36 Facts About Saul Alinsky

Saul David Alinsky was an American community activist and political theorist.

Saul Alinsky was born in 1909 in Chicago, Illinois, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, the only surviving son of Benjamin Alinsky's marriage to his second wife, Sarah Tannenbaum Alinsky.

Saul Alinsky's father started out as a tailor, then ran a delicatessen and a cleaning shop.

Saul Alinsky describes himself as being devout until the age of 12, the point at which he began to fear his parents would force him to become a rabbi.

Saul Alinsky studied in America's first sociology department under Ernest Burgess and Robert E Park.

Saul Alinsky took a job with the Illinois State Division of Criminology, working with juvenile delinquents and at the Joliet State Penitentiary.

In 1938, Saul Alinsky gave up his last employment at the Institute for Juvenile Research, University of Illinois at Chicago, to devote himself full-time as a political activist.

Saul Alinsky began to work alongside the CIO and its president John L Lewis.

Saul Alinsky knew that if I grab you by the shoulders and say do this, do that and the other, you're going to resent it.

In 1940, with the support of Roman Catholic Bishop Bernard James Sheil and Chicago Sun-Times publisher and department-store owner Marshall Field, Saul Alinsky founded the Industrial Areas Foundation, a national community organizing network.

Saul Alinsky claimed the organization was the first community group not only to plan its own urban renewal but, even more important, to control the letting of contracts to building contractors.

Saul Alinsky said that he "knew the day of sit-ins had ended" when the executive of a military contractor showed him blueprints for the new corporate headquarters.

Rochester was to be the last African-American community that Saul Alinsky would help organize through his own intervention.

Saul Alinsky was sceptical of Community Action Program funding under the Act doing more than provide relief for the "welfare industry": "the use of poverty funds to absorb staff salaries and operating costs by changing the title of programs and putting a new poverty label here and there is an old device".

The one year OEO grant for the program at Syracuse that had hired Saul Alinsky was not renewed.

Saul Alinsky liked to think this because of his toughness and the ridicule he would have heaped upon his persecutors.

Yet Saul Alinsky was not "untouched by the climate of fear, suspicion and innuendo".

Saul Alinsky insists on full employment for economic security but is just as insistent that man's work should not only provide economic security but be such as to satisfy the creative desires within all men.

In Reveille Saul Alinsky is "as contemptuous of 'top down' approaches to social planning as he is of laissez-faire economic policies".

Saul Alinsky had a sharper response to the more strident black nationalism of Maulana Karenga, mistakenly identified in news reports as a board member of the newly formed Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization.

At the beginning of the 1960s, in the first postwar generation of college youth Saul Alinsky appeared to win new allies.

The JOINers charged Saul Alinsky with being "stuck in the past", and, perhaps most cutting, to be unwilling to confront white racism.

Saul Alinsky saw the possibility of an electoral breakout: of Woodlawn helping mount a challenge to the incumbent in the 1966 Democratic-Party primary for the 2nd Congressional District.

Levelling against him the charges of the New Left, the interview effectively invited Saul Alinsky to summarize the lessons he had drawn for the new generation of activists in Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.

Saul Alinsky explained that the life span of one of his organizations might be five years.

Saul Alinsky never predicted exactly what form or direction middle-class organization would take.

On June 12,1972, three months after the publication of the Playboy interview, Saul Alinsky died, aged 63, from a heart attack while walking near his home in Carmel, California.

Saul Alinsky remained close to his mother, Farah Rice, who survived him.

Saul Alinsky acknowledged his national notoriety but not his politics.

Saul Alinsky had two children from his first marriage, Kathryn Wilson and Lee David Alinsky.

NPA's successful national campaign to pass the Community Reinvestment Act CRA challenged the assertion that Saul Alinsky-style organizing is only local and confined to winnable single issue campaigns.

The quotes attributed to Saul Alinsky were not found in his writings.

Saul Alinsky, it was discovered, had been the subject of then Hillary Rodham's senior college thesis.

Saul Alinsky believed that community leaders who generate pressure on the system from the outside could produce more effective change than the lofty lever-pullers on the inside.

Saul Alinsky was a true believer in the possibilities of American democracy as a means to social justice.

Saul Alinsky saw it as a great political game among competing interests, a game in which there are few fixed boundaries and where the rules could be changed to help make losers into winners and vice versa.