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78-461: Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) was an American community activist and political theorist . His work through the Chicago -based Industrial Areas Foundation helping poor communities organize to press demands upon landlords, politicians, bankers and business leaders won him national recognition and notoriety. Responding to the impatience of a New Left generation of activists in

156-509: A Detroit meeting to cite one concrete example of what he meant by Black Power, Carmichael had named the FIGHT project in Rochester. Carmichael, Alinsky suggested, should stop "going round yelling 'Black Power!'" and "really go down and organize." Alinsky had a sharper response to the more strident black nationalism of Maulana Karenga , mistakenly identified in news reports as a board member of

234-514: A broad-based community organization and committed, through a recruitment and training program, to black employment, in June 1967. A retired public affairs officer for Kodak later said, "Alinsky and the people who exploited the situation were looking for attention," and claimed Kodak had already undertaken or was developing a lot of the programs that community activists sought. "We were working on it." While in Rochester, Alinsky had been employed four-days

312-547: A concern for the loss of "social capital" (of the organized opportunities for conviviality and deliberation that allow and encourage ordinary people to engage in democratic process), in his own statement of purpose for the IAF, Alinsky wrote: In our modern urban civilization, multitudes of our people have been condemned to urban anonymity—to living the kind of life where many of them neither know nor care for their neighbors. This course of urban anonymity...is one of eroding destruction to

390-498: A high standard of food, housing, and health … The Radical places human rights far above property rights. He is for universal, free public education and recognizes this as fundamental to the democratic way of life … The Radical believes completely in real equality of opportunity for all peoples regardless of race, color, or creed. He insists on full employment for economic security but is just as insistent that man's work should not only provide economic security but also be such as to satisfy

468-528: A holding prison in 2002. Budget cuts and the obsolete and dangerous nature of the buildings were the cited reasons. All inmates and most staff were transferred to Stateville Correctional Center . As of 2018 the Joliet Area Historical Museum is running tours of the penitentiary for Route 66 travelers and other interested parties. Different tours are being offered: History, photography/tripod friendly and private tours. The facility

546-401: A month at the federally-funded Community Action Training Center at Syracuse University . The 1964 Economic Opportunity Act , passed as a part of Lyndon B. Johnson ’s War on Poverty , committed the federal government to promoting the "maximum feasible participation" of targeted communities in the design and delivery of anti-poverty programs. This appeared to acknowledge what Alinsky insisted

624-612: A national spokesman for the Black Power movement. In 1961, to show city hall that TWO was a force to be reckoned with, Alinsky combined "two elements—votes, which were the coin of the realm in Chicago politics, and fear of the black mass" by bussing 2,500 black resident citizens, down to city hall to register to vote. Through TWO, Woodlawn residents challenged the redevelopment plans of the University of Chicago. Alinsky claimed

702-432: A remaining category ("Other") for those theorists who do not fit into any of the major traditions. Joliet Correctional Center Joliet Correctional Center, which was a completely separate prison from Stateville Correctional Center in nearby Crest Hill , opened in 1858. The prison was built with convict labor leased by the state to contractor Lorenzo P. Sanger and warden Samuel K. Casey. The limestone used to build

780-525: A tailor, then ran a delicatessen and a cleaning shop. Both parents were strict Orthodox . 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 . Although he had "not personally" encountered "much antisemitism as a child", Alinsky recalled that "it was so pervasive ... you just accepted it as a fact of life." Called up for retaliating against some Polish boys, Alinsky acknowledged one rabbinical lesson that "sank home." "It's

858-476: A walk through its leafy rickety streets behind, and pointed my way." In chapter 31 of The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream by Dean Jobb, in reference to inmate Thomas Neill Cream, admitted November 1881. Memphis Minnie recorded the song "Joliet Bound" with Kansas Joe McCoy in 1932, which was most likely derived from the same source as Noah Lewis' "Viola Lee Blues". Perhaps the most well-known version of

