouncing Caples as a segregationist. (Caples resigned from the Board of Education the following month “because of the pressure of company business.”) When the Superintendent of Schools, Benjamin Willis, denied that overcrowding could be relieved by transferring Negro students to all-white schools, TWO sent “truth squads” of mothers into neighboring white schools to photograph empty and half-empty classrooms. TWO members also staged a “death watch” at Board of Education meetings, which they attended in long black capes to symbolize their “mourning” over the plight of their children.
Such programs and tactics soon provoked denunciations of Alinsky as an agitator who dealt in hate and incited conflict. “The fact that a community may be stirred and organized by ‘sharpening dormant hostilities’ and ‘rubbing raw the sores of discontent’ is not new,” said Julian Levi, in quoting from a TWO memorandum. “The technique has been proved in practice in the asssembling of lynch mobs.” Levi is executive director of the South East Chicago Commission and the key figure in the vast urban renewal activities of the University of Chicago, which once had plans of its own for Woodlawn. Specifically, Levi objected to a TWO leaflet naming a local food store and warning people to “watch out” for short weights, spoiled food, and short changing. “If this is what this merchant is really doing,” Levi argued, “he should be punished by the court—but with all the safeguards the law provides. This is not the way people should be taught to protect themselves.” They should be taught instead, Levi said, to register complaints about spoiled food with the Department of Health, about short weights with the Department of Weights and Measures, and about short change with the Police Department. Levi similarly objected to the tactic of rent strikes. If landlords were violating the building code, TWO should have brought action through the Building Department, following the practice of his South East Chicago Commission, instead of taking the law into its own hands.
But slum dwellers have been complaining to the Building Department and to other city agencies for years, usually to no avail. The reason the South East Chicago Commission has been able to get rapid action on its complaints from the Building Department or any other city agency is that it has political “clout”: the Commission is the urban renewal arm of the University of Chicago, whose trustees include some of the most influential businessmen and politicians in the city.1 Alinsky and TWO do not have these discreet but powerful influences at their disposal and perforce must rely upon more overt pressures. Levi’s criticism, moreover, misses the further point that Alinsky’s tactics are designed to serve other purposes besides the exerting of pressure. In TWO the most urgent need was not to persuade the local entrepreneurs to change their ways, but to convince the local population that it could solve some of its own problems through organized action.
The basic characteristic of the Negro slum—and the basic problem in organizing it—is that its “life style” is one of apathy. No organization can be created unless this apathy is overcome, but the slum residents will not be stirred until they see evidence that they can change things for the better. This reluctance to act contains a deep element of fear as well as hopelessness, for it is simply not true that the very poor have nothing to lose; in some respects, they have more to lose in their struggles with prevailing authority than the middle class does. They face the danger of having a relief check taken away, of being fired from an unskilled patronage job, of having a son on probation remanded to jail—and these are only a few of the reprisals that a politically powerful bureaucracy can impose. Indeed, one of the differences between lower-class Negro communities and middle-class white ones is that while the latter clamor for more protection by the police, the former frequently need protection from the police. Residents of a place like Woodlawn are often treated brutally and illegally by the police, and it is obvious that the traffic in narcotics, gambling, and prostitution that flourishes in most Negro slums could not go on without the active cooperation of the local police.
The net effect is that a community like Woodlawn seethes with inarticulate resentments and with muffled, dormant hostilities. The slum dwellers are incapable of acting, or even of joining, until these resentments and hostilities are brought to the surface and seen as problems, i.e., conditions they can do something about. Thus Alinsky calmly admits to the charge of being an agitator. “The community organizer,” he writes, “digs into a morass of resignation, hopelessness, and despair and works with the local people in articulating (or ‘rubbing raw’) their resentments.” His job is to “agitate to the point of conflict,” to formulate grievances and persuade the people to speak out, to hope, and to move—in short, to develop and harness the power needed to change the prevailing patterns.
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Agitation in itself, however, is not sufficient. To use the language of war (for that is what TWO is conducting), the only way to build an army from scratch is by winning a few victories. But how do you gain a victory before you have an army? The only method is guerrilla warfare: to avoid major battles and to concentrate on hit-and-run tactics designed to gain the small but measurable triumphs that can create a sense of solidarity and elan.
