Participatory politics: Community organizing, gender, and the New Left in the 1960s

Community organizing was an important, if often overlooked, part of the activist repertoire of the New Left in the 1960s. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)--the organization that came to be regarded as virtually synonymous with the white New Left--began community organizing in 1963. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, SDS aimed to build "an interracial movement of the poor" to demand changes in state and society and abolish poverty in America. Over the next few years, New Left organizers established some sixteen community organizing projects in both black and predominantly white neighborhoods; the largest, most successful, and longest-lasting projects were located in Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, and Boston. Attention to these efforts challenges the emphasis on the student and antiwar movements in histories of the New Left and the 1960s and broadens, and complicates, our understanding of New Left activism.; I draw upon theoretical literature on social movements to argue that SDS's community organizing was at the intersection of, and a transition point between, "old" and "new" social movements. SDS's initial strategy, organizing unemployed men to demand "jobs or income now," derived largely from the instrumental politics of the Old Left and organized labor. When New Left organizers abandoned this strategy, they adopted a strategic flexibility more in keeping with expressive politics and the realization of participatory democracy. With this shift, they began to organize constituencies, such as women and "the poor," around issues, like housing and welfare, and toward goals, such as children's recreation programs, formally excluded from the old social movements. At the same time, a "politics of identity" emerged among project participants--fostered by the growing feminism of New Left women and heightened tensions around class and race differences between organizers and residents--that divided the projects and eventually brought SDS's community organizing to an end. When the projects disbanded in 1967 and 1968, New Left organizers and community residents brought this approach to politics into later social movements.