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936-633: A year. In addition to the prisoners temporarily held in the R&;C unit, Joliet maintained a large population of permanent inmates. In the late 1960's quasi-ethical hepatitis experiments at Willowbrook State School on developmentally disabled children became controversial. When these were discontinued, the US Army recruited "volunteers" at Joliet to continue the experiments. In reality, the "volunteers" were Vietnam-draft conscientious objectors , who agreed to drink feces-laden chocolate milkshakes and exposed to

1014-411: Is the slum area itself, and not the particular group living there, with which social pathologies were associated. Yet Alinsky claimed to be "astounded by all the horse manure [sociologists] were handing out about poverty and slums, playing down the suffering and deprivation, glossing over the misery and despair. I mean, Christ, I’d lived in a slum, I could see through all their complacent academic jargon to

1092-728: The Spoon River Anthology . And the iron gates of Joliet Swung as the gray and silent trusties Carried me out in a coffin. In the Commitment Arc of The Adventure Zone one of the characters suggests "going to Joliet". Mentioned in Kerouac's On the Road : "To get out of the impossible complexities of Chicago traffic I took a bus to Joliet, Illinois, went by the Joliet pen, stationed myself just outside town after

1170-666: The Community Service Organization of Mexican Americans in California, training, among others, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta . In July 1964, a race riot broke out in Rochester, New York , which Alinsky said was owned "lock stock and barrel" by Eastman Kodak , whose only contribution to race relations was "the invention of color film". In the wake of the riots, the Rochester area churches, together with black civil rights leaders, invited Alinsky and

1248-569: The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a national community organizing network. The mandate was to partner with religious congregations and civic organizations to build "broad-based organizations" that could train up local leadership and promote trust across community divides. For Alinsky there was also a broader mission. In what sixty years later, with publication of Robert Putnam 's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community , would have been understood as

1326-617: The Spanish Civil War and for southern sharecroppers , organizing for the Newspaper Guild and other fledgling unions, fighting evictions, and agitating for public housing. He also began to work alongside the CIO ( Congress of Industrial Organizations ) and its president John L. Lewis . (In an "un-authorized biography" of the labor leader Alinsky wrote that he later mediated between Lewis and President Franklin D. Roosevelt in

1404-551: The University of Chicago . He studied in America's first sociology department under Ernest Burgess and Robert E. Park . Overturning the propositions of a still ascendant eugenics movement, Burgess and Park argued that social disorganization , not heredity , was the cause of disease , crime , and other characteristics of slum life. As the passage of successive waves of immigrants through such districts had demonstrated, it

1482-406: The 1870s the prison had work contracts with local businesses. The penitentiary's original plans included a one-hundred cell "Female Cell House" located inside the male penitentiary. Female prisoners were housed adjacent to men's cells from 1859 until 1870, when they were moved to the fourth floor of the central administration building. In 1896 a separate, one-hundred cellblock "Joliet Women's Prison"

1560-583: The 1960s, Alinsky – in his widely cited Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer (1971) – defended the arts both of confrontation and of compromise involved in community organizing as keys to the struggle for social justice . Beginning in the 1990s, Alinsky's reputation was revived by commentators on the political right as a source of tactical inspiration for the Republican Tea Party movement and subsequently, by virtue of indirect associations with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama , as

1638-504: The American way . . . Old Testament . . . They beat us up, so we beat the hell out of them. That's what everybody does." The rabbi looked at him for a moment and said quietly, "You think you're a man because you do what everybody does. But I want to tell you something great: 'where there are no men, be thou a man'". Alinsky considered himself an agnostic , but when asked about his religion would "always say Jewish." In 1926, Alinsky entered

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1716-531: The BYNC threw its support behind the first major walkout of the United Packinghouse Workers ), landlords and city hall. This, and other efforts in the city's South Side to "turn scattered, voiceless discontent into a united protest" earned an accolade from Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson : Alinsky's aims "most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and dignity of

