By David Moberg
Reynolds and Ostendorf didn’t get to be buddies by sharing an interest in sports or poker or bird-watching–they’re allies in a vastly ambitious project to transform the public life of greater Chicago. As part of a disparate coalition of 85 people–blacks, whites, Latinos, and Asians drawn from both the city and suburbs, from virtually every major religious faith and secular groups as well–they’re among the early leaders of a new metropolitan citizens’ organization. This Sunday the group hopes to assemble more than 10,000 supporters at the UIC Pavilion to help launch United Power for Action & Justice, an association of nearly 300 different churches, unions, social service agencies, and community organizations reflecting the racial, religious, economic, and geographic diversity of the Chicago area.
On March 6, 1995, the church leaders–stationed beneath a banner emblazoned with the words “Power Action Justice”–announced the formation of Chicago Metropolitan Sponsors. Under the guidance of the IAF, Chicago Metropolitan Sponsors would hire organizers and provide funds to sustain the resulting association until the year 2000, when it would have to rely on dues from its members. Eventually the list of sponsors swelled to include other Protestant churches, Jewish congregations, mainstream Muslim groups, and three of the state’s largest labor unions–the Service Employees International Union, the Illinois Education Association, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees–bringing the total investment in building the organization to $2.6 million. Chicago Metropolitan Sponsors hired the IAF to do the organizing, but both the IAF and the new group would remain accountable to the sponsors until the association gained financial independence. An “organization of organizations,” this new group was following the traditional patterns of community organizing first established in the late 1930s, when Alinsky helped found the Back of the Yards Council near Chicago’s stockyards.
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In Chicago the IAF spawned the influential Community Action Program, which battled air pollution and the first Mayor Daley’s proposed Crosstown Expressway, which threatened to destroy many city neighborhoods. By 1976, however, CAP collapsed, and the IAF moved out of Chicago. It left behind a community of organizers, some of whom rebelled against the IAF style (at that time, for example, women were not encouraged to be organizers). Community organizing flourished in Chicago, and experienced organizers established several training centers here that had national influence, including the Midwest Academy, the Gamaliel Foundation, and the National Training and Information Center. New approaches to organizing also emerged. The statewide Illinois Public Action Council, now Illinois Citizen Action, was an early example of organizing on a larger scale, and later many community groups moved from traditional protest actions to a variety of other strategies, including economic development initiatives, job retention efforts, and the construction of affordable housing. A variety of advocacy groups formed around specific issues like school reform or the environment. But these issue-oriented groups often ignored communities. While there continued to be some grassroots and church-based organizing, on the whole community organizing in Chicago declined during the last decade.
The city had changed as well. The old machine both organized people and served as a target for community organizers. As the machine declined, so did the independent political organizations in the neighborhoods. The movement spurred by Harold Washington’s election as mayor collapsed after his death, and the new machine of Richard M. Daley was largely based on an inversion of the Washington coalition (linking lakefront middle-class whites and Latinos to ethnic working-class whites on the northwest and southwest sides) and followed the money and goals of the city’s developers and business elite. Meanwhile, metropolitan Chicago sprawled outward, and the urban center lost jobs, especially in manufacturing. Growing joblessness and inequality isolated parts of the city, and the federal government no longer offered much help. “When Daley’s dad was in power, you could get a bunch of people, go to City Hall, beat on the walls, and money would fall out of the windows,” says Gale Cincotta, executive director of the National Training and Information Center. “Now the city isn’t so rich.”
Yet IAF groups see themselves engaged in a larger, longer-term mission. As citizen organizations they operate, according to San Antonio organizer Ernesto Cortes, as “mini-universities to teach about public life. We are creating the infrastructure and intermediate institutions that are required for civil society, the prerequisites for pro-family, pro-worker politics.”
At the start of a ten-day training session in June 1995, Ed Chambers began the class discussion with an account of the war between the Athenians and the Melians by the Greek historian Thucydides. It set up his epigrammatic discussion of power and organizing.
