Grassroots Organizing Quotes

a system that sets people against each other fundamentally misunderstands the dynamics that drive achievement. Education thrives on partnership and collaboration—within schools, between schools, and with other groups and organizations.

Many schools are organized as they are because they always have been, not because they must be.

First of all, nobody gave us anything. It makes me furious when I hear that they gave us suffrage. Excuse me? It took 72 years of unrelenting, unbroken organizing grassroots effort to get women's suffrage. It took 113 years to get rid of child labor by law. It took similarly long periods of organized effort to accomplish any advance in social policy.

This goes out to freedom fighters, graffiti writers, innocent lifers, grassroots organizers

I recommend trying this kind of grassroots organizing for a week or a year, a month or a lifetime—working for whatever change you want to see in the world. Then one day you will be talking to a stranger who has no idea you played any part in the victory she or he is celebrating.

A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code. In a totalitarian state there are no independent schools, no private businesses, no grassroots organizations, and no critical thought.

[Ella Baker]'s second defining characteristic was her dislike of top-down leadership... 'She felt leaders were not appointed but the rose up. Someone will rise. Someone will emerge'. It was an attitude Baker shared with some of the older women in the movement.

Only a visionary leadership that can motivate "the better angels of our nature," as Lincoln said, and activate possibilities for a freer, more efficient, and stable America -- only that leadership deserves cultivation and support. / This new leadership must be grounded in grassroots organizing that highlights democratic accountability. Whoever our leaders will be as we approach the twenty-first century, their challenge will be to help Americans determine whether a genuine multiracial democracy can be created and sustained in an era of global economy and a moment of xenophobic frenzy.

Another way of putting it is that Obama played the anti-war, anti-Wall Street party crasher to his grassroots base, which imagined itself leading an insurgency against the two-Party monopoly through dogged organization and donations gathered from lemonade stands and loose change found in the crevices of the couch. Meanwhile, he took more money from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate, swallowed the Democratic Party establishment in one gulp after defeating Hillary Clinton, then pursued “bipartisanship” with crazed Republicans once in the White House.

BDS is a modern, grassroots nonviolent movement inspired by a 2005 call from a long and diverse list of Palestinian civil society organizations. Despite being ignored by world leaders and global media, BDS has been an integral feature of the Palestinian national movement.

I do not write every day. I write to the questions and issues before me. I write to deadlines. I write out of my passions. And I write to make peace with my own contradictory nature. For me, writing is a spiritual practice. A small bowl of water sits on my desk, a reminder that even if nothing is happening on the page, something is happening in the room--evaporation. And I always light a candle when I begin to write, a reminder that I have now entered another realm, call it the realm of the Spirit. I am mindful that when one writes, one leaves this world and enters another. My books are collages made from journals, research, and personal experience. I love the images rendered in journal entries, the immediacy that is captured on the page, the handwritten notes. I love the depth of ideas and perspective that research brings to a story, be it biological or anthropological studies or the insights brought to the page by the scholarly work of art historians. When I go into a library, I feel like I am a sleuth looking to solve a mystery. I am completely inspired by the pursuit of knowledge through various references. I read newpapers voraciously. I love what newspapers say about contemporary culture. And then you go back to your own perceptions, your own words, and weigh them against all you have brought together. I am interested in the kaleidoscope of ideas, how you bring many strands of thought into a book and weave them together as one piece of coherent fabric, while at the same time trying to create beautiful language in the service of the story. This is the blood work of the writer. Writing is also about a life engaged. And so, for me, community work, working in the schools or with grassroots conservation organizations is another critical component of my life as a writer. I cannot separate the writing life from a spiritual life, from a life as a teacher or activist or my life intertwined with family and the responsibilities we carry within our own homes. Writing is daring to feel what nurtures and breaks our hearts. Bearing witness is its own form of advocacy. It is a dance with pain and beauty.

Many conscientious environmentalists are repelled by the word "abundance," automatically associating it with irresponsible consumerism and plundering of Earth's resources. In the context of grassroots frustration, insensitive enthusing about the potential for energy abundance usually elicits an annoyed retort. "We have to conserve." The authors believe the human family also has to _choose_. The people we speak with at the recycling depot or organic juice bar are for the most part not looking at the _difference_ between harmony-with-nature technologies and exploitative practices such as mountaintop coal mining. "Destructive" was yesterday's technology of choice. As a result, the words "science and technology" are repugnant to many of the people who passionately care about health, peace, justice and the biosphere. Usually these acquaintances haven't heard about the variety of constructive yet powerful clean energy technologies that have the potential to gradually replace oil and nuclear industries if allowed. Wastewater-into-energy technologies could clean up waterways and other variations solve the problem of polluting feedlots and landfills.

Pedagogy should work in tandem with students’ own knowledge of their community and grassroots organizations to push forward new ideas for social change, not just be a tool to enhance test scores or grades. Pedagogy, regardless of its name, is useless without teachers dedicated to challenging systemic oppression with intersectional social justice.

This is the basis for the most important critique of microfinance. The poor are not entrepreneurs. The idea that more than a few will turn tiny loans into a viable business is simply unrealistic.

