From Saul David Alinsky
Author: Alinsky, Saul David
Date: January 3, 1961
Location: Chicago, Ill.
Genre: Letter
Topic: Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views
Details
During a television program titled “Housing Decision,” Chicago community organizer Alinsky included King among supporters of a quota system as a strategy for integrating neighborhoods.1 In response to letters from concerned viewers, King denied ever having made such a statement, and called the quota idea “morally wrong and legally indefensible.”2 In this letter to King, Alinsky attributes King’s quote to a December 1959 article in the Chicago Daily News and admits that it never occurred to him that the statement could have been misconstrued.3
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ebenezer Baptist Church
407 Auburn Avenue, N.E.
Atlanta, Georgia
Dear Dr. King:
The attached copy of my letter to Mr. John H. Wagner is self-explanatory.4 I deeply regret the way this matter was brought to your attention. If Mr. Wagner had contacted me prior to writing you he would have been given these facts which would have provided you with a specific situation for comment. I too have been involved in similar situations and know how much more helpful and fairer it is to be presented the facts. As you will note from my letter to Mr. Wagner I point out my gratitude to you for insisting that he contact me and that I write you on the background of the statement.
The program was part of your television presentation of that particular evening.5 In Chicago and I understand on the West Coast the network went in for a regional discussion of race issues pertaining to that particular area. My major function seemed to involve an attack on the Chicago Real Estate Board for what I consider to be segregational practices and my insistence on the initiation and carrying through of integration practices in our residential living.
You more than anyone else will appreciate the difference between the cool comfortable climate on the mountain-top where one can indulge in self-satisfied, safe, militant denunciations of the evils of segregation as over against the heat of the valleys with all of the irrationalities of human motivations when one attempts to implement and really do something about integration. I repeat that I know no one who could understand these differences more than yourself. For years I stood on the mountain-tops with many of my liberal friends indulging in righteous anger against the inequities of discrimination and segregation and suffered few if any inconveniences. It was not until I and my organization descended into the valleys of implementation on this issue that I suddenly felt the full violence and anger of every racist Negro hating group in Chicago. It was not until then that I found my family as well as myself being physically threatened. A sample of the kind of correspondence which I am graced with is also enclosed. This came on the heels of the television speech which is the subject of discussion.
The attached will indicate why I made the statement about you and the quota system which I did along the lines described in the copy of the letter to Mr. Wagner. Since without one single exception every known area of integrated residential housing in the north from the Milgram projects to the Spring Hill Gardens in Pittsburgh to the Mount Royal community in Baltimore to the Palo Alto, California interracial housing experiment utilize the quota as the opening wedge in securing and settling an integration residential pattern (obviously once the whites have become accustomed to living with their Negro neighbors and getting to know Negroes as human beings and not as faceless racial symbols then the quota idea is dismissed)—and since the honor roll of those (both Negro and white) who have fought for equal rights through the years and include many of our most distinguished Americans realize that there is no alternative at this time to the quota procedure (a procedure which incidentally is viciously opposed by every racist group) it never occurred to me that there might possibly have been anything out of line as far as the interview reported with you by the Chicago Daily News on December 16, 1959.6 On the contrary I felt that it was courageous for you to take the position since so many of those I know in the field (and the kind for whom I am sure that you would have the same feelings about that I have) have assured me of their private commitment to this procedure but felt that it was not yet time for them to make a public commitment to this effect. I trust that I am not imposing by also attaching a copy of my testimony before the United States Civil Rights Commission, a photostat of the kind of reaction which it received in this city (which served one good function of ending a newspaper taboo of any discussion on the issue except in the most indirect and vague terms) and also an article by Mr. Oscar Cohen, “The Case for Benign Quotas in Housing,” published in the spring issue, 1960 of Phylon.7 This article is regarded as the most perceptive and best balanced analysis of the subject to this date. I am sure you know it and also know that it is widely accepted as a most delineating analysis of the issue.
Our mutual friend, Ralph Helstein, informs me that you will be in Chicago on the 21st of this month and he hopes to make it possible for us to meet at that time. Needless to say I am eagerly looking forward to this opportunity of getting to know you and to be able to personnally express my deep admiration for all that you have done and what you represent. I would appreciate hearing from you before then.8
Sincerely yours,
[signed]
Saul D. Alinsky
SDA:cmf
Enclosures
1. Saul David Alinsky (1909–1972), born in Chicago, Illinois, earned a B.A. in sociology in 1930 from the University of Chicago. While working in Chicago for the Congress of Industrial Organizations during the Great Depression, Alinsky became a community organizer in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. He formed the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council in 1939, and the Industrial Areas Foundation in 1940. He published a handbook on neighborhood organizing, Reveille for Radicals, in 1946. In 1961 he founded the Temporary Woodlawn Organization to promote integration on Chicago’s Southside.
2. Harold Edward Fey to King, 30 November 1960; King to Fey, 21 December 1960.
3. The newspaper quoted King as saying that quota systems were “all right as … an attempt to set an example in a community to prove that integration can work. This is not the ultimate aim. By setting it (integration) forth before people, they’ll be able to see it work” (“Sets 10-Year Target for Desegregation,” Chicago Daily News, 16 December 1959).
4. Alinsky to Wagner, 3 January 1961. King also received a letter from Wagner, assistant secretary of the National Lutheran Council, who watched the program and asked King to explain “on what basis you would accept ‘quota integration!’” (Wagner to King, 7 December 1960). Responding to Wagner’s letter, King denied ever making the “proposal in private or public,” and suggested that perhaps he had been “misquoted in the press” (King to Wagner, 15 December 1960).
5. In Chicago, Alinsky’s appearance on the “Housing Decision” was preceded by King’s appearance on “The Nation’s Future” (Debate with James J. Kilpatrick, 26 November 1960, in Papers 5:556–564).
6. Alinsky refers to several privately owned integrated housing programs throughout the United States that utilize the racial quota system. In 1954, Morris Milgram, the former national secretary of the Workers Defense League, created Concord Park, the country’s first private interracial housing project in Philadelphia. Completed in 1959, the Spring Hill Gardens included 209 apartment units divided into nineteen sections; the plan was to place two or three black families in each section. In Baltimore, the Mount Royal Improvement Association opened its membership to blacks in 1954 and set an informal quota at 12–15 percent black. In Palo Alto in 1948, two groups partnered to buy a small tract with space for twenty-four homes. The home buyership was open to equal parts white, black, and Asian families. In order to maintain the multiracial composition, the buyers agreed to sell their homes to people of their own race.
7. In 1959 Alinsky spoke in favor of a housing quota system before the United States Commission on Civil Rights (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1959 [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959], pp. 769–781). In Cohen’s article, Alinsky was again quoted in favor of housing quotas (Oscar Cohen, “The Case for Benign Quotas in Housing,” Phylon 21, no. 1 [1960]: 20–29).
8. Helstein was president of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). King went to Chicago in late January for the Public Review Advisory Committee meeting of the UPWA but he did not have time to meet with Alinsky (James R. Wood to Alinsky, 24 January 1961).
Source: MLKP-MBU, Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers, 1954–1968, Boston University, Boston, Mass.