October 18, 2010

When I left home for a university education in 1966 at age 18, I swore I would work for Saul Alinsky when I graduated. The year I did graduate, Alinsky was declining, and he died two years later. So much for my plan to work for him in Chicago and maybe elsewhere around the nation organizing the dispossessed into effective groups that eventually might alter the equation of power across the United States. But, though he was dead in body, Alinsky left behind his theories and practices in books that guided me, and later guided somebody younger and eventually far more influential than I am — Barack Obama.