Calling All Radicals: How Grassroots Organizers Can Save Our Democracy, by
Gabriel Thompson, Nation Books, $14.95.
Tools for Radical Democracy: How to Organize for Power in Your Community, by Joan Minieri and Paul Getsos, Chardon Press, $29.95.
Social change is often depicted as the reaction to one charismatic leader’s actions or the outcome of a landmark court case. In this simplistic definition, the civil rights movement is boiled down to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches, the marches that beat down Jim Crow, and Brown v. Board of Education calling for the end of “separate but equal” schools. Apart from its over-simplicity, such a portrayal also overlooks the tedious tasks and gruntwork of unknown organizers along the way. It misses the numerous meetings where snacks are supplied, strategy is planned and action is agreed upon.
Organizing, quite simply, is getting a group of people to participate in collective action to affect change. Three recent books serve as guides to organizers building community groups, unions and other social change organizations. Two of these works could be characterized as textbooks – “Tools For Radical Democracy,” by Joan Minieri and Paul Getsos, and “Building Powerful Community Organizations,” by Michael Jacoby Brown. “Calling All Radicals,” by Gabriel Thompson, gives helpful tips on organizing while maintaining a more anecdotal narrative flow.
Minieri and Getsos both did organizing work with Community Voices Heard, a Harlem-based community and labor organizing group whose successful “jobs campaign” is referenced throughout the book. The campaign improved working conditions for low-income public housing residents participating in “welfare to work” job programs in the late 1990s. Jacoby Brown has a similar background in community and labor organizing, working on such diverse campaigns as improving firefighters’ work conditions and affordable utility rates for consumers. Thompson, meanwhile, was a tenant organizer at the Pratt Area Community Council and an author and journalist (writing in City Limits, New York, The Nation and elsewhere).
All three books pay tribute to legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky, while only “Calling All Radicals” offers pointed criticism of Alinsky’s style. A self-described radical and author of classic organizing books (“Reveille for Radicals” and “Rules For Radicals”), Alinsky began organizing for better living conditions during the Great Depression in Chicago’s slum neighborhoods. Alinsky advocated appealing to people’s self-interest and creating local neighborhood organizations to run campaigns and target those in power to create social change. Alinsky’s direct action tactics – actions like pickets, protests and sit-ins done to confront your target – are still gospel in most community groups and unions today.
“Tools For Radical Democracy” and “Building Powerful Community Organizations” are the most explicit about how to build organizations for social change. The Alinskian mantra “building power” appears throughout each book and is defined by Minieri and Getsos as the “ability to act and to make things happen.” Building power is the job of every organizer and community group so that they can create change. Their textbook format lays out in bullet points how to build leadership, choose campaigns and targets, and sustain an organization. Both books offer various case studies, rooted in Getsos’ coalition-building in uptown Manhattan and Jacoby Brown’s decades' worth of agitating around workplace issues across the country. The textbooks also offer exercises and work sheets at the ends of chapters on such mundane organizing work as phone banking, door knocking, media relations and preparing testimony to elected officials.
