People Power: The Community Organizing Tradition of Saul Alinsky

Aaron Schutz · Mike Miller

Apr 2015 · Vanderbilt University Press

About this ebook

Saul Alinsky, according to Time Magazine in 1970, was a "prophet of power to the people," someone who "has possibly antagonized more people . . . than any other living American." People Power introduces the major organizers who adopted and modified Alinsky's vision across the United States:

--Fred Ross, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the Community Service Organization and National Farm Workers Association
--Nicholas von Hoffman and the Woodlawn Organization
--Tom Gaudette and the Northwest Community Organization
--Ed Chambers, Richard Harmon, and the Industrial Areas Foundation
--Shel Trapp, Gale Cincotta, and National People's Action
--Heather Booth, Midwest Academy, and Citizen Action
--Wade Rathke and ACORN

Weaving classic texts with interviews and their own context-setting commentaries, the editors of People Power provide the first comprehensive history of Alinsky-based organizing in the tumultuous period from 1955 to 1980, when the key organizing groups in the United States took form. Many of these selections--previously available only on untranscribed audiotapes or in difficult-to-read mimeograph or Xerox formats--appear in print here for the first time.

About the author

Aaron Schutz, Professor, Department of Educational Policy and Community Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is the author of two previous books on social action.

Mike Miller was a leader in the pre-1960s' birth of the student movement at UC Berkeley, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee field secretary, and director of an Alinsky community organizing project. He has been an organizer for more than fifty years.