As prison abolitionists, grassroots organizers, and practitioners of transformative justice, our vision for 2018 is one of clear-eyed awareness and discussion of the horrors of the prison system—and the action that awareness demands. As a society, we have long turned away from any social concern that overwhelms us. Whether it’s war, climate change, or the prison-industrial complex, Americans have been conditioned to simply look away from profound harms. Years of this practice have now left us with endless wars, dying oceans, and millions of people in bondage and oppressively policed. It is time for a thorough, unflinching examination of what our society has wrought and what we have become. It is time to envision and create alternatives to the hellish conditions our society has brought into being.

After high school, he’d passed two relatively laid-back years as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles before transferring to Columbia, where by his own account he’d behaved nothing like a college boy set loose in 1980s Manhattan and instead lived like a sixteenth-century mountain hermit, reading lofty works of literature and philosophy in a grimy apartment on 109th Street, writing bad poetry, and fasting on Sundays. We laughed about all of it, swapping stories about our backgrounds and what led us to the law. Barack was serious without being self-serious. He was breezy in his manner but powerful in his mind. It was a strange, stirring combination. Surprising to me, too, was how well he knew Chicago. Barack was the first person I’d met at Sidley who had spent time in the barbershops, barbecue joints, and Bible-thumping black parishes of the Far South Side. Before going to law school, he’d worked in Chicago for three years as a community organizer, earning $12,000 a year from a nonprofit that bound together a coalition of churches. His task was to help rebuild neighborhoods and bring back jobs. As he described it, it had been two parts frustration to one part reward: He’d spend weeks planning a community meeting, only to have a dozen people show up. His efforts were scoffed at by union leaders and picked apart by black folks and white folks alike. Yet over time, he’d won a few incremental victories, and this seemed to encourage him. He was in law school, he explained, because grassroots organizing had shown him that meaningful societal change required not just the work of the people on the ground but stronger policies and governmental action as well. Despite my resistance to the hype that had preceded him, I found myself admiring Barack for both his self-assuredness and his earnest demeanor. He was refreshing, unconventional, and weirdly elegant.

In August 1917, white, Black, and Muskogee tenant farmers and sharecroppers in several eastern and southern Oklahoma counties took up arms to stop conscription, with a larger stated goal of overthrowing the US government to establish a socialist commonwealth. These more radically minded grassroots socialists had organized their own Working Class Union (WCU), with Anglo-American, African American, and Indigenous Muskogee farmers forming a kind of rainbow alliance. Their plan was to march to Washington, DC, motivating millions of working people to arm themselves and to join them along the way. After a day of dynamiting oil pipelines and bridges in southeastern Oklahoma, the men and their families created a liberated zone where they ate, sang hymns, and rested. By the following day, heavily armed posses supported by police and militias stopped the revolt, which became known as the Green Corn Rebellion.

The lesson of the last decades is that neither massive grass-roots protests (as we have seen in Spain and Greece) nor well-organized political movements (parties with elaborated political visions) are enough - we also need a narrow, striking force of dedicated 'engineers' (hackers, whistle-blowers...) organized as a disciplined conspiratorial group. Its task will be to 'take over' the digital grid, to rip it out of the hands of the corporations and state agencies that now de facto control it.

Koch never lied to himself about what he was doing. While some others in the movement called themselves conservatives, he knew exactly how radical his cause was. Informed early on by one of his grantees that the playbook on revolutionary organization had been written by Vladimir Lenin, Koch dutifully cultivated a trusted “cadre” of high-level operatives, just as Lenin had done, to build a movement that refused compromise as it devised savvy maneuvers to alter the political math in its favor. But no war is won with all generals and no infantry. The cause also needed a popular base to succeed, one beyond the libertarians of the right, who were kindred in conviction but few in number. Camouflaging its more radical intentions, the cadre over time reached out and pulled in the vast and active conservative grassroots base by identifying points of common cause.21 Indeed, after 2008, the cadre more and more adopted the mantle of conservatism, knowing full well that the last thing they wanted was to conserve, but seeing advantages in doing so.

If you don’t know where to start, follow Solitary Watch and Prison Legal News on social media to find out what’s going on. There are organizations that are trying to change prisons as we know them, such as Critical Resistance and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. As human beings, we need to insist on the humane treatment of prisoners and the rehabilitation and education of prisoners. Prisoners who are mentally ill need treatment, not paralyzing drugs and 23 hours a day in a cell. Prisoners who are uneducated need education.

The First Intifada, as it became known, erupted spontaneously all over the Occupied Territories, ignited when an Israeli army vehicle struck a truck in the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, killing four Palestinians. The uprising spread very quickly, although Gaza was the crucible and remained the most difficult area for Israel to bring under control. The intifada generated extensive local organization in the villages, towns, cities, and refugee camps, and came to be led by a secret Unified National Leadership. The flexible and clandestine grassroots networks formed during the intifada proved impossible for the military occupation authorities to suppress.