Once guerrilla warfare begins, the best organizing help of all comes from “the enemy”—the established institutions which feel threatened by the new organization. Thus, what really welded the Woodlawn community together was the University of Chicago’s announcement on July 19, 1960 that it planned to extend its “South Campus” in Woodlawn by annexing a strip of land a block wide and a mile long. Woodlawn residents had no particular attachment to this strip, in which University buildings extended into a dreary amalgam of warehouses, tenements, and empty lots. But they suspected that annexation was the prelude to clearing a large part of Woodlawn itself for middle- and upper-income apartment and town houses. There was ample basis for these fears: the huge urban renewal projects which the University was sponsoring in the Hyde Park-Kenwood district to the north had in fact been designed in good measure to remove Negroes along with “crime” and “blight.”2 Unless they acted quickly to establish the principle that no plan should be adopted for Woodlawn without active participation by Woodlawn residents in the planning process itself, the Negro community might wake up one morning to find bulldozers in every front yard. According to Rossi and Dentler, “the characteristic mode of action of the University and of the South East Chicago Commission, was to develop plans quickly, announce proposals in general terms, and then obtain quick approval through political leverage downtown.” Almost immediately and quite loudly, TWO therefore demanded that the city defer approval until university and city-planning officials had met with TWO and negotiated a long-term plan for Woodlawn. Otherwise, the organization warned, its members would lie down in front of the bulldozers and wrecking equipment. Some three-hundred TWO members crowded into a City Planning Commission hearing and succeeded in blocking the quick approval the University had expected.
The Negro tenants and homeowners were not the only ones who were alarmed by the University’s announcement. Having seen many of the small businessmen in the Hyde Park-Kenwood area flattened by the urban renewal program, the Woodlawn merchants also became apprehensive; conversations with University and city officials only increased their apprehensions. According to a local restaurant owner, Julian Levi told a meeting of the Woodlawn Businessmen’s Association that “we could either accept the plan and help it or sit back and watch it go through.” Phillip Doyle, head of the Chicago Land Clearance Commission, was even less reassuring. “He said that the biggest investment he would advise us to make in our business was one coat of paint.” The businessmen voted unanimously to join TWO.
It was not long before a full-scale battle was in progress, and as the velvet glove of the University began to wear thin against the serious opposition of TWO, its iron fist became quite visible. In February of 1961, for example, the University’s Public Relations Director, together with Julian Levi and another PR man, called on several Chicago dailies to warn them against “the evil forces” of Alinsky, the Industrial Areas Foundation, the Catholic Church, and TWO. They brought with them a dossier on Alinsky and his foundation; the main item was a copy of the Industrial Area Foundation’s income tax return—which the University happened to have in its possession—listing various Catholic groups as IAF’s principal source of financial support for that year.3
The Chicago newspapers balked at running any articles based on the University’s dossier, but eventually a piece was published in the student paper The Maroon, after being copyrighted under the name of the writer—a rare procedure which guaranteed the University immunity against a possible suit for libel. Under a banner headline reading “Church Supports ‘Hate Group,’” the article led off by announcing that the IAF had “received over $56,000 last year from the Chicago Catholic Bishop and the National Conference of Catholic Charities. . . . [and also] received approximately $43,000 from the two Catholic groups in 1958.” The article went on to quote Rev. Walter Kloetzli, a Lutheran minister, to the effect that the Catholic-IAF-TWO “conspiracy” was designed to keep Negroes locked up within Woodlawn in order to preserve the all-white parishes to the southwest and southeast. What was omitted from the article was any mention of the fact that Kloetzli’s charges had been raised two years before at a meeting of some thirty Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Catholic representatives, and that Alinsky had answered the charges to the satisfaction of virtually everyone present. For this reason and others, Joseph Sittler, the distinguished Lutheran theologian and a faculty member of the University, charged that the publication of the article had been “irresponsible.” Sittler also noted that on matters of integration in Chicago, the Catholic Church had been guided by “a wise and charitable policy.”4
In any event, the truth is that The Woodlawn Organization, far from being a Papist conspiracy, represents one of the most meaningful examples of Protestant-Catholic amity and cooperation to be found anywhere in the United States—an amity that extends from the fellowship among local church members and leaders to the close collaboration between the Archdiocese, the Chicago Presbytery, and the Church Federation of Chicago. Indeed, TWO’s involvement of church leaders of various denominations in direct social action to improve the Negro’s lot may prove to be its most enduring contribution. In Kansas City, Mo., for example, Presbyterians, Catholics, Episcopalians, and Jews are collaborating in an attempt to develop a program resembling that of TWO, while Catholics, Presbyterians, and Lutherans are doing the same in Gary, Indiana.