1794-506: The Communists are forced to follow along or get out on the basis of the issues--a movement so healthy, so filled with the vitality of real American Radicalism, that the Communists will wear their teeth down to their jaws trying to bore from within. I know that the latter can be done But in the meantime, Alinsky believed that "certain fascist mentalities" posed a far greater threat to the country than "the damn nuisance of Communism". In

1872-449: The IAF could not be "a holding for People's Organizations", Alinsky thought that one solution would be for community-councils, under their native leadership, to constitute their own inter-city fund-raising and mutual-assistance network. In the early 1950s, Alinsky was talking about "a million-dollar budget to carry us over a three-year plan of organization through the country." The usual corporate and foundation funders proved decidedly cold to

1950-564: The IAF to help the community organize. With the Reverend Franklin Florence , who had been close to Malcolm X , they established FIGHT (Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today). Concluding that picketing and boycotts would not work, FIGHT began to think of some "far-out tactics along the lines of our O'Hare shit in." This included a "fart-in" at the Rochester Philharmonic , Kodak's "cultural jewel." It

2028-563: The New Left seemed to place community organizing at the heart of their vision. The SDS insisted that students "look outwards" beyond the campus "to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice." "The bridge to political power" would be "built through genuine cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new left of young people and an awakening community of allies." To stimulate "this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program in campus and community across

2106-619: The Spanish Inquisition or the Salem witch hunts. In Reveille , Alinsky is "as contemptuous of 'top down' centralizing Soviet approaches to social planning as he is of laissez-faire economic policies". The Radical, he says, "will bitterly oppose complete Federal control of education. He will fight for individual rights and against centralized power …The Radical is deeply interested in social planning but just as deeply suspicious of and antagonistic to any idea of plans which work from

2184-558: The White House). Alinsky's idea was to apply the organizing skills he believed he had mastered "to the worst slums and ghettos, so that the most oppressed and exploited elements could take control of their own communities and their own destinies. Up until then, specific factories and industries had been organized for social change, but never whole communities." In the belief that if he could trial his approach in these neighborhoods, he could do so successfully anywhere, Alinsky looked to

2262-645: The alleged source of a radical Democratic political agenda. While criticized on the political left for an aversion to broad ideological goals, Alinsky has also been identified as an inspiration for the Occupy movement and campaigns for climate action. Saul Alinsky was born in 1909 in Chicago, Illinois, to Lithuanian Jewish emigrant parents from Vilnius , Russian Empire. He was the only surviving son of Benjamin Alinsky and his second wife, Sarah Tannenbaum Alinsky, from Vilnius (now Lithuania). His father started out as

2340-800: The back of the Chicago Stockyards (the area made infamous by Upton Sinclair 's 1905 novel The Jungle ). There with Joseph Meegan, a park supervisor, Alinsky set up the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC). Working with the archdiocese, the Council succeeded in rallying a mix of otherwise mutually hostile Catholic ethnics (Irish, Poles, Lithuanians, Mexicans, Croats . . .) as well as African Americans to demand, and win, concessions from local meatpackers (in January 1946

2418-549: The central concept the SDS's Port Huron Statement , meant something fundamentally different . . . to what 'citizen participation' meant to Alinsky." Within community organizations Alinsky "put a premium on strong leadership, structure and centralized decision-making." When SDS volunteers set up shop in the "Hillbilly Harlem" of uptown Chicago, they crossed town to meet with Alinsky in Woodlawn. They charged Alinsky with being "stuck in

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2496-555: The city needed was a powerful black community organization that could "bargain collectively" with other organized groups and agencies, private and public. With the groundwork prepared by his deputy Edward T. Chambers , Alinsky began mentoring The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), based in the Woodlawn community area on Chicago's South Side . Like other IAF organizations, TWO was a coalition of existing community entities, local block clubs, churches, and businesses. These groups paid dues, and

2574-608: The city", they felt they had little to hide from a "college kid"). Among other things about the exercise of power, he says they taught him was "the terrific importance of personal relationships". Alinsky took a job in the Illinois, Division of the State Criminologist, working with juvenile delinquents and at the Joliet Correctional Center . He recalls it as a dispiriting experience: if he dwelt on