Launching more drone strikes than Bush ever did and compiling a secret “kill list,” President Obama’s administration took the view that al-Qaeda was like an organized crime gang—disrupt the hierarchy, destroy the gang. Theirs was a concerted and dogmatic attempt at pretending that al-Qaeda was nothing but a fringe criminal group, and not a concrete realization of an ideological phenomenon with grassroots sympathy. They took this view in part because of how successful Islamist “fellow-traveler” lobbies had been in influencing Obama’s campaign after the mistakes of the Bush years. For Islamists and their allies, the problem was “al-Qaeda inspired extremism,” and not the extremism that had inspired al-Qaeda.

Rodney Stark confirms the point, saying, For far too long, historians have accepted the claim that the conversion of the Emperor Constantine (ca. 285–337) caused the triumph of Christianity. To the contrary, he destroyed its most attractive and dynamic aspects, turning a high-intensity, grassroots movement into an arrogant institution controlled by an elite who often managed to be both brutal and lax.… Constantine’s “favor” was his decision to divert to the Christians the massive state funding on which the pagan temples had always depended. Overnight, Christianity became “the most-favoured recipient of the near limitless resources of imperial favors.” A faith that had been meeting in humble structures was suddenly housed in magnificent public buildings—the new church of Saint Peter in Rome was modeled on the basilican form used for imperial throne halls.

out of informal learning communities if they fail to meet our needs; we enjoy no such mobility in our relations to formal education. Affinity spaces are also highly generative environments from which new aesthetic experiments and innovations emerge. A 2005 report on The Future of Independent Media argued that this kind of grassroots creativity was an important engine of cultural transformation: The media landscape will be reshaped by the bottom-up energy of media created by amateurs and hobbyists as a matter of course. This bottom-up energy will generate enormous creativity, but it will also tear apart some of the categories that organize the lives and work of media makers.... A new generation of media-makers and viewers are emerging which could lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.12 This report celebrates a world in which everyone has access to the means of creative expression and the networks supporting artistic distribution. The Pew study suggests something more: young people who create and circulate their own media are more likely to respect the intellectual property rights of others because they feel a greater stake in the cultural economy.13 Both reports suggest we are moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume media toward one in which everyone has a

Tea Party Patriots, Inc., as an organization, believes in Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government, and Free Markets. Tea Party Patriots, Inc. is a non-partisan grassroots organization of individuals united by our core values, which derive from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States of America, and the Bill of Rights as explained in The Federalist Papers. We recognize and support the strength of a grassroots organization powered by activism and civic responsibility at a local level. We hold that the United States is a republic conceived by its architects as a nation whose people were granted “unalienable rights” by our Creator. Chief among these are the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The Tea Party Patriots stand with our Founders, as heirs to the Republic, to claim our rights and duties which preserve their legacy and our own. We hold, as did the Founders, that there exists an inherent benefit to our country when private property and prosperity are secured by natural law and the rights of the individual. As an organization we do not take stances on social issues. We urge members to engage fully on the social issues they consider important and aligned with their beliefs.

Most young people find school hard to use. Indeed, many young people find school a negative learning environment. Not only do schools fail to help students become competent in important life skills, they provide a warped image of learning as something that takes place only in schools, segregated from the real world, organized by disciplines and school bells, and assessed by multiple-choice, paper-and-pencil tests. Schools have scores of written and unwritten rules that stifle young people’s innate drive for learning and restrict their choices about at what they want to excel, when to practice, from whom to learn, and how to learn. It is no wonder that so many creative and entrepreneurial youth disengage from productive learning. They recognize that staying in the schools we offer them constitutes dropping out from the real world.

Honda, instead, is driven by a series of grassroots, Eastern-derived principles that emphasize: individual responsibility over corporate mandates; simplicity over complexity; decision making based on observed and verifiable facts, not theories or assumptions; minimalism over waste; a flat organization over an exploding flow chart; autonomous and ad hoc design, development, and manufacturing teams that are nonetheless continuously accountable to one another; perpetual change; unyielding cynicism about what is believed to be the truth; unambiguous goals for employees and suppliers, and the company’s active participation in helping them reach those metrics; and freely borrowing from the past as a bridge to what Honda calls innovative discontinuity in the present.

third step: building and financing industry-aligned front groups (fake public-interest organizations) and astroturf groups (fake grassroots organizations). Using phony science and controversy, these outfits “whip up grassroots anger and frustration,

First of all, the GOP must rebuild its own establishment. This means regaining leadership control in four key areas: finance, grassroots organization, messaging, and candidate selection. Only if the party leadership can free itself from the clutches of outside donors and right-wing media can it go about transforming itself. This entails major changes: Republicans must marginalize extremist elements; they must build a more diverse electoral constituency, such that the party no longer depends so heavily on its shrinking white Christian base; and they must find ways to win elections without appealing to white nationalism, or what Republican Arizona senator Jeff Flake calls the “sugar high of populism, nativism, and demagoguery.

One study of the national decline of violence from the 1990s to the 2010s found that grassroots nonprofits focused on combating crime had a significant impact. Using data spanning 264 cities and more than twenty years, sociologist Patrick Sharkey and his team at New York University observed that for every one hundred thousand city residents, the addition of ten organizations led to a 9 percent reduction in the murder rate, a 6 percent reduction in the violent crime rate, and a 4 percent reduction in the property crime rate.

