"As to Alinsky, no one I have known seriously attacted to his work has believed that any fundamental change (not just revolution but reforms) is necessary or desirable in the u.s. social relations. Alinksy's tactics are designed to help limited groups of people operating within the context of those social relations as a given." Carrol(?)
did he invent affirmative action? fs
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That wasn't a serious question, right?
Alinsky's real contribution was tactical rather than theoretical or strategic. His main thing was going down to the street level and working there. All of that was a contribution and a benefit to any movement. Of course it was bound by its own historical context. But the basic idea and methods were fine as far as they went.
Later movements in community action needed to add (and did) to the basic thrust of Alinsky's trip. He depended a great deal on benefactors, established reform movements within labor unions, and other already established institutions like foundations, academic institutes and so forth. And he also depended on his own personal contacts with the political power in place.
All of those ingredients were and still are necessary. And creativity. Let's not forget that. Alinsky was very creative in figuring out ways to put the screws to who ever he was after, a company, a city council, a business association. Part of that creativity was his ability to figure out weak points in the particular establishment powers, and their relational interdependencies to one another. All of this works together to figure out what tactics and methods might work.
What was missing with Alinsky was a large scale agenda (beyond his own ego). And that was deliberate. From his point of view, the agenda needs to arise from the street, from the people. It's their lives and immediate problems that inform the issues, not the other way around.
The civil rights movements particularly SCLC used virtually all of Alinsky's tactics which were not particular to Alinsky to mobilize individual communities in key counties in the South and Midwest (and later in the North and West). SCLC used local school de-segregation, voter registration drives, boycotts, sit-ins, church socials and functions, whatever within the context of the particular communities that fit the people and used the local oppressions as the immediate issues at hand. But these community action efforts were all orchestrated under the large scale agenda (hammered out in a coalition of leaders and elite) to get rid of Jim Crow.
None of this should be news. We need both the large scale conceptual frame and direction, and the immediate local expression found in ordinary lives. The disabled movements in the 70s followed more or less in the footsteps of the black civil rights movements, with the difference that there were no centralized organizations like the NAACP, CORE, and SNCC. In some sense the disabled movements resembled the SCLC, a lose association of affliates, more than the central HQ top-down style of the others. And, only a few local disabled communities groups like those in Berkeley, NYC, some in Chicago were developed enough by previous community action and political groups in labor, civil rights and women's rights organizations to draw on their support networks and learn from their experiences.
On the other hand, because at least some of the civil rights leadership cadre had moved into federal government positions in HEW during the Kennedy and Johnson era they were a power connection to tap in relation to specific federal programs already in place.
CG