2652-529: The climate of fear, suspicion and innuendo". Rumors of communist associations and Red-baiting would follow him into the 1960s, and, once his name was associated with leading Democratic-Party presidential contenders, would follow his legacy into the new century. For some of his "anti-communist" critics, Alinsky's definition in Reveille for Radicals of what it is to be a "radical" may have been a sufficient indictment: The Radical believes that all peoples should have

2730-629: The contributing causes of crime, such as poor housing, racial discrimination , or unemployment, he was labelled a " red ." In 1938, 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. In his free time he had been raising funds for the International Brigade (organized by the Communist International ) in

2808-544: The country," in 1963, the SDS launched (with $ 5000 from United Automobile Workers ) the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). SDS community organizers would help draw white neighborhoods into an "interracial movement of the poor". By the end of 1964, ERAP had ten inner-city projects engaging 125 student volunteers. In the summer of 1964, Ralph Helstein of the Packinghouse Workers , one of

2886-436: The creative desires within all men. Alinsky would not apologize for working with communists at a time when, in his opinion, they were doing "a hell of a lot of good work in the vanguard of the labor movement and ... in aiding blacks and Okies and Southern sharecroppers ." He also said, "Anyone who was involved in the causes of the thirties and says he didn't know any communists is either a liar or an idiot". They were "all over

2964-403: The death penalty—by Clarence Darrow ). Their case was known as "the crime of the century" at the time after kidnapping and murdering Robert Franks . The duo went on to revamp the prison's educational system, adding a high school curriculum to help inmates who are seeking for a tertiary education. In 1933 Lester Joseph Gillis ( Baby Face Nelson ) was released from Joliet Prison, and a mock-up of

3042-534: The executive said, 'is our sit-in-hall. [You will have] plenty of comfortable chairs, two coffee machines and lots of magazines . . . '". "You are not going to get anywhere", Alinsky concluded, unless you are "constantly inventing new and better tactics" that move beyond your opponent's expectations. In the 1960s, Alinsky focused through the IAF on the training of community organizers. The IAF assisted Black community organizing groups in Kansas City and Buffalo, and

3120-447: The farm-worker barrios of Southern California." Although Alinsky always had rationalizations, his biographer Sanford Horwitt records that "on rare occasions" Alinsky would concede that not all of his mentored projects were "unequivocal successes". There was uncertainty about "what was supposed to happen after the first two or three years, when the original organizer and/or fund-raiser left the community council on its own." Recognizing that

3198-563: The feces of other inmates in an effort to mass-produce and isolate the virus that caused Hepatitis A . The Army was especially interested in Hepatitis A because it was a classic disease of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions common in prisons and military camps. In 1975, members of the Almighty Black P. Stone Nation and other Chicago street gangs took over a cell block and held several corrections officers hostage. The warden at

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3276-477: The federal sponsor for community action, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), should bypass city halls and either fund existing militant organisations such as FIGHT in Rochester (although these could never allow the federal government to be their core funder) or, in communities not already organized, seek out local leadership to initiate the process of building a resident organization. Amendments to OEO funding in

3354-410: The few labor leaders interested in the emergence of the New Left, arranged for Alinsky to meet SDS founders Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin . To Helstein's dismay Alinsky dismissed Hayden and Gitlin's ideas and work as naive and doomed to failure. The would-be organizers were absurdly romantic in their view of the poor and of what could be achieved by consensus. Horwitt notes that "'Participatory democracy,'

3432-554: The foundations of democracy. For although we profess that we are citizens of a democracy, and although we may vote once every four years, millions of our people feel deep down in their heart of hearts that there is no place for them—that they do not 'count'. Through the IAF, Alinsky spent the next 10 years repeating his organizational work--"rubbing raw", as the New York Times saw it "the sores of discontent" and compelling action through agitation--"from Kansas City and Detroit to

