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Copyright (c) 1995 by Robert Fisher, all rights reserved. This work may be copied in whole or in part, with proper attribution, as long as the copying is not-for-profit "fair use" for research, commentary, study, or teaching. For other permission, please contact the author.

A revised version of this essay will appear in Dennis Keating, Norman Krumholz, and Phil Star, eds. REVITALIZING URBAN NEIGHBORHOODS (University Press of Kansas, forthcoming).

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NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZING: THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Robert Fisher

INTRODUCTION

Neighborhood organizing has a history as old as the neighborhood concept itself. It is certainly not simply a product of sixties dissent. New Social Movement theory argues that community-based resistances -- around geographic communities such as a neighborhood or communities of cultural identity such as the black or women's community -- have become the dominant form of social action since the 1960s, replacing more class and labor based organizing.(1) Unlike other commentators who propose that neighborhood organizing is disappearing, little more than a vestige of earlier urban spatial relations in an industrial society, new social movement theorists argue that community-based resistances, such as neighborhood organizing, become in a post-industrial order the primary means of social change. While this theory has much to contribute to our understanding of the contemporary salience of community-based organizing and the importance of this collection of essays, it tends to overlook the rich and significant history prior to the 1960s that undergirds current efforts.

To illustrate the point, this essay begins with a discussion of the varied types of neighborhood organizing that have persisted since the late nineteenth century and the lessons to be learned from them. It follows with a discussion of neighborhood organizing in the 1980s, arguing that the political economy of the larger historical context is fundamental to understanding the nature and potential of neighborhood organizing in any historical period.

TYPES OF NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZING

Since the 1880s, there have been three main types of neighborhood organizing (See Table 1). The social work approach is best characterized by the social settlement movement, which began in the United States in 1886, and by contemporary social service delivery at the neighborhood level, such as neighborhood centers or health clinics. The political activist approach is best reflected in the work of oppositional efforts which see power as the fundamental issue. These date back to the ward-based political machines of the nineteenth century, but as social efforts are best reflected in the efforts of the Communist Party in the 1930s, the efforts of Saul Alinsky and followers since the late 1930s, New Left neighborhood organizing in the 1960s, and a host of current neighborhood based grouping since then, perhaps most notably in African-American and gay male communities. The neighborhood maintenance approach also originated in the late 19th century, when more middle class residents sought to defend their neighborhood against change and perceived threats. The ongoing history since the 1920s of neighborhood protective associations, whose primary concern is maintaining or improving property values, is the classic example.(2)

TABLE 1

History of Neighborhood Organizing: Three Dominant Approaches

Social Work Political Activist Neighborhood

Maintenance

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Concept of social organism political unit neighborhood

Community power base residence

Problem social powerlessness threats to

condition disorganization exploitation property values

social conflict neighborhood or neighborhood

destruction homogeneity

insufficient

services

Organized working & lower working & lower upper &

group class class middle class

Role of professional political activist elected

organizer social worker mobilizer spokesperson

enabler & advocate educator civic leader

coordinator & interest-group

planner broker

Role of partners with fellow activists dues-paying

neighborhood professional indigenous members

residents recipients of leaders

benefits mass support

Strategy seek consensus engage in conflict seek

pursue gradualist mediate consensus

tactics challenge power apply peer

work with power structure pressure

structure do political

promote social reform lobbying

engage in

legal action

Goals form groups obtain, maintain, improve property

achieve social or restructure value

integration power maintain

deliver services develop alternative neighborhood

bring about social institutions deliver services

justice

Examples social settlements Unemployed Councils neighborhood

community centers tenant organizations preservation

Cincinnati Social Alinsky programs associations

Unit Plan Student Nonviolent neighborhood

community chests Coordinating civic clubs

United Community Committee (SNCC) property

Defense Services Students for a owners'

Community Action Democratic Society associations

Program (SDS)

United Way Association of

Community

Organizations

for Reform Now

(ACORN)

LESSONS FROM THE PAST

Simply stated, there have been a number of key lessons from the past of neighborhood organizing that should inform the study of contemporary efforts.