The seven core members also became more involved in local Minneapolis politics. Drawing attention at a national level had been the driving impetus of the earlier Black Lives Matter protests, which had relied on getting that hashtag to spike. Now it was clear that if their focal point was police funding, it would need to be a local effort, dependent on a partnership with the city council and the mayor's office, where these budgetary decisions were made. They would need to learn the mechanics and make some allies. This was organizing as it had long been done, and they got good at it. It was also, in a way, what separated Minneapolis from Cairo. Whereas the Middle East lacked a democratic or grassroots political tradition-and had no way to even imagining how to create one-this wasn't the case in America....But there was a long history of African American organizing that predated Silicon Galley. Miski and their friends got to know city council members and their aides, inundated them with research material, visited their offices, and maybe most important, brought people out to hearings when the budget was being discussed, arguing in forum after forum against the belief that all the police needed were a few more bodycams. All this happened without much fanfare and largely off-line.

Degradation of work. Compelling the people in an organization to focus their efforts on the narrow range of what gets measured leads to a degradation of the experience of work. Edmund Phelps, a Nobel Prize winning economist, claims in his book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change that one of the virtues of capitalism is its ability to provide “the experience of mental stimulation, the challenge of new problems to solve, the chance to try the new, and the excitement of venturing into the unknown.”9 That is indeed a possibility under capitalism. But those subject to performance metrics are forced to focus their efforts on limited goals, imposed by others, who may not understand the work that they do. For the workers under scrutiny, mental stimulation is dulled, they decide neither the problems to be solved nor how to solve them, and there is no excitement of venturing into the unknown because the unknown is beyond the measureable. In short, the entrepreneurial element of human nature—which extends beyond the owners of enterprises—may be stifled by metric fixation.10 One result is to motivate those with greater initiative and enterprise to move out of mainstream, large-scale organizations where the culture of accountable performance prevails. Teachers move out of public schools to private schools and charter schools. Engineers move out of large corporations to boutique firms. Enterprising government employees become consultants. There is a healthy element in this. But surely the large-scale organizations of our society are the poorer for driving out those most likely to innovate and initiate. The more that work becomes a matter of filling in the boxes by which performance is to be measured and rewarded, the more it will repel those who think outside the box.

Political Islam has served as a vehicle for resistance as well as collaboration in different eras of Palestinian history, notably in the form of the grassroots combination of Islamic revival and nationalism espoused by the charismatic Shaykh ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam, whose “martyrdom” in 1935 can be said to have inspired the revolt of 1936–39. The same can be said of the more recent Islamic Jihad movement, an offshoot of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its founders were disgusted with the Brotherhood’s quietism and passivity toward—and, some even alleged, collaboration with—the Israeli occupation. Their attacks on Israeli military personnel in 1986 and 1987 helped spark the first Palestinian popular uprising, or intifada, which broke out in December 1987 and helped provoke the transformation of the major part of the Muslim Brotherhood organization into Hamas. Hamas itself has played a major part in the resistance to Israel, although some of the tactics that both Hamas and Islamic Jihad have pioneered in the Palestinian arena, particularly suicide attacks on civilians inside Israel, have been both morally indefensible and disastrously counterproductive strategically.

Congregations, maybe especially congregations, are political spaces. They are intersections where power is gathered, invoked, and expressed.

Advocate for Progressive Taxation: Support policies that promote progressive taxation, where the wealthy pay their fair share. Engage with advocacy groups and contact your representatives to push for tax reforms that reduce inequality. Support Regulatory Frameworks: Advocate for robust regulatory frameworks that protect consumers, workers, and the environment. Join organizations that work towards strengthening regulations and hold policymakers accountable. Defend Public Services: Stand against the privatization of essential public services. Support initiatives that prioritize the public good over profit and work to ensure that services like healthcare, education, and infrastructure remain accessible to all. Promote Economic Justice: Engage in efforts to reduce economic inequality by supporting policies that increase the minimum wage, expand access to affordable healthcare, and provide opportunities for education and training. Join movements that fight for economic justice and social equity. Educate and Mobilize: Spread awareness about the risks of Project 2025’s economic policies. Host discussions, share information on social media, and participate in grassroots movements to mobilize others in the fight for a fairer economic system.

He had handed out relief checks and food, counseled people behind barbed wire, sat across the desk from racist employers and convinced them to hire Japanese Americans. But the problems to be confronted were immense, and thus far he had largely acted alone. The Lakewood Experiment showed that Ross was beginning to sense the limitations of such an approach. He was growing impatient, ready to bite off a new challenge, taken with the idea of creating a snowball of people who could transform their community. Ross the social worker was receding, soon to disappear. The outlines of Ross the campaigner, Ross the organizer, were beginning to take shape.

As a voting block, they could swing local elections. Organized, they could form their own version of the NAACP. But most Mexican Americans weren’t registered to vote, and most of the organizations in the barrio didn’t challenge the dominant—white—society.

