West Side Chapter of Chicago Congress of Racial Equality
Organizer
1965
1965
Christian Student Movement - Youth Affiliate of Catholic Interracial Council of Chicago
Lead Organizer
1965
1966
SCLC - Near North Side Union to End Slums
Organizer
1970
1971
Wyandanch Community Development Corporation of New York
Coach / Consultant
1971
1976
Southwest Parish and Neighborhood Federation
Lead Organizer
Founder
1976
1978
Midwest Academy
Coach / Consultant
1976
1980
Illinois Public Action Council
Coach / Consultant
Director
1979
1985
Southwest Parish and Neighborhood Federation
Coach / Consultant
Director
1982
1985
Chicago Neighborhood Organizing Project
Director
1984
1985
Save Our Neighborhoods/Save Our City Coalition
Director
Organizer Profile
In 1963, when I was 16 and a Catholic seminarian, my white ethnic, working class, west side Chicago neighborhood, Our Lady of the Angels Parish, was beginning to undergo violent racial and economic change. I went to our local library looking for answers. The librarian gave me a first edition copy of "Reveille for Radicals" to read. I was impressed. Better still, the author was listed locally. So, I called IAF and asked to speak to Saul Alinsky. I was told Saul was out of town, but I could talk to Tom Gaudette who was one of his local organizers. Tom, then Director of the Northwest Community Organization, agreed to meet spending close to 3 hours with me. In the end, he told me to get my local pastor to come up with $5,000 and he would get us an organizer. My Dad and I met with our local pastor, just as Tom advised, but he chose to build a gymnasium instead. Our local bishop was big on building gymnasiums to stabilize neighborhoods at the time. Shortly thereafter, I fractured my hip running track and couldn’t do my regular summer job. Father Edgar “Peter” Haasl who said Sunday mass at our parish hired me to clean his priory in the neighboring, poorer, black community of West Garfield Park. Mopping his basement floor one fateful evening, I was introduced to a meeting of the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. Folks were talking about fighting the local panic peddling realtors, so I eagerly threw in with them. I had just turned 17.
1. Never judge a person by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. (Dr. King)
2. People aren't apathetic. They just don't want to do what you want them to do. (Saul Alinsky according to Tom Gaudette)
3. A liberal is someone who starts an argument in a bar and runs for the door when the bottles start flying. (Saul Alinsky according to Tom Gaudette)
1. Dr. King, Dr. King, Dr. King
2. Cesar Chavez, Jesus Christ, Dorothy Day, Mohandus Gandhi, Dick Gregory, Karl Meyer, Leo Tolstoy
3. Jack and Bobby Kennedy, LBJ’s Great Society, Eugene McCarthy, Richard J. Daley Sr., Harold Washington
4. James Baldwin, Julian Bond, Ralph Ellison, Franz Fanon, John Hope Franklin, Paul Goodman, Rev. Andrew Greeley, Charles Hamilton, Oscar Handlin, Jane Jacobs, Oscar Lewis, Malcolm X, Karl Marx, Wilhelm Reich, Mike Royko, Baynard Rustin, Charles Silberman, Philip Slater, Studs Terkel, Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael), Nicholas Von Hoffman, Arthur Evans Wood, Richard Wright
5. Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, James Brown, Jimmy Collier, Judy Collins, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, Bob Dylan, Myriam Makeba, Phil Ochs, Odetta, Tom Paxton, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Pete Seeger, Nina Simone
6. Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Father Dan Mallette, Pope John XXIII, Doctor Benjamin Spock
7. Anthony Imperiale, North Ward, Newark, New Jersey (Alinsky had Capone. I had Tony.)
8. Hubert Connolly, Jessie "Ma" Houston, Sacco and Vanzetti, Frances Scala, Mary Lou Wolff
9. My first spouse, Susan Tircuit, and our son Jason
Needless to say, I was greatly and primarily influenced by the Civil Rights Movement including the nascent Black Power Movement. By the same token, I was also influenced by other “movements’” of my day including the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, the Feminist/Women’s Movement, the Labor Movement, especially the United Farm Workers, and the LGBT Civil Rights Movement. As for "political" moments, I'd have to say the 1968 Democratic Convention and the 1983 Chicago Mayoral primary/general elections of Harold Washington.
Overall, I think sticking by folks on Chicago’s southwest side, as I did, over the years. After all, I was there, as a “marshall” directing and protecting others, when Dr. King was hit with the brick as we marched in Marquette Park during the summer of 1966.
Nonetheless, it was 1971 and my wife and I were back in town after attending college in New York. She was pregnant and I needed work. Tom Gaudette told me that Catholic Charities was hiring organizers at the time. I was interviewed for a job on the southwest side, but was told that I couldn’t work there because my wife was black. Catholic Charities said “can't” to an organizer and the rest is history…
As for the state of the art, I have been credited with having created the “parish organizing model” copied and proliferated, particularly, by IAF over the years. I would say reinvented. It is, of course, as old as Alinsky’s original Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council.