1) Neighborhood organizing has a long and important history. As the Table and examples above illustrate, neighborhood organizing is not simply a product of the past generation, not a transitory phenomenon. It is a means of democratic participation, a means of extra-political activity, a way to build community, obtain resources, and achieve collective goals. Neighborhood organization has been an integral, on-going, and significant basis of civil life in the United States for more than a century. Whereas people continually choose in astounding numbers not to participate in the electoral process, underscoring both the inability of politicians to galvanize the electorate and the alienation of citizens from the political process, this is not true for participation in neighborhood organizations. Americans have always turned most easily to organizations at the grassroots level to build community, meet individual and collective needs, and participate in public life. This is as true today as it was one hundred years ago.

2) Neighborhood organizing cuts across the political spectrum. While all neighborhood organizing is a public activity, bringing people together to discuss and determine their collective welfare, it is not inherently reactionary, conservative, liberal, or radical. Nor is it inherently inclusive and democratic, or parochial and authoritarian. It is above all a political method, an approach used by varied segments of the population to achieve specific goals, serve certain interests, and advance clear or ill- defined political perspectives. Organizations can be creative efforts open to innovation and supportive of progressive struggles as well as defensive responses to external pressures. The form an organization takes depends on a number of factors, especially the ideology and goals of its leadership, constituency organized, and local context.

3) Neighborhood organizing efforts develop in a larger context that transcends local borders and determines the dominant form of neighborhood organizing in any era. Conditions at the local level directly spawn and nurture neighborhood organizing projects. The organizers, residents, local conditions, and many other factors at the grassroots level combine to forge consistently unique neighborhood organizing experiences. But while neighborhood organizing projects do have a significant origin, nature, and existence of their own at the local level, they are also the products of national and even international political and economic developments. To no small degree, the larger political-economic context determines the general tenor, goals and strategies, even the likelihood of success, of local efforts.

Examples abound. It was the liberal reform political economy of the Progressive Era, the period from approximately 1900 through 1917, that responded positively to the social settlement idea and that legitimated the first era of neighborhood organizing. While other types of neighborhood organizing existed in this period, it was the social work approach, best exemplified in the social settlements and the Cincinnati Social Unit Plan, which dominated the era.

In the depression era of the 1930s the social work approach had much less salience and support. As capitalism collapsed, as one reform solution after another failed to halt the economic depression, the political activist type of neighborhood organizing, most notably the radical efforts of the Communist Party in many cities and the urban populist work of Saul Alinsky in the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago, personified grassroots activity. The hotly debated and precarious political economy of the era legitimated citizen action and political ferment at the grassroots level.

In the post World War II era the conservative cold war economy stifled the political activist approach of the depression era and nurtured the neighborhood maintenance type of neighborhood organizing. Of course, homeowners' and property associations had been strong in the United States since the 1920s. The business of protecting property values was important especially in the United States, where homes were economic investments and where the lack of government protection and support for maintaining communities put the onus of neighborhood maintenance and development on property owners. The conservative eras of the 1920s and 1950s, however, tied this necessity for neighborhood associations to a reactionary politics. Segregationist goals became quite typical of neighborhood associations, interconnecting the protection of property values with a politics of neighborhood exclusion.

Of course the relationship between the national political economy and neighborhood organizing is not a one way street where the dominant form of neighborhood organizing is determined by the national political economy of an era. (3) The historical process is much more complex, more of a dialectical interaction between the national political economy and grassroots resistances and initiatives. In the 1960s and the first part of the 1970s, when the political activist type of neighborhood organizing came to dominate again, the national political economy both produced the change and was the product of it. It was the grassroots resistance of the southern civil rights movement, the student New Left, and the rebellion in black urban slums that pushed the national political economy left, that expanded the political discourse to legitimate grassroots resistance, that demanded the passage of social policy to address the needs of the poor and people of color. The shift in political economy at the national level, expanded with LBJ's Great Society and War on Poverty programs, developed in response to these challenges. These legitimated further the political activist approach, so much so that a heyday of political activist neighborhood organizing continued well into and through the 1970s, causing some commentators to herald a "backyard revolution" in the making. It is this interpenetration between the national political economy and community organizing that comes across so vividly in the history of neighborhood efforts. (4)

NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZING IN THE 1980S: CONTEXTUALIZING PRACTICE

The importance of the national, even global, political economy in shaping the nature of neighborhood organizing is especially evident in the 1980s, in the increasing importance of CDCs and the widespread adoption by most neighborhood organizations of more moderate strategies.