People must be awakened from lethargy,” he commanded his readers.5

Ross was certainly drawn to Lopez, but he was also searching for new models, frustrated by the existing unity councils. Ross found that despite their good intentions, most were inherently conservative. They wanted change, but they didn’t want to risk alienating their peers in the process. “The average member thinks he is dependent upon community good will for his livelihood,” Ross wrote. Compromised in such a manner, Ross complained, they were destined to “meet, seat, eat, and repeat (or retreat).”7 Tuck had reached a similar conclusion, lamenting that many groups of Anglo do-gooders were “floundering along in a morass of minutes, letter-heads, and empty objectives.”8

The other important lesson was this: look for the women. At Bell Town the ringleaders were women;

His primary bias was toward those with a willingness to work: find and invest in people who will, quickly leave behind those who won’t.

So there it was. Listen. Take the time to really get to know people. Hardie had just demonstrated two fundamental skills of a good organizer.

What started out as a way to win them [over],” Ross later said, “almost immediately became a driving interest to be around them, learn about them, pick up their stories. If you are really interested, listening comes naturally.

But looking at his first get-out-the-vote operation in Casa Blanca, it’s clear that even as a rookie organizer he already knew the importance of leaving as little to chance as possible.*

Ross would become known for his preparation and attention to detail. He never tired of sharing a favorite line about the craft of organizing: “The incidentals make up the fundamentals.

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but what many members recalled, decades later, was their transformation into individuals with too much political self-respect to be ignored or abused.

They “realized that since an org either progresses or falls apart, something had to be done.”4 Ross made his pitch at a September meeting, summarizing his work in the Citrus Belt and outlining a plan to comb through Boyle Heights, precinct by precinct, in search of leaders who would build an organization so powerful it couldn’t be ignored.

ORGANIZING IS OFTEN COMPARED TO running a marathon, but Ross was in no mood to pace himself. In the first six months of 1954, he put 15,754 miles on the new Plymouth,

Early on, Ross paid a call to the local Catholic churches, whose priests—thanks to Alinsky’s friend Monsignor John O’Grady, head of Catholic Charities in Washington, DC—had already received instruction from the local bishop to provide whatever support Ross might need.

And so the CSO was built, with Ross and Chavez crisscrossing the state to find people who were ready to fight.

You try to crank up your brain. You ask questions to get back to what is basic. You start with: “What’s hurting?” and push on to: “What’s wrong?” and “Why?” You might have an educational on: “What is a meeting?” “How is it different from a get-together?” “What about parliamentary procedure?” “How does it help?” “What is binding about a meeting?” “Why do we have majority rule?” We might meet on: “How does this happen?” “Who does it?” “What are the duties of officers?” We held an educational on: “What makes a leader?” We ended up saying that it has nothing to do with oratory, clothes, education. Rather, it is one who works for the people. Therefore, even a farm worker can be a leader.9

Good organizers must be students of people’s fears, hopes, and motivations.

Tens of thousands of people became citizens; half a million voters were added to the rolls. More work remained to be done, of course, but the CSO had largely accomplished what it set out to do: provide Mexican Americans with a political voice.

When Ross sat down, CSO members voted unanimously to accept him as organizer. During his talk, he had informed the group that they would be put to work—“this is your organization, not mine”—and he immediately made good on the promise. He formed a membership committee of five volunteers, each of whom agreed to go out with Ross one night a week to visit neighbors and talk up the CSO.

This action has been taken because of my personal and complete confidence, not only in your ability in the area of organization (which I regard as tops) but also in your character, intelligence and ideals,” Alinsky wrote. “I share your feeling that you are about to get your teeth into what might well be one of the most significant organizational programs in the nation. I believe that I am not overstating the fact.”22

He also made a point of popping into the office of the local newspaper, introducing the project in the most innocuous way and laying out the many supporters—including the church—that the CSO enjoyed.

In arguing for pursuing a strategy from the bottom up,

By the middle of 1955, the CSO had grown to eleven chapters and could legitimately be called a statewide organization.

Ross worked with Huerta to improve her focus, and he cut her off during frequent outbursts, saying, “Dolores, you’re not thinking—you’re feeling.”23 For Huerta, Ross showed that one could channel righteous anger at injustice into a steady and relentless force that was calm and methodical, without getting exasperated at every roadblock. And while it was clear that only so much of this calm style would rub off on Huerta, it didn’t really matter: too much energy and passion was a problem Ross could work with.

One: “Don’t give them the idea that you are there to ‘help’ them.” Two: “Find out from them what their problems are. Don’t tell them what these problems are, or what they should do about them.” Three: Prove they will work. “A long-winded conversation can be considerably shortened if you will find out whether the individual is willing to carry out a work assignment. Those who make excuses are generally not good membership material.

Back in Chicago, Alinsky’s office blackboard had just one line written across it: Low Overhead = High Independence.

These were the headliners—but behind such individuals were the thousands more men and women who remained largely anonymous but who were crucial in building the strongest Mexican American organization of its period.

