Community Organizing - What side are you on?

By John David Kromkowski and Dr. John A Kromkowski

People don't live in cities; they live in neighborhoods. Neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are the building blocks of cities. If neighborhoods die, cities die. There's never been a Federal policy that respected neighborhoods. We destroyed neighborhoods in order to save them. – the late Msgr. Geno Baroni

"Community Organizer" may be a dead field now after Guilliani’s and Palin's and other recent speeches at the Republican National Convention.

The fundamental problem was that Obama didn’t explain, define or frame what it meant to be a "community organizer" and what he did. Of course, the Obama campaign could have know it was coming when the Fox News commentator, Sean Hannity,in the earlier part of the summer said: “Community organizer? – what even is a community organizer?” That former Mayor Guilliani, who should know well that vibrant neighborhoods are the building blocks of cities, would mock the field of “community organizer” is shameful. Let’s see what the mainstream media decides to do: Give the Republican caricature of “community organizing” a pass or challenge Obama and mayors of cities across the country to explain and re-legitimate the Neighborhood Self-Help Movement.

Of course, there are at least two strains to this field: "Community Organizer as Agitator" a la Alinsky vs."Neighborhood Organizer" providing technical assistance to actual neighborhood leaders so that neighborhoods can do self-improvement a la Monsignor Baroni’s Neighborhood Movement of the 1970s. The tensions between these two strains is complex because of co-existence, co-evolution and cohabitation.

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development was created in part as an outgrowth of the work of Msgr. Geno Baroni, who founded the National Center for Urban Ethnics (NCUEA). NCUEA spawned, funded and trained hundreds of parish, neighborhood and community based organizations, organizers, credit unions, and local programs. Baroni’s tradition is neighborhood strengthening plus a pluralistic notion of ethnicity as a replacement for racialization. Fr. Baroni's catholic social justice in action included notable proteges, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-OH, currently the longest serving woman in Congress and Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-MD. Barack Obama's first community organizing project was funded by the CHD.

But even within the Catholic church’s social justice tradition in America, there has been a tension and co-existence between these two styles.

In 1975, the noted Irish-American Roman Catholic priest, sociologist, journalist and best selling author, Fr. Andrew Greeley described the demarcation between the “old" catholic social activist and the “new" catholic social activist approaches to activism. In “Catholic Social Activism – Real or Rad/Chic?”, Greeley saw the old social justice action in labor schools, labor priests, and community organizing that “mastered the politics of coalition building with the system.” Leading figures in that “old” tradition for Greeley were Ryan, Higgins, Egan and Baroni. On the other hand, the “new” Catholic action came out of the Berrigan experience, the peace movement and Alinsky’s ideas. It was heavily involved in confrontation and protest. Greeley scathingly predicted, that the “newer” tradition would likely lack the tangible success in comparison to the “older” tradition:

"The old social actionists are largely men of action, doers, not talkers. The new social actionists are intellectuals...They are masters at manipulating words and sometimes ideas...They are fervant crusaders. [But] winning strikes, forming unions, organizing communities are not their 'things', they are much more concerned about creating world economic justice."

Neither Obama nor McCain are Catholic, so neither is required to claim allegiance to either the old social actionist tradition or the new social actionist tradition, but they must decide and speak out on exactly what their positions are about helping neighborhoods be the building blocks of cities.

If McCain and the Republicans want to mock the work of neighborhoods improving themselves with technical assistance from “organizers”, then they’ve cast their die. If Obama and the Democrats are willing to let the mocking pass, then they’ve cast their die. Who knows, perhaps we should ask where Bob Barr and Ralph Nader stand on the issue of neighborhood and community organizing.

John David Kromkowski is an attorney in Baltimore, MD. Dr. John A. Kromkowski, lives in Baltimore and is a professor in the Politics Department at Catholic University of America and since 1979 he has been the President of the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs. They recently co-wrote “An American Catholic Perspective on Urban Neighborhoods: The Lens of Monsignor Geno C. Baroni and The Legacy of the Neighborhood Movement” which is soon to be published by Scranton University as part of a series of papers comparing “The Social Justice approaches of Henry George and the Catholic Church”.