3510-444: The foyer is shown in the 1957 movie, "Baby Face Nelson" where Gillis (played by Mickey Rooney) is seen both entering and leaving the facility with a suitcase in his hand. The name of the prison can be seen in his exit sequence. From at least the early 1960s, the prison included a reception and classification center for northern Illinois, holding new prisoners for less than a month before their final assignments and processing over 20,000

3588-589: The idea. Successes could also be problematic. In Chicago, the Back of the Yards Council set itself against housing integration and offered no objection to a pattern of "urban renewal" with which Alinsky professed himself "fed-up": "the moving of low-income and, almost without exception, Negro groups and dumping them into other slums," in order to build houses for middle-income whites. There being "no substitute for organized power," Alinsky concluded in 1959 that what

3666-492: The individual." In founding the BYNC, Alinsky and Meegan sought to break a pattern of outside direction established by their predecessors in poor urban areas, most notably the settlement houses. The BYNC would be based on local democracy: "organizers would facilitate, but local people had to lead and participate." Residents had to "control their own destiny" and in doing so not only gain new resources but new confidence as well. "Some of Saul's real genius," according to one observer,

3744-402: The injustice and how militant your supporters, people get turned off by repetitious and conventional tactics. Your opposition also learns what to expect and how to neutralize you unless you're constantly devising new strategies. 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. "'And here',

3822-460: The mid-1960s, civil rights activists began to call for "Black Power"—for Stokely Carmichael a "call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations". Alinsky appeared not to be fazed. "I agree with the concept," he said in the fall of 1966. "We've always called it community power, and if the community is black, it's black power." But a year later he was relating, with evident satisfaction, that when he had asked Carmichael at

3900-484: The negotiation of an open-housing deal that was to prove toothless. (After King's assassination , Alinsky argued that Woodlawn was the one black area of Chicago that did not "explode into racial violence" because, while their lives were not "idyllic", with TWO people "finally" had a sense of "power and achievement"). At the end of the sixties Alinsky complained that student activists had been more interested in "revelation" than in "revolution," and that their campus politics

3978-595: The newly formed Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization . In an angry letter to the Foundation's executive director, Lucius Walker , Alinsky took exception to one of Karenga's "insights," that "blacks are a country and if you support America you are against my community." This Alinsky found "repugnant and nauseous." He and his associates would not only "plead guilty to supporting America" but would "gladly admit that we love our country." Horwitt notes that in 1968 "virtually no leftist dissenter – black or white –

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4056-404: The organization was run by an elected board. The TWO moved quickly to establish itself as the "voice" of the black neighborhood, mobilizing, developing and bringing up new leadership. An example was Arthur M. Brazier , the first spokesperson and eventual president of the organization. Starting out as a mail carrier, Brazier became a preacher in a store front church, and then, through TWO, emerged as

4134-498: 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. Alinsky found it "touching to see how competing contractors suddenly discovered the principles of brotherhood and racial equality." Similar "conversions" were secured from employers elsewhere in the city with mass shop-ins at department stores, tying up bank lines with people exchanging pennies for bills and vice versa, and

4212-444: The party" for reasons "partly philosophic": One of my articles of faith is what Justice Learned Hand called "that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you are right." I've never been sure I'm right but also I'm also sure nobody else has this thing called truth. I hate dogma. People who believed they owned the truth have been responsible for the most terrible things that have happened in our world, whether they were Communist purges or

4290-727: The past," and unwilling to confront white racism. To meet the challenge of growing black dissent following the August 1965 Watts riots , King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had sought a victory in the North with the Chicago Freedom Movement (CFM). JOIN later claimed that they pushed whites on the race question "at every opportunity" and "even mobilized members to support Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 's campaign to desegregate housing in Chicago in

4368-583: The place, fighting for the New Deal the CIO and so forth". Alinsky said he was "sympathetic to Russia at that time [i.e. in the 1930s before the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact ] because it was the one country that seemed to be taking a strong position against Hitler ... If you were anti-fascist on the international front in those days you had to stand with Communists". But Alinsky insists he "never joined