While Ross hoped to expand the grassroots CSO, Sanchez sought to pull together a group of experts who could provide advice to Mexican American organizations around the country. Sanchez preferred to keep the struggle in the courtroom and was leery of the CSO’s street-level activism, once referring to the group as “trouble makers.

They didn’t win because of a speech, he said—they won because they put in the work. People saw them knocking on doors. They saw them at the meetings. Anyone can give a speech. Not everyone will put in the work.

Ross believed that a group needed “fighting issues,” and Stockton had more than its fair share.

This is the identical critique that Ross made of groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens that he had found when he first began organizing in the Citrus Belt. The longtime leader of the Fresno chapter brought in people from the professional class—doctors, policemen, lawyers—who were happy to, as Ross once described, “meet, seat, eat, and repeat (or retreat).

If his year with the ACRR left Ross disillusioned with what he considered mushy professional types, it deepened his faith in the abilities of so-called average folks—field hands, blue-collar workers, housewives—to upend the status quo. Having suffered the sting of injustice most acutely, they were more likely to put in the hard work to end it. Alienated from the dominant white culture, they more easily saw through the lies and empty rhetoric of the opposition. Without as much to lose, they refused to back down. They might have dropped out of school early. They might find it difficult to read and write. They might not be able to deliver an eloquent speech. But what these ordinary people lacked in “more conspicuous statesmanlike abilities” they more than made up for with intestinal fortitude, and they were far more likely to exhibit the type of urgency that got things done. 19 These were the people Ross would be on the lookout for.

Citizenship wasn’t something you received after successfully completing an exam, they stressed, it represented the process of becoming an active participant in democracy.

Ross could teach the nuts and bolts of organizing: make reminder calls before every meeting; practice your pitch before knocking on doors. But one can’t teach will, the seemingly involuntary need to do whatever it takes to succeed. This will is complimented by a sense of urgency, which, in an excellent organizer, practically radiates from the body.

I learned quite a bit from studying Gandhi,” Chavez later said, “but the first practical steps I learned from the best organizer I know, Fred Ross. He changed my life.”12

But his work in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago had convinced him that a strong organization needed not only volunteers but also the resources to afford paid staff.

During a CSO executive board meeting in 1955, Alinsky laid out the matter in stark terms. They had one of two roads to take: continue to grow without worrying about the finances, which would cause the CSO to “destroy itself,” or launch a “consolidation” program of the existing chapters to stabilize the organization.5 Once

Returning to chapters also meant lighting a fire under leaders who had grown complacent. Without the guidance of Ross or Chavez, the shrunken membership often coalesced around a clique that had grown to like the status quo, as it allowed them to do little more than give speeches. The service program, Ross hoped, would force these leaders, however reluctantly, into action. “At first, we felt a little guilty about building up this intensive service program in the various chapters, and then leaving the leaders holding the bag,” he wrote. But he found that “once we have initiated the program and the people are aware of its value, they force the leaders to continue with it after we have gone.

He lived out of apartments and motels, staying at each location for a few months before moving on. It was an exhausting schedule—or would have been, for most people. What comes through in Ross’s frequent reports to Saul Alinsky is not fatigue but enthusiasm.

From Monday to Friday, Ross and a member made the rounds, beginning at 6:00 P.M. and ending near midnight. The legwork paid off. By the next meeting, the original group of 17 had increased to 55. Soon the 55 became 70, then 85, then 175. The meetings grew so large they had to relocate to the YMCA’s gymnasium. “To put it cautiously,” Ross wrote to Alinsky, “I’m getting less discouraged about the work here all the time. Let’s hope the trend continues.”6

But aside from such behind the scenes maneuvering, along with attempts to marginalize certain individuals through parliamentary procedures, Ross believed that the key to avoiding being taken over by Communists—or any other group—was to keep moving on issues of concrete concern to the community.

The historian Lawrence Goodwyn, a leading scholar of the American Populist movement, wrote that any democratic movement depends on participants who have attained “a high level of personal political self-respect” and who therefore refuse to be resigned or intimidated.

Edward Roybal gave the keynote speech. “We have been socially and politically ostracized,” he told the delegates. “We have said that this is the cross we must bear. Now we are no longer going to say that this is the cross which we have to bear. This is the convention in which we are now going to fight back and we are not going to stop. . . . We are now beginning this great organizational drive throughout the Southwest.”27

At its current rate of growth, Ross wrote Alinsky, the CSO would have active chapters in every sizable Spanish-speaking area in the state within the year.28 Which, as it turned out, would present a whole new set of challenges.