In the 1980s, as we know all too well, the United States made a clear turn to rightwing politics at the national level. The twelve years of Reagan/Bush policy from 1981-1993 promoted a neoconservative agenda grounded in rightwing programs, policies, and political discourse. Responding to the heightened demands of an emerging global economy and the challenged status of U.S. corporations in it, neoconservatives sought to cut social costs. They went after labor unions, government programs, and claimant movements; they shifted even the limited political dialog about human needs completely to corporate needs; they delegitimized the public sector and public life and pushed people into increasingly private spheres and private conceptions of the good life.

In the neoconservative 1980s, the impact of national context on local organizing was enormous. While a wide variety of efforts continued, promoting democratic resistance and left insurgency, it was the neoconservative political economy that largely determined the direction of most community organizing during the decade, pushing them into community economic development and moderate strategies.

Community Economic Development

In general during the 1980s concern with broader social issues and social action receded. In the economic crisis of the past few decades, economic survival became the paramount issue for most individuals, organizations, businesses, and cities. As economic support for social services and solving social problems declined due to opposition at the federal level and shrinking tax bases at the local, and as political discourse in the nation revolved around free market solutions to all problems, neighborhood organizing efforts moved into the business of economic development.(5)

This trend is nowhere more evident than in the rapid growth and spread of community development corporations (CDCs) in the 1980s. CDCs first sprang up in the 1960s, when they were tied to the civil rights and anti-poverty movements of the period, and were funded by a few foundations and Great Society programs. In this first wave were only about a 100 organizations, but among them were such well-funded, significant efforts such as The Woodlawn Organization and the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. For its multitude of important projects the Bed-Stuy CDC received about $4 million in federal support annually.

The second wave of community development organizations came in the 1970s, when the number of development projects increased tenfold. These were smaller efforts that began in opposition to urban renewal, redlining, factory closings, or the lack of tenant rights. For those involved in community economic development, most funds came from foundations, primarily The Ford Foundation, and federal sources, such as the Community Services Administration and the Office of Neighborhood Development. The idea of community economic development caught on in the Carter Administration, and by the late 1970s, CDCs, with all their virtues and drawbacks, were central components of the limited but significant, federally- assisted neighborhood development movement.

Beginning around 1980, however, CDCs found government support drastically cut. The new, third wave of CDCs that developed in the privatization campaigns of the Reagan years were forced into becoming much more businesslike than their predecessors. They had to exhibit "business talent and development skills once thought to be the exclusive province of the for-profit sector," as one report put it. (6)

The Community Services Administration and the Office of Neighborhood Development were dismantled. Other sources of federal funds were dramatically cut back. The bottom line for CDCs, as with seeming everything else in the decade, was economic success. The primary goal, as Benjamin Marquez argues in an astute analysis of CDCs role, was to "correct the market's failure to provide jobs and services to the community." Added to this, for the CDCs in minority neighborhoods, was to help build a non-white middle class by developing highly specific and measurable development projects in which neighborhood people could work for their own economic betterment. (7) The new CDCs became less like community organization and more like small businesses and investment projects, evaluated on their economic success. Most avoided political controversy, were dominated by professionals with a technical orientation, had narrow memberships bases, and rejected social action activity.

While market demands forced most CDCs to become so oriented to economic success that they were not able to sustain their work for community empowerment, they did not always give up on these goals by choice. They were forced into it. The absence of public support, newly rigid interpretations of IRS restrictions on political activity of nonprofit groups, the necessity of seeking funds from and joining in partnerships with private sector leaders, and the orientation of the CDC approach to economic investment and development decisions, all pushed CDCs away from politics and an analysis of power. "This lack of fiscal and political support," Marquez concludes, "has forced CDCs to accommodate themselves to rather than redirect the course of the free market."

Economic development has become a central issue for progressive organizing efforts that formerly spurned or discounted the strategy. Many older, prominent community organizing efforts now do community economic development, from ACORN to NPA (National People's Action) and IAF (Industrial Areas Foundation). To their credit, these political activist projects see community economic development as part of a much larger program of community work that also includes organizing, empowerment, advocacy, and social action. Still, community economic development has become virtually synonymous with neighborhood organizing, as if organizing and empowerment were rooted in economic development issues, as if neighborhood struggles were always the same as community economic development, as if working in partnership with local banks and putting in "sweat equity" were the answers to urban poverty and housing shortages.