The controversy over the South Campus plan has been revealing in another respect. Federal legislation now requires as a condition of aid local citizen participation in the formulation of renewal plans, but the Woodlawn experience indicates that “participation” means something very different to planners and social scientists from what it means to the citizens being planned for. To the former, the requirement of “citizen participation” is satisfied by giving the local residents a chance to air their views after the plans have been drawn, not before; planning, in this view, is a matter for experts, and “participation” is really thought of as acquiescence.
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Certainly the Chicago planners showed no eagerness to engage the Woodlawn residents in any active role. In March 1962 the City Commission presented a comprehensive plan for Woodlawn which included a huge program of urban renewal clearance, conservation, and rehabilitation; a massive investigation of illiteracy, ill health, crime, and unemployment; and a pilot attack on these problems to be financed by government and foundation grants. When asked if the planning committee had been guided by opinions from the community, the committee’s coordinating consultant replied that “There is nobody to speak for the community. A community does not exist in Woodlawn.” Philip Hauser, a University of Chicago sociologist and another consultant, remarked that “the people there have only one common bond, opposition to the University of Chicago,” and added gratuitously, “this is a community that reads nothing.”
The two consultants were quickly disabused of these views. In conjunction with the Woodlawn Businessmen’s Association, TWO employed its own firm of city planners to analyze the City Commission’s plan and present alternate proposals. Besides issuing a detailed critique of the commission’s urban renewal plan for Woodlawn, TWO affirmed the principle that “self-determination applies in the field of social welfare. Therefore the best programs are the ones that we develop, pay for and direct ourselves. . . . Our aim is to lessen burdens in practical ways, but in ways that also guarantee we will keep our personal and community independence. We go on record as unqualifiedly opposing all notions of ‘social planning’ by either government or private groups. We will not be planned for as though we were children.” This radical assertion of independence did not please the planners. “Some of their resolutions against welfare are singularly unfortunate,” Philip Hauser was moved to say. “What would they do without welfare?” Other of his colleagues regarded the resolutions as “revolutionary” and even “subversive”—much to the bemusement of the Negroes of Woodlawn. “They’ve been calling us ‘welfare chiselers’ and ‘dependent’ and everything else,” said one TWO member. “Now they distrust us for trying things for ourselves.”
The University of Chicago sociologists and the professional planners may have resisted the message, but the Chicago politicians did not. Mayor Richard Daley brought the reluctant Chancellor of the University to his office to meet with TWO representatives. Eventually negotiators from both sides agreed on a compromise which called for construction of low-income housing on vacant land before any existing buildings were torn down. Thus, for the first time in the history of urban renewal, people displaced by demolition will have new homes waiting for them in the same neighborhood. Instead of the usual wholesale replacement of lower-class housing by “middle-income” units, Woodlawn will be renewed in stages. Only houses beyond salvage will be torn down, and units to be rehabilitated will be repaired without evicting tenants. City officials also agreed to give TWO majority representation on the citizens’ planning committee that will draw up further plans and supervise their execution, and Mayor Daley asked Dr. Blakely, one of the founders of TWO, to serve as chairman of the committee.
Forcing the University of Chicago and the city planners to take account of the community and its own desires is not the only victory TWO has won. As a result of TWO drives, double shifts have been eliminated and overcrowding has been substantially reduced in Woodlawn’s public schools; a number of Chicago firms have been persuaded to open up jobs for Negroes; and several local block organizations have been stimulated into cleaning up and maintaining their neighborhoods, as well as into pressuring landlords to repair buildings. TWO’s attacks on “the silent six” Negro aldermen of the city, moreover, have driven them into a position of militancy, thereby changing the whole complexion of Chicago politics.
But what finally makes The Woodlawn Organization so significant is not so much what it is doing for its members as what it is doing to them. When the first group from the community—forty-six busloads—went to City Hall to register, Alinsky commented that the chief point “was their own reaction. Many were weeping; others were saying, ‘They’re paying attention to us.’ ‘They’re recognizing that we’re people.’” Eighteen months later, an active member observed, “City Hall used to be a forbidden place, but we’ve made so many trips there and seen so many people that it’s beginning to feel like a neighborhood store.” Other members say similar things: “We’ve lost our fear of standing up and expressing ourselves.” “We don’t have to go hat in hand, begging, anymore.”