Building stable chapters proved more difficult than Ross anticipated. Some chapters were sturdy. In Stockton and Bakersfield, leaders drove the work. But other seemed to begin to unravel the moment Ross or Cesar Chavez left town.

the greatest hope for the transformation of the world lies in a grassroots revolution of love-in-action, will be a grueling one. The forces stacked against the success of our enterprise are brilliantly organized, dark, drunk on power, and lethal, and the situation we find ourselves in is already apocalyptic, with the environment in freefall, two billion people living close to starvation, hundreds of animal and plant species vanishing every day, politicians in the pay of corporations hell-bent on continuing their fundamentalism of the bottom line, a corporate-sponsored New Age addicted to a materialist and narcissistic pseudospirituality, and major world religions retreating whole-scale into divisive tribal dogmatism.

public statements condemning segregation, sharply worded telegrams to Washington, and meetings with White House officials—were demonstrably ineffectual. New and more dramatic measures were in order. Mass action, Randolph reasoned, would be required, and he proposed a protest of 10,000 black people marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to demand an end to segregation in the armed forces and exclusion from jobs in the defense industry. Drawing on community organizing and protest networks developed during the 1920s and 1930s, this would be a broad, national mobilization of African Americans. The substance of their demand would be full and equal participation in the national defense effort, and the form of the demand would be a mass mobilization designed to compel the federal government to action. The MOWM, in effect, pioneered the type of protest politics that was used to considerable effect during the civil rights movement to push the federal government to enforce or enact African American citizenship rights. Randolph announced the March on Washington proposal in a January 1941 statement to the press. He declared that “power and pressure do not reside in the few, and intelligentsia, they lie in and flow from the masses.… Power is the active principle of only the organized masses, the masses united for a definitive purpose.” 19 Two months later Randolph issued the official call for the march, set for July 1, 1941. Drawing on his standing as a prominent black leader, and especially as the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), Randolph made his case that the time was right. “In this period of power politics, nothing counts but pressure, more pressure, and still more pressure,” he wrote in the call to march. “To this end we propose that 10,000 Negroes MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOR JOBS IN NATIONAL DEFENSE AND EQUAL INTEGRATION IN THE FIGHTING FORCES.” 20 To coordinate this massive effort, organizers established a March on Washington Committee, headed by Randolph, along with a sponsoring committee and regional committees in cities across the country. Galvanized by a rising desire for action within black communities, the idea found enthusiastic approval in the black press and eventually won the endorsement of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and other elements of black leadership. 21 By the end of May, Randolph estimated that 100,000 black Americans would march. A national grassroots movement was afoot, and Randolph grew even more confident in his vision for the demonstration. “Let the Negro masses march!” he declared. “Let the Negro masses speak!” 22

The over-reliance on high-stakes standardized testing in state and federal accountability systems is undermining educational quality and equity in U.S. public schools by hampering educators’ efforts to focus on the broad range of learning experiences that promote the innovation, creativity, problem solving, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and deep subject-matter knowledge that will allow students to thrive in a democracy and an increasingly global society and economy,” the organization states.5

Much of the cause of the teacher attrition rate is the condition under which many teachers work. “The data suggest that school staffing problems are rooted in the way schools are organized and the way the teaching occupation is treated and that lasting improvements in the quality and quantity of the teaching workforce will require improvements in the quality of the teaching job.”39

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and other industry representatives, it turned out, had created a “grassroots” group called Energy Citizens that joined Tea Party organizations in packing the town halls with protesters.

We have to understand that the closer you get to the corridors of power, to the Oval Office and Congress, the more you become a prisoner of the past .The closer you get to the marginalized, the grassroots and the groundlings, the greater your incentive to think imaginatively and 'outside the box.

As an Asian American woman within black radical circles, Grace surely was anomalous, but this raised no significant concerns or barriers to her participation in various black organizations, struggles, and movements. While she never attempted to conceal her ethnic identity, Grace developed a political identity as a black movement activist—that is, an activist based in a black community and operating within black movements. Living with Jimmy in a black community in the 1950s and immersing herself in the social and political worlds of black Detroit, she solidified this political identity through her activism. By the early 1960s she was firmly situated within a network of activists building organizations, staging protests, and engaging in a range of grassroots political initiatives. By mid-decade, when the Black Power movement emerged, Grace was a fixture within black radical politics in Detroit and widely known in movement circles nationally. Together, Jimmy and Grace helped to build a vibrant local black protest community in Detroit, the city that served not only as their home and political base, but also as a catalyst for new ideas about social change. They formulated their theories through grassroots activism in the context of—and at times directly in response to—the tremendous urban transformation experienced by the Motor City during the decades following World War II. Alongside their local efforts, the couple forged an ever-widening network of activists, artists, and intellectuals across the country, engaging multiple spaces of black activist politics. A diverse group of younger black activists from Detroit and across the country visited their eastside Detroit home—“ the Boggses’ University,” as one of them labeled it. 2 Each received theoretical training, political education, and a sense of historical continuity between past and future struggles. Through their extraordinary partnership James and Grace Lee Boggs built several organizations, undertook innumerable local activist initiatives, produced an array of theoretical and political writings, and mentored a generation of activists.

Unless institutional power reinforces the hurt and prejudice suffered by a group, it is not oppression. By definition, a person of color cannot be racist, or a woman sexist, because they do not have the institutionalized power to act on their prejudices. Also, by definition, all white people are racist, not just because of the personal attitudes that we usually think of as racist, but because of the privilege white skin brings in our society. Whites cannot say they are not racist because they are born into a society that teaches racism and reinforces white privilege every day even before they can be aware of it. Whites can choose, however, to be active antiracists, which means making a commitment to a lifelong process of learning to recognize racism in themselves and in the institutions they are part of and taking steps to stop it.