It has not quite worked out that way. "If the primary success story of the last 25 years has been the development of a legitimate, skilled nonprofit development sector with the proven capacity to create and preserve housing, jobs and businesses," Bill Traynor of the Community Training and Assistance Center in Boston sums up the problem, "the major failure has been the proliferation and dominance of a narrowly focused -- technical -- production related model of community development which is estranged from strong neighborhood control or direction and which does not impact the range of issues which affect poor neighborhoods." (8)

Moderate Strategies

Most activists promoting community economic development would probably defend their consensual approach as appropriate for the Reagan-Bush years. To have a chance at community development, efforts must be in tune with capitalist economic development and have a working relationship with the powers that be in the public and private sector. Given the shift in the national political economy, organizers think they must now be more community economic development minded.

Neo-Alinsky organizer Shel Trapp sees a natural progression in his work. First, organizations defend the neighborhood; then they take an "offensive" stance. "That's when you start to link development with organizing," he argues. (9) Robert Rivera, an IAF organizer, puts it similarly: "There are two types of organizing. One that is for, the other is against. Now you have to be for something. It's a different style of organizing." (10)

But at play in the 1980s was more than a "life cycle" of organizing. Community economic development and building community partnerships with local economic and political elites became the dominant form of neighborhood organizing because of the demands and constraints of organizing in a neoconservative political economy. Organizers were willing to rewrite history (good organizing has always been for things) in an effort to distance themselves from the radicalism of the past, maintain current support, and legitimate their efforts in a context hostile to social action.

The changes that took place in community development corporations are emblematic of the way organizing responded to the conservative context of the '80s, but moderate strategies during that period were by no means limited to CDCs. Most neopopulist, political activist neighborhood organizing efforts during the 1980s and early 1990s adopted more moderate strategies, and a more moderated version of oppositional politics. Battle lines shifted. "To a surprising extent, claim M. W. Newman and Lillian Williams in a recent Chicago Sun Times article, "the grass roots no longer 'fight the power.' They fight for a share of the power. Sometimes they win a sizable share.... [Sometimes they] team up with the established elite that they once derided and that once spurned them." (11) Even National People's Action (NPA), criticized by some organizers as too confrontational, opposed being "out in the streets making symbolic statements, when you can be in the boardroom negotiating specific agreements that win for neighborhoods." (12)

Consider the evolution of the Industrial Areas Foundation, the direct descendant of Alinsky organizing, over the past decade. IAF currently has 28 organizing projects in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Tennessee, Arizona, California, and Texas, but it is in Texas, where the IAF network includes 10 organizing efforts, that it is the strongest. Throughout the state, in San Antonio, Houston, El Paso, Austin, Fort Worth, and in the Rio Grande Valley, IAF organizers and active members struggle for utility reform, improved public education, government accountability, healthcare for the indigent, and basic public services, including water and sewers for the "colonias". Most visibly they organize "get out the vote" efforts to promote bond packages to help IAF neighborhoods, hold "accountability sessions" to keep politicians publicly in line with IAF objectives, encourage voter registration, and work to improve schools by halting the drop out rate, stopping drug use and violence, and getting parents more involved. More quietly, in the day in and day out practice of community organizing they serve as "schools of public life," empowering neighborhood residents by giving them "an opportunity to do something about things that [they] have been frustrated all their lives." (13)

IAF organizations do all this remarkably well, as many commentators have noted. Peter Applebome in the New York Times proposed that the IAF Network is "in ways large and small ... changing politics in Texas." And Mary Beth Rogers, ex-Chief of Staff to Texas Governor Ann Richards, concludes in her study of Texas IAF that these "are virtually the only organizations in America that are enticing working poor people to participate in politics." (14)

While still following much of the Alinsky style of organizing, in the 1980s IAF made some significant changes in their organizing method to meet the needs of new constituents and adapt to the demands of a new conservative context. The major change in IAF organizing is a shift from a radical politics to a strategy of moderation. Where CDCs look for consensus, IAF groups focus on the importance of "standing for the whole."

Of course, many in power still see IAF as a radical protest group, and even during Alinsky's lifetime some IAF projects, such as The Woodlawn Organization, shifted from "conflict to coexistence." In the 1980s, however, this developed into an organizing credo. Now, IAF seeks to organize "community sustainers" and "core moderates," especially women in mainline religious congregations and civic organizations. They want the civic volunteers who already work tirelessly for the PTA or church group -- the folks, IAF says, who already protect the community and stand for the whole.

