Saul Alinsky

Saul David Alinsky, born on 30 January 1909 in a tenement on Maxwell Street in Chicago, founded modern American community organising. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he studied archaeology at the University of Chicago, took graduate courses in criminology with Ernest Burgess, and from 1933 worked as a sociologist inside Joliet State Prison interviewing members of the Capone outfit.

In 1939, with backing from the meatpacking unions, the Catholic Bishop Bernard Sheil and the philanthropist Marshall Field III, he co-founded the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council in the immigrant slums behind the Chicago stockyards, the model later imitated across the United States. In 1940 he established the Industrial Areas Foundation as a permanent training body for organisers; over thirty years it built groups in Rochester (FIGHT against Eastman Kodak), Buffalo, Kansas City and the Mexican-American Community Service Organization in California, where Cesar Chavez and Fred Ross learned the trade.

His tactics — mass meetings, public theatre, ridicule of opponents and pressure on a corporation's banks rather than its factories — were codified in Reveille for Radicals (1946) and, more sharply, in Rules for Radicals, published by Random House in 1971 and dedicated, with mock irreverence, to Lucifer as the original rebel. The book later influenced organisers as different as the young Hillary Rodham, who wrote her Wellesley thesis on him, and Barack Obama, who used Alinsky-trained mentors in 1980s Chicago.

He died of a heart attack in Carmel, California, on 12 June 1972 while planning a national middle-class organising drive.

The masculine given name Saul comes from the Hebrew Sha'ul meaning asked for or prayed for, the name of the first king of Israel. He gave it the colouring of a lifelong agitator.