September-October 2005

Dynamics of Organizing

From Trainer to Trainee…Sewers to Bombs
by Joseph W. Mariano, NTIC executive director

Editor’s note: NTIC has always been about training organizers to build strong local organizations. Some of those local organizations were in Cleveland, Ohio where Inez Killingsworth began her work as a leader, and also where Joe Mariano trained community organizers. The following article was published in the January/February 1983 edition of Disclosure and is meant to serve as a look back at our history to help set the stage and challenge us for what is coming up May 2006 -- the 35th anniversary celebration of the National People's Action national neighborhoods conference. What stories do you remember that offer us insight and challenges?

Where are you going now my friend/Where will you be tomorrow?
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

“Your goal for today is to set up a meeting on that street by knocking on doors, introducing yourself, asking questions, and listening to the people’s answers very, very carefully.”

As the trainer recited the assignment slowly and patiently, the new organizer recruit, a German volunteer, carefully wrote almost every word on her notepad.

“Self-interest,” he continued, “is what you’re gonna be looking for.  Find out where the folks are at and what makes them angry, and by the way, don’t let me hear you talking about that ‘building the revolution’ stuff, or that anti-war, no-nukes bullshit, because that’s where you’re coming from and the people aren’t there yet.  What you’ll hear is ...”

She glared at him with fire in her eyes and snapped back.

“If I want to begin the revolution in my turf, that’s just what I’ll do, because the movement has to begin somewhere!”

“Enough of the theory-shit, Eva, how about you get out on the streets and organize?  Like I was saying, you’ll hear about dog shit and potholes, at least if you really listen to what the people are saying.”

****

Radical rhetoric dissolved into down-and-dirty door-knocking on a dilapidated Cleveland street, in the fading late afternoon daylight.

“What kind of problems are you having on this street?” Eva asked the man staring out at her from inside his open front door.  He smiled and started in with his own question, “How much time you got?”  Not waiting for her to answer, he rolled on.

“You’re talking dogs that’s running loose; ripoffs and folks boostin’ from their neighbors; cops that don’t come ‘round for three days after you call them; the mess you see in the streets is because the city ain’t been doing nuthin’ in this neighborhood for as long as I been stayin’ here; and when it rains, the street and my basement get enough water in it so you can go for a swim, because of the sewers…”

“I’m sorry,” she quickly interrupted, “but my English is not so good. What do you call these sewers?”

He stared at her for fifteen long seconds. She had an accent all right, and was writing stuff down on her paper-filled clipboard. He hadn’t seen her around the street before, and he would’ve remembered her thick glasses, and a white woman knocking on doors was rather unusual.

“Sewers.”
“What do these do?”

He shut the door, stepped out into the cold November afternoon, walked off his porch, down the rickety wooden front steps, turned to her and said, motioning, “Come on over to the street with me and I’ll show you.”

“These are sewers,” he said, pointing to the manhole cover in the middle of the residential street.  “And if you want to see folks hoppin’ mad, come ‘round after it’s rained!”

“I’ll be right back,” she explained as she put the clipboard under her arm, “and we’ll get action on what you call these sewers.”

****

Eva demanded an instant meeting with her trainer upon walking in the door of the office, and he had to answer all of her rapid-fire questions about sewers. “Who was in charge of sewers? How sewers worked? Where they went?” It wasn’t raining the next day when she handed out flyers on a sewer leadership planning meeting, but she was finding folks who were hoppin’ mad about the sewers and the flooding, and who wanted to be at the meeting.

Eva learned the lesson of organizing around the principle of self-interest, but continued to ask a lot of questions about the strange differences between Germany and America. She was adamant about not wanting to organize to get more police, because she felt she was helping create a police state in America, until she learned the safety issue and how it differed from the police in Germany.  She persisted in her questions, which were especially unpopular at late-night staff meetings.

“Why do we need the U.S. Marine Color Guard at the convention?”  The anger in her question was always easy to spot in these matters.

“I am a volunteer that is being sponsored by Action Reconciliation for Peace, and you all need to remember that this organization was started after World War II by the German churches, to atone for the militarism and Nazism that engulfed the world.
“I’m only going to be here through October of 1979,” she would shout at the staff, “for one year, so I can learn about this community organizing, and go back to get Germany organized.

“But that doesn’t mean I have to accept helping people to create a police state here, and besides, many of the volunteers are doing this as alternative service to serving in the German Armed Forces!”

Not to be outdone by her ranting, the American organizers would shout back at her, “That’s what the people want, Eva, and we’re organizing on the principle of self interest, in order to get people initially involved in the organizing process here at Buckeye Woodland.”