The strategy of moderation pushes IAF organizers to distance themselves from radicals and social movements. Whereas Alinsky took pride in being a radical, in the current IAF radicals are seen as alienated outsiders. "IAF now almost makes a fetish of its commitment to moderates," notes organizer trainer Mike Miller in a recent article in Christianity and Crisis. "Will the next book be Reveille for Moderates?" (15)

Standing for the whole seeks to legitimize grassroots organizing in the eyes of both the powerless and the powerful, both of whom IAF assumes, as do CDC proponents, to be fundamentally moderate in outlook. It seeks to create a working relationship between those with and without power in order to promote the interests of its members. In the 1980s confronting government officials became -- according to IAF -- less and less productive. Even when local government officials were sympathetic with the issues, they felt they did not have the resources to address them. So "standing for the whole" now includes developing working relationships with business and government leaders in order to further the goals of both IAF constituents and the larger community. (16)

The strategy of moderation, the commitment to moderates, the grounding of IAF efforts in mainstream religious institutions, and a definition of power which emphasizes building relationships leads, however, to a politics which limits the parameters of IAF's work, and excludes alliances with other movement activists and organizations, as Mike Miller and others persuasively argue. It encourages IAF to work alone with its constituency and mainstream allies, and to avoid confronting the harsh realities of power that oppress their constituents.

The moderate strategy, for all its short-term gains, is fraught with traps. Most important, the emphasis on moderation and negotiation and a more interest group style of politics changes the role of the organizer. Standing for the whole moves IAF away from the Alinsky idea of the organizer being in the background, working his or her way out of a job, focusing on primarily developing community residents to lead the organization. The more IAF gets involved in negotiating with government officials and corporate executives, the more the organizers have come center stage to be the brokers and spokespersons for the organization. And the more the organizer becomes the broker, the more potential, as in all interest group organizing, to be both coopted and, worse, ignored. Moderate strategy ultimately bargains away the tactic of radical protest. The American Medical Association and other powerful interest groups can afford to be moderate; poor and working people must always fight for power.

NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZING IN THE '90S

The responses of grassroots efforts to shifts in the national political economy always produce strategies that both replicate and challenge existing power relations. For all its obvious limitations, a focus on community economic development has built a broad base of real technical expertise and created innovative projects which in a limited way help meet the dire need for housing and in poor neighborhoods. The politics of moderation gives up on more radical change but it helps build the capacity for governance, gets advocates to the bargaining table, and wins modest victories.

Given the dramatic tensions and shifts occurring worldwide, both in the global economy and in national political struggles, we can expect in the near future to see the political economy encourage more of the same: continued proliferation and preference for grassroots efforts, continued focus on community economic development as global competition remains heated and as nation- states and corporate-elites persist in avoiding domestic social needs, and continued diverse strategies with most funding and support going to moderate approaches which are willing to work with business and government leaders.

Current events will likely continue to overwhelm such neighborhood efforts. It is much more difficult to be optimistic now about the prospects of neighborhood organizing than it was just 15 years ago. It is no paradox neoconservatives call for neighborhood-based solutions and "empowerment" of citizens; they know well that these are less expensive strategies for problems that require costly national and global solutions and neighborhood- based initiatives. Without the existence of a social movement able to push the national political discourse left, win funding for social programs and redistributional policies, and struggle for state power, we can expect, at best, incremental change from the top and important but modest victories at the grassroots. Whatever the context ahead, neighborhood organizing, even with its limits, will remain essential: as schools of democracy and progressive citizenship, as seeds of larger resistance efforts, as demonstrations of the persistence of public life in an increasingly private world, as the vehicles of struggle in which we win victories, develop skills, forge identity, and legitimate opposition, and as potential grassroots components of the next major social justice movement. To play such roles, however, neighborhood organizing must both build on and go beyond the contemporary context. It must benefit from the new skills and strategies learned in the 1980s and challenge the neoconservative political economy which heavily shaped organizing in the past decade. While the history of neighborhood organizing makes clear that national context is fundamental, it also instructs that conflict -- ideological and direct action challenges -- is essential to push the context, policies, and programs towards meeting basic human needs and implementing more democratic processes.

Robert Fisher teaches social policy and community organization at the Graduate School of Social Work, University of Houston, where he is also chair of the program in Political Social Work. Most recently, he authored a second edition of Let The People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America (Twayne, 1994).