Besides giving its members a new sense of dignity and worth, The Woodlawn Organization has given a good many people a sense of direction and purpose and an inner discipline that have enabled them to overcome the disorganization of the Negro slum. As one TWO officer remarked, “the organization has given me a real sense of accomplishing something—the only time in my life I’ve had that feeling.” Like so many of Woodlawn’s Negroes, he had once wasted an enormous amount of time and energy because of personal inefficiency—a factor that originally made the work of Alinsky’s organizers far more difficult than it had been in any white slum. Even such an apparently simple matter as rounding up half a dozen people to hand out leaflets involved a major effort: those selected would turn up at different times, the leaflets would be lost or misplaced, or the volunteers would grow bored and give up. From month to month, however, the members learned to take orders, to carry out a task and follow through on it; bit by bit they began to learn to give orders themselves, to organize a rent strike or a rally, to talk on their feet and debate an issue at a meeting and to handle opposition. And as the discipline of the organization continues to impose itself on their own lives, it slowly transforms the individuals within it as well as the community they inhabit.
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It would be fatuous to pretend that Woodlawn has become a model community; it remains a slum, and it is still largely sunk in poverty and crime. However, it is a slum with hope—one that is developing the means of raising itself “by its own bootstraps.” “We’ve learned to live together and act as a community,” a TWO activist says—and adds, “Two years ago I didn’t know a soul.” Most of the problems that make Woodlawn what it is—high unemployment, lack of education, family disorganization, poor health—cannot be solved by a community organization alone. Enormous resources must still be poured into Woodlawn in the form of compensatory education, job retraining, advice on child-rearing, and preventive medicine. But experience in every city in the nation has also demonstrated that any paternalistic program imposed from above will be resisted and resented as “welfare colonialism.” The greatest contribution of an organization like TWO is its most subtle: it gives the slum residents the sense of dignity that makes it possible for them to accept help. For help now comes not as charity but as a response to their own initiative and power; they have decided what services they need and want. Hence social programs which the community, in the past, would have contemptuously ignored as one more instance of “Mr. Charlie’s brainwashing” are now eagerly sought after. Recent negotiations between TWO and the University of Chicago produced a nursery school program designed to reverse the effects of “cultural deprivation,” while cooperation between TWO and a team of psychiatrists has led to the setting up of some promising experiments in group therapy. And so, throughout this once completely depressed and deprived area, a new sense of energy and possibility is at work, and a new conception of social welfare has begun to take form in America.
1 In The Politics of Urban Renewal, a study of the University’s urban renewal program in the Hyde Park-Kenwood area, Peter H. Rossi and Robert A. Dentler note that the influence of the administration and trustees enabled Levi to represent “the most powerful community interests in demanding protection from the Chicago Department of Buildings and the Mayor’s Housing and Redevelopment Coordinator. Pressure on real-estate speculators was also channeled through the University’s strong connections with the business community. Banks and insurance companies were warned that their funds were in jeopardy when invested as mortgages on illegally converted property in the area. Insurance companies were persuaded to suspend policies written on badly maintained properties.”
2 Rossi and Dentler provide convincing documentation of this fact. For example: in answer to the question of “why the University did not consider expansion to the east (which seemed more plausible than expansion elsewhere in Hyde Park), a respondent high in the University administration replied that the area to the east contained ‘our people’ . . . Whether one liked it or not, neighborhood conservation and renewal meant the preservation of Hyde Park-Kenwood as a primarily white middle-class residential neighborhood.” (Italics theirs.)
3 The same income tax return was included in a dossier which the University sent to me in the fall of 1961, via a reporter, in the hope of dissuading me from writing about TWO in an article I was then preparing for Fortune. When I asked the reporter what the income tax return was supposed to demonstrate other than support of the IAF by the Catholic Church, he replied that Catholic support was in itself enough to discredit the IAF and TWO.
4 The Chicago Archdiocese, in fact, has been one of the most outspoken advocates of integration in the city. Monsignor John Egan of the Cardinal’s Committee on Conservation and Urban Renewal led the protest against the controversial Hyde Park-Kenwood urban renewal program, arguing that the plan would destroy a great deal of adequate housing occupied largely by Negroes, most of whom would be unable to afford the new apartments and houses that were to be erected.