The truth is that every country has its own organic feminism. Far more than communism, capitalism, or any other philosophy I can think of, it is a grassroots event. It grows in women’s heads and hearts.

it will represent a dramatic reversal of recent history, toward more cottage industry, more small enterprises and ventures, and more empowerment for individuals willing to take advantage of the tools that become available. We’re likely to see a movement from the impersonal, imposed means to an end to a more individualized, grassroots way of doing things. In fact, we’re already starting to see that, as many people—laid off or voluntarily departed from big organizations—start small businesses.

Ross took two important lessons from Bell Town. The first was to remember that the issue that gets people upset might not be the issue to tackle. In Bell Town, the catalyst hadn’t been school segregation but the proposed bond measure. Part of the organizing process was to encourage others to think through a problem, to turn it around in their heads and talk through the merits of various solutions. An organizer always starts out where the people are, but that doesn’t mean that he or she can’t help them get to a different place.

It was during this period that Ross stumbled upon a tactic that would become the building block for his method of organizing. After holding a small meeting, Ross asked if people knew anyone else who might be interested in getting involved.

I began to get the idea,” Ross later said, “that this was a really good way to organize, because each meeting was linked with the last one.”23 The house meeting method was born.

In this relatively intimate setting, Ross would describe the organizing work and, at the end, ask each person to hold their own meeting. Even the person who said he “knew nobody” likely had a few family members he could invite. As Ross continued to experiment, he found that the approach had other advantages as well. The meetings were small enough to allow quieter voices to be heard but large enough that they felt productive and built momentum. They didn’t require people to do something out of the ordinary, such as attend a rally or speak in public. He noticed, early on, that the meetings were a forum in which skeptical people could be won over—not by arguments from an outside organizer but by their close companions. Ross would eventually turn house meetings into something of a science and train thousands of people in this method, which he refined over the years in great detail. (One

Not surprisingly, as civil rights advocates converted a grassroots movement into a legal campaign, and as civil rights leaders became political insiders, many civil rights organizations became top-heavy with lawyers. This development enhanced their ability to wage legal battles but impeded their ability to acknowledge or respond to the emergence of a new caste system.

Her biggest clients were transportation companies. She helped plan their PR campaigns, write white papers, and set up “Astroturf” organizations to give corporate messaging the appearance of grassroots support. A

While the men at Attica hoped that powerful people such as State Senator John Dunne still might do something on their behalf, there was little consensus regarding what to do if this effort also failed to bring some meaningful improvements to their facility. The disparate political factions in the yard had been talking about this very question for some time now—activists like Sam Melville from the Weather Underground (a revolutionary organization committed to fighting racism and imperialism), Black Panthers like Tommy Hicks, Black Muslims like Richard X Clark, and men like Mariano “Dalou” Gonzalez from the Young Lords Party (a grassroots activist organization working in cities like New York and Chicago to improve conditions for Puerto Ricans).1 Still, no new strategy had been agreed upon. By early September 1971, however, and after Oswald’s taped message, all of them could agree on one crucial point: most men at Attica were now at a breaking point. Just about anything might cause this place to explode.

In fact, every major State reform has come in response to the strength and power of grassroots movements.

Troublingly, the various reports disseminated by the FBI were often misleading if not outright inaccurate. In one teletype sent to the director of the Domestic Intelligence Division of the FBI, as well as to the White House and the U.S. attorney general, at 11:58 p.m. on September 9, the Buffalo office reported that during the riot “the whites were reportedly forced into the yard area by the blacks” and Black Power militants there were rounding up not just employee hostages but also all white prisoners, which was misleading in that it suggested a race riot was unfolding.42 More inflammatory still, the FBI’s Buffalo office stated that the prisoners “have threatened to kill one guard for every shot fired [at them]”; that they “have threatened to kill all hostages unless demands are met”; and that all of the hostages “are being made to stand at attention” out in D Yard.43 None of this proved to be the case. During the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s the FBI was deeply invested in destabilizing and undermining grassroots organizations that it considered a threat to national security—as were the politicians, such as Nixon, Agnew, and Mitchell, who supported its efforts and relied on its briefings.44 One of the FBI’s counterintelligence programs in this period—COINTELPRO—was notorious for using rumor and outright fabrication stories in an attempt to destroy leftist, antiwar, and civil rights groups from within. For this reason Commissioner Oswald’s determination to keep negotiating with the men in D Yard infuriated much of the Bureau. As one internal FBI memo put it, state officials had “capitulated to the unreasonable demands of prisoners.”45 And these weren’t just any criminals; as the FBI noted on multiple occasions, “The majority of the mutinous prisoners are black.”46 As dusk fell over D Yard on the first day of the Attica uprising, FBI and State Police rumors about black prisoners’ threats and outrageous actions only multiplied. But no matter how hostile everyone else was to the idea of the state negotiating with the prisoners, Commissioner Russell Oswald insisted even more forcefully that he was going to see these talks through.