NOTES

1. See, for starters, Barbara Epstein, `Rethinking Social Movement Theory.' SOCIALIST REVIEW 90 (January-March, 1990), 35-66; Robert Fisher and Joseph Kling, eds., MOBILIZING THE COMMUNITY: LOCAL POLITICS IN THE ERA OF THE GLOBAL CITY (Sage, 1993).

2. See Robert Fisher, LET THE PEOPLE DECIDE: NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZING IN AMERICA Updated Edition (Twayne, 1994) for introductory discussions of these efforts and bibliography for further reading. Mike Davis, CITY OF QUARTZ (New York: Vintage, 1992) offers a scathing critique of the reactionary nature of homeowner's associations in Los Angeles.

3. There are other caveats to offer related to the typology of neighborhood organizing and the relationship between national and neighborhood efforts. For example, each type of neighborhood organizing is evident in all eras. It is not as though one ends and the other begins. For the past century there have been continuous efforts at building service delivery organization, radical opposition, and neighborhood protection associations. It is just that each period tends to produce a *dominant* form most appropriate to it. In addition, there is a good deal of overlapping in the types. Political activist organizations also deliver services. Service organizations also seek to maintain neighborhoods. Neighborhood maintenance often entails being very political and activist. Nevertheless, the essential points of this essay remain: neighborhood organizing has a long history, this history reveals a highly varied politics, and the national political economy is critical to shaping a dominant form of neighborhood organizing in varied historical eras.

4. A debate currently rages in urban politics between political process and structural theorists, not to mention poststructuralists. For a discussion of the theoretical debate see John Logan and Todd Swanstrom, eds., BEYOND THE CITY LIMITS (Temple University Press, 1990); and Robert Fisher and Joseph Kling, eds., MOBILIZING THE COMMUNITY: LOCAL POLITICS IN THE ERA OF THE GLOBAL CITY (Sage, 1993). I do not intend here to minimize the importance of the organizer and local context in the organizing process; I would, however, argue that changes in organizing strategy that seem natural and internally initiated (decisions made by organizers and activists or influenced by local factors) are usually products of or at least are heavily influenced by larger contextual changes (decisions made within a limited set of externally structured choices).

5. Neal B. Peirce and Carol F. Steinbach, ENTERPRISING COMMUNITIES: COMMUNITY BASED DEVELOPMENT IN AMERICA, 1990 (Washington, D.C.: Council for Community-Based Development, 1990), 15-16.

6. Peirce and Steinbach, CORRECTIVE CAPITALISM, 30.

7. Benjamin Marquez, "Mexican American Community Development Corporations and the Limits of Directed Capitalism," manuscript, 6. Article will be published in ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT QUARTERLY 7 (no. 3), forthcoming.

8. Bill Traynor, "Community Development and Community Organizing," SHELTERFORCE (March/April, 1993 #68), 4.

9. Trapp quoted in Jeffrey L. Katz, "Neighborhood Politics: A Changing World," GOVERNING (Novvember, 1990), 49.

10. Robert Rivera, lecture at the University of Houston, April 18, 1991.

11. M. W. Newman and Lillian Williams, "People Power: Chicago's Real Clout," in CHICAGO SUN TIMES, April 6, 1990, 12.

12. Shel Trapp, "Dynamics of Organizing," DISCLOSURE (March- April, 1992), 2.

13. Ernesto Cortes quoted in Harry Boyte, COMMONWEALTH: A RETURN TO CITIZEN POLITICS (New York: Free Press, 1989), 191, endnote 21.

14. Peter Applebome, "Changing Texas Politics at its Roots," NEW YORK TIMES May 31, 1988; Mary Beth Rogers, COLD ANGER: A STORY OF FAITH AND POWER POLITICS (Denton: North Texas State University Press, 1990), 2.

15. Mike Miller, "Saul Alinsky and the Democratic Spirit," CHRISTIANITY AND CRISIS 52 (May 25, 1992) copy sent to author, no page numbers.

16. "Standing for the Whole," Industrial Areas Foundation statement, 1990; ORGANIZING FOR TEXAS FAMILIES AND CONGREGATIONS, referenced in Pearl Caesar, ed., "Texas IAF Network: Vision, Values, and Action," brochure published by Texas IAF Network, 1990), 13.

Bob Fisher Graduate School of Social Work University of Houston Houston, Texas 77204-4492 Tel: 713 743-8112 Fax: 713 743-8149 Internet: bfisher@uh.edu

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