4446-559: The prison was quarried on the site. The first 33 inmates arrived from Alton in May 1858 to begin construction; the last prisoners were transferred in July 1860. Both criminals and prisoners of war were confined there during the Civil War . The first corrections officer to be killed there was Joseph Clark in 1865. By 1872 the population had reached 1,239, a record number for a single prison. From

4524-404: The realities." The Great Depression put an end to an interest in archaeology: after the stock-market crash "all the guys who funded the field trips were being scraped off Wall Street sidewalks." A chance graduate fellowship moved Alinsky on to criminology . For two years, as a "nonparticipant observer", he claims to have hung out with Chicago's Al Capone mob (he explains that, as they "owned

4602-458: The ridicule he would have heaped upon his persecutors. Herb March, the most prominent Communist Party member with the Packinghouse Workers in Chicago, said he would "place a little more emphasis ... on the Church influence", but also allowed that, as the government "undoubtedly must have had him under close surveillance", they cannot have had "anything" on him. Yet Alinsky was not "untouched by

4680-589: The rioting inmates and was murdered. Warden Finkbeiner was standing in Catlett's blood as he spoke to the inmates, and the hostage situation was resolved. The warden later eulogized Catlett at an African-American church in Chicago Heights. The number of inmates peaked at 1,300 in 1990 and was still 1,156 in 2000, although capacity had been raised to 1,300 over 1999–2000, from 1,180 previously. In 2000 there were 541 staff. Joliet Correctional Center closed as

4758-411: The song "Gun", which mentions Joliet – "I'm singing solo in my cell in Joliet". Folk singer Steve Goodman recorded the song " Lincoln Park Pirates " concerning an auto towing company of Chicago. The song includes the lyrics "Our drivers are friendly and courteous/ Their good manners you always will get/ 'Cause they all are recent graduates/ Of the charm school in Joliet". Joliet Prison was featured in

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4836-463: The summer of 1965 ruled out any such "creative federalism". These gave city halls the right to select the official Community Action Agency (CAA) for their community and reserved two-thirds of the CAA boards for business representative and elected officials. There was no prospect of a federal mandate favoring Alinsky's organizing model. The one-year OEO grant for the program at Syracuse that had hired Alinsky

4914-588: The summer of 1966". It is not clear that participation by Alinsky in the Chicago Freedom Movement was either offered or invited. Yet "Freedom Summer" in 1965 seemed to follow the Alinsky playbook: "The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a 'dangerous enemy'. The hysterical instant reaction of the establishment [will] not only validate [the organizer's] credentials of competency but also ensure automatic popular invitation". The difficulty

4992-432: The threat of a "piss-in" at Chicago O'Hare International Airport . For Alinsky the "essence of successful tactics" was "originality." When Mayor Daley dragged his heels on building violations and health procedures, TWO threatened to unload a thousand live rats on the steps of city hall: "sort of share-the-rats program, a form of integration": Any tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag itself. No matter how burning

5070-425: The time, Fred L. Finkbeiner, spoke to the inmates through a bullhorn and promised they would not be harmed. Their primary grievance was the fact that they were being transferred to other prisons because they had too much control over other inmates at Joliet. One former gang member, Herbert "Cadillac" Catlett, had reformed and been cooperating with the administration to bring about positive change. He tried to reason with

5148-486: The top down. Democracy to him is working from the bottom up". With Thomas Jefferson , the Radical believes that the people are "the most honest and safe", if not always the wisest, "depository of the public interest." On the issue of whether communists should be banned from unions and other social organizations, Alinsky argued that: [The question is] whether there can be developed an American Progressive Movement in which

5226-525: The tune was by Rory Block on When a Woman Gets the Blues . Bob Dylan 's " Percy's Song " tells the story of the singer's attempt to have a friend's ninety-nine year sentence in Joliet Prison commuted. The song, an outtake from the sessions that produced Dylan's album The Times They Are a-Changin' , has been covered by Fairport Convention and Arlo Guthrie . The Henningsens wrote and recorded