****

Eva stayed for two and a half years, instead of only one year, as an organizer at the Buckeye Woodland Community Congress in Cleveland, and learned well the techniques of mobilizing people around self-interest issues, and helped to build that community organization into a strong coalition.

Eva was organizing at a time when the neighborhood movement was in its prime.  Carter was president, and he had appointed a National Commission on Neighborhoods.  Harris was secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and had her office occupied by 1,000 NPA leaders who won a meeting on getting abandoned FHA houses rehabbed and more Community Development Block Grant dollars into the low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.  The Department of Justice was shut down by NPA leaders who were demanding LEAA money for neighborhood safety organizing projects.  The nation’s big banks and insurance companies were also under fire for redlining urban areas, and to put money back into these communities for reinvestment purposes.  All across the country, folks wanted to help get organized; new neighborhood organizations were created, and coalitions were formed city-wide and nationwide on critical issues like housing and safety, with targets often being the vast faceless bureaucracies ... .

When Eva was about to leave the United States to return to Germany in 1980, she spoke to the Christmas-time gathering of organizers in Chicago.

“I’m going to build the movement in Germany, and I hope to see you at our first International People’s Action conference in a few years!”

****

We savored our best war stories and wrote to Eva about our ass-kicking organizing campaigns as we entered a new decade.  She received letters telling about a national convening meeting of all the major organizing networks in the United States; and about a joint organizing campaign sponsored by National People’s Action and C/LEC that produced 5,000 people to a “Showdown in Chicago” with the Big Oil lobby, the API.  Lengthy descriptions were written about the development corporations that were being spun off by community organizations that won major CRA victories against banks and S&Ls; and about corporate annual meetings being disrupted by thousands of angry citizens who wanted an end to the price-gouging oil corporations.

We wrote that Sohio had shut down its meeting in five minutes, for the first time in its 125-year history, since John D. Rockefeller began his empire.  Internorth was attacked by angry Iowans.  The biggest oil company in the world, Exxon, had its plush Manhattan skyscraper headquarters shut down by busloads of people from all over the U.S. who had been on Wall Street to “Reclaim America.”  And we told Eva about the action at the Hunt Club horse show in Cleveland’s suburbs; and about the march on Wall Street, where we sang “This Land Is Your Land”; and about taking the fight to the corporations, who are calling all the shots, and about telling the three-piece suit crowd, “There’s no place to hide.”

****

Two years to the month, Eva Michels returned to the United States to attend an organizers conference that was being sponsored by the Pacific Institute for Community Organizations, the Mid-America Institute, and the National Training and Information Center, which was a rather historic occasion in itself.

On the last full evening of the gathering, Eva spoke to the organizers about her experience in direct organizing in Germany and about how she took what she learned from us to use over there.

We sat in silence as she described the organizing efforts against the placement of nuclear missiles in Germany, which was spearheaded by Action Reconciliation for Peace.  They began direct organizing for the first time in early 1981, with many of the staff having been trained as organizers in the U.S.  She told about the meetings with the churches, the labor unions, the political parties, the students, and the environmentalists. She described the tensions between some of the groups, and the charges by the government that the anti-nuclear movement was being sponsored by communists and directed by Moscow.

We listened to how the process of organizing produced 300,000 people in the capital city of Bonn in October, 1981, and how some people came by boat, and how there were no buses left to charter in all of Germany.  We heard of the follow-up organizing in the small villages, and even in East Germany.  She talked on about how the movement was beginning to focus on demands and targets.

Finally, the trainee turned into the challenger and asked us: “Why aren’t you moving off the blocks and challenging your leadership on the tremendous defense/war budget that the Reagan Administration has at its disposal?”  She challenged the organizers to look at ways of coalescing on this issue with other groups, churches, and unions.  Eva’s questions led to a discussion about people from the cities and farms, senior citizens, the folks that we work with moving on that budgetary sacred cow, the war budget.  The targets include the military planners, the corporations that produce the weaponry, and the budget for Civil Defense, which is supposed to assist after a nuclear holocaust.

Where has organizing come from and where is it going? If you told me back in the early '70s that organizers would be seriously talking about moving into a fight with the Pentagon with a neighborhood organization base of working and poor people, I would’ve said the same thing we used to say to Eva, when she was first in this country as a trainee.

Now I think the folks that we work with just might be ready to tangle with more than dog shit and sewers.  We, as organizers, need to be bold enough to act on issues such as military spending and not shortchange the people we work for.

Can’t you see it now?  In the church basement with 500 people yelling at some fat-ass General with all of his braids and medals.  Demanding a “yes or no” answer…Watching him sweat…Hearing about the plans to go after the Secretary of Defense at the Washington conference…How millions in Civil Defense funds could be better spent for…

Thank you Eva. From all of us.