Ella Baker Source: https://www.biography.com/.image/ar_1:1%2Cc_fill%2Ccs_srgb%2Cg_face%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_300/MTIwNjA4NjMzNzMyNDk4OTU2/ella-baker-9195848-1-402.jpg
Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book Rules for Radicals is a guide to effective community organizing, though he has something to learn from Ella Baker’s lived example. Baker was on the cutting edge of community activism in Black communities throughout much of the 20th century. She centered community over the organizer.
Alinsky claims that the job of community organizers is to create actionable problems. Generating an actionable problem, according to Alinsky, is a process of community agitation that relies on the building of power. Baker sheds light on how Alinsky’s tenet of community organizing can be improved: the community organizer should generate actionable problems, but they should do so based on community priorities rather than simply for the sake of a “win.”
A major role of community organizers is to dissect and understand particular issues within an unjust environment, and then help their community see paths to addressing those issues. The key role of the organizer is to illustrate that there are actionable “issues,” not just a “bad scene” (Alinsky, 1989, p. 119). Alinsky defines an issue as “something you can do something about, but as long as you feel powerless and unable to do anything about it, all you have is a bad scene” (Alinsky, 1989, p. 119). Alinsky advocates for the organizer to engage in action-oriented community empowerment. Effectively, the organizer’s “biggest job is to give the people the feeling that they can do something, that while they may accept the idea that organization means power, they have to experience this idea in action” (Alinsky, 1989, pp. 113–114). That is why he suggests that organizers try to give their communities wins. He seeks to highlight specific issues, dramatize injustice and show that something can be done to effectively change circumstances (Alinsky, 1989).
Cover of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Source:upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/62/Rules_for_Radicals.png/220px-Rules_for_Radicals.png
What does that process look like?
For Alinsky, creating an actionable problem is part of a wider process of agitating a community and garnering power through numbers. The first step is addressing apathy in a community: the organizer should bring to light the latent discontents within a community, a process that involves engaging with controversy (1989). The next step is to move people to participate and act. Alinksy frames this process through a lens of power: the organizer should “develop and harness the necessary power to effectively conflict with the prevailing patterns and change them” (Alinsky, 1989, p. 117). The organizer is simultaneously disrupting the status quo and harnessing the power of the masses (Alinsky, 1989). Part of the process of harnessing power is giving the community “wins” (Alinsky, 1989). Wins are perceived successes, but also any action or initiative—failed or successful—that brings in more members and by extension, more power (Alinsky, 1989). The next step relies on Alinsky’s premise that demoralization and resentment of circumstances result in inaction when there is a “lack of opportunity for effective action” (Alinsky, 1989, p. 117).
Keeping Ella Baker in mind, Alinsky offers key takeaways for organizers:
- Center your community – let the community determine priorities
- Show your community that the wider set of problems or challenges in your community contains specific actionable issues
- Address apathy in your community; bring light to problems
- Motivate people to participate and act; harness power, gain numbers