5304-442: Was "his sense of timing and understanding how others would perceive something. Saul knew that if I grab you by the shoulders and say do this, do that and the other, you're going to resent it. If you make the discovery yourself, you're going to strut because you made it". In 1940, with the support of Roman Catholic Bishop Bernard James Sheil and Chicago Sun-Times publisher and department-store owner Marshall Field , Alinsky founded

5382-460: Was a proposal Alinsky considered "absurd rather than juvenile. But isn't much of life kind of a theater of the absurd?" No tactic that might work was "frivolous." Following a disruption of its annual stockholders' convention in April 1967 assisted by Unitarians and others assigning FIGHT their proxy votes (Alinsky had called on them to "put your stock where your sermons are"), Kodak recognized FIGHT as

5460-482: Was built across the street from the male penitentiary. In design it was an exact mini-replica of the male prison. In 1933 all female prisoners were moved to the Oakdale Women's Reformatory (later known as Dwight Correctional Center ) and the facility was used for male prisoners. The women's prison was converted into secondary facility to house male prisoners, making Joliet Prison an all-male prison. The prison

5538-642: Was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2023. On May 30, 2017, one of the buildings (the mattress factory) in Joliet Correctional Center was heavily damaged by fire, the cause of which was later determined to be arson. This is the third building to be severely damaged or destroyed by fire at the facility. Joliet is referred to in Edgar Lee Masters ' poems "Silas Dement" and "Mrs. Merritt", part of

5616-492: Was little more than street theater. From the perspective of real social change, he regarded their outraging of middle-class sensibilities to have been a tactical mistake. Political theorist A political theorist is someone who engages in constructing or evaluating political theory, including political philosophy . Theorists may be academics or independent scholars . Here the most notable political theorists are categorized by their -ism or school of thought , with

5694-417: Was not renewed. When the program trainees began organizing residents against city agencies, the mayor withdrew cooperation. Alinsky never became a direct target of McCarthyism . He was never called before a congressional investigating committee nor had to endure a determined press campaign to identify and exclude him as a communist “ fellow traveler ”. Alinsky liked to think this because of his toughness and

5772-511: Was sceptical of Community Action Program (CAP) 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". If it was to achieve more than this, there had to be meaningful representation of the poor "through their own organised power". In practice this would mean that

5850-514: Was slow to modernize. There was no running water or toilets in the cells in 1910. The construction of the nearby Stateville Correctional Center began in 1917 and opened in March 1925 was meant to lead to the swift closure of Joliet. This did not happen, and both prisons operated simultaneously for the rest of the 20th Century. In 1924, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were given life sentences to be served at Joliet (after their successful defense—from

5928-495: Was that Daley's experience was such that that city hall could not be drawn into a sufficiently damaging confrontation. The mayor responded to the brutal reception for Freedom marchers in the white neighborhoods of Gage Park and Marquette Park with a judicious expression of sympathy and support. King balked at a further escalation—a march through the red-lined suburb of Cicero, "the Selma of the North"—and he allowed Daley to draw him into

6006-476: Was the key to social and economic deprivation, "political poverty": Poverty means not only lacking money, but also lacking power. ... When ... poverty and the lack of power bar you from equal protection, equal equity in the courts, and equal participation in the economic and social life of your society, then you are poor. ... [An] anti-poverty program must recognise that its program has to do something about not only economic poverty but also political poverty Alinsky

6084-480: Was using this kind of patriotic rhetoric." By 1970, Alinsky had conceded publicly that "all whites should get out of the black ghettos. It's a stage we have to go through." At the beginning of the 1960s, in the first postwar generation of college youth, Alinsky appeared to win new allies. Disclaiming any "formulas" or "closed theories," Students for a Democratic Society called for a "new left ... committed to deliberativeness, honesty [and] reflection." More than this,

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