What I really think that I and the team of organizers who came up with me hewed and pioneered were the various consensus building methods and strategies we employed. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. In the day, the convention was to put practically all of your financial resources into salaries, find the relative handful of liberals who resided in white ethnic neighborhoods facing racial and economic change, rely on the press, and run with it. However, on Chicago’s southwest side, we were building upon such an effort that had failed. Consequently, we sought, successfully, to build a majority based organization which helped educate and move most folks along in confronting the various factors, as issues, that contributed to the “resegregation” of neighborhoods. As a result, for example, we used the address lists of local parishioners to send out relatively frequent bulk mailings with as many as 5 back-to-back, printed inserts explaining issues, strategies, and tactics. In other words, we were as concerned with what folks who did not come to our meetings and actions thought, as those who did. As a result, our major events had a “movement” substance and feel to them with a thousand or more folks doing this or that addressing issues.
Last, but not least, I would say my own role in helping usher in a meaningful, working “peace” between Chicago’s southwest and northwest side neighborhoods in 1984 and then Mayor Harold Washington. Ill advised, the late Mayor picked a fight starting in the Mayoral Primary of 1983 which, fortuitously, ultimately, led to his truly becoming the Mayor of all of Chicago. To quote a Chicago Sun-Times column by Basil Talbott Jr. in April, 1985, “…(Ald. Cliff) Kelley met the ethnics’ top advisor, Jim Keck, on Bruce Dumont’s “Inside Politics.” They hit it off. Kelley said he recognized that Keck once worked in the civil rights movement. Later Kelley met Keck and (Chicago United businessman Al) Robinson in a bar and plotted how to go around skeptical Washington deputies…”
Folks who should know better insisting upon treating racism and other divisive, polarizing isms as causes rather than symptoms. There really is, after all, a "them" and "us," something that wasn’t lost on previous generations. That, throughout human history, there has always been a conflict and struggle between a relatively few haves versus the vast majority of have somes and have nots. Organizers, therefore, should never lose sight of this and find themselves complicit in pitting or playing off have somes and have nots against each other.
Consequently, I still think the chapter “Myths of Coalition” in their book “Black Power” by Charles Hamilton and Kwame Toure and Baynard Rustin’s “From Protest to Politics” remain must reads for any organizer. By the same token, I would also say there is even more to be said for Dr. King’s concept and vision of the “beloved community.”
Besides experiencing Dr. King firsthand, I was fortunate as an organizer to have headed out east in the late 60’s for college. There white ethnic studies was being pursued along with black studies programs. In short, what was being learned was blacks and liberals asking white ethnics to accept guilt and responsibility for 350 years of American slavery and racism as a precondition for dialogue and cooperation was tantamount to asking someone you first met how many times do you beat your wife. That Marquette Park, for instance, would be greater as a model of deliberate, peaceful integration than an easy, convenient symbol of racism.
Not surprisingly, I have never been more optimistic. After all, we now have in the White House an organizer who understands and appreciates the politics of inclusion and need for consensus building towards achieving large, otherwise unobtainable goals. Someone who deeply respects Dr. King’s incredible brilliance and audacity in transforming the American black experience into a force intent on literally saving the Nation, if not the world. As a result, a majority of Americans have come to recognize through collective and assertive action that we have the capacity and power, as a people, to transcend differences for a greater cause or good.
I have been working in the field of addictions and mental health counseling since 1990. I have since earned a Master's degree and become fully licensed as a professional counselor. In recent years, I have grown especially concerned with the lack of adequate and effective adolescent substance use prevention and treatment programs. In truth, I have never really stopped being and thinking like an organizer. I have remained ever committed to the empowerment of people. In order to help make "the dream come true," as folks I originally came up with like to phrase it, I did my bit to elect Barack Obama our President, as a full-time volunteer, in Macomb County, Michigan, the home of Reagan Democrats.
West Side Chapter of Chicago Congress of Racial Equality
Packard, Richard
West Side Chapter of Chicago Congress of Racial Equality
Jim Keck's Coaches
Who has mentored, coached, or consulted with you in your organizing career?
Person
Organization
Egan, Msgr. John
Chicago Archdiocesan Office of Urban Affairs
Gaudette, Tom
Mid-America Institute for Community Organizations
Haasl, Rev. Edgar
West Side Chapter of Chicago Congress of Racial Equality
Hogan, Bill
Chicago Freedom Movement
Kotler, Milton
Institute for Policy Studies
Jim Keck's Peers
Which of your peers influenced your development as an organizer?
Person
Organization
Booth, Heather
Midwest Academy
Creamer, Bob
Illinois Public Action Council
Galluzzo, Greg
United Neighborhoods Organization
Kellman, Jerry
Northeast Austin Organization
Pierson, Frank
Citizens Action Program
Jim Keck's Trainees
Whom have you developed or trained as an organizer? (Please list people who have stayed in the field or a related field for at least three years.)
Person
Organization
Cleary, Joan
Southwest Parish and Neighborhood Federation
Engle, Marc
Southwest Parish and Neighborhood Federation
Franz, Richard
Southwest Parish and Neighborhood Federation
Gannett, Bob
Southwest Parish and Neighborhood Federation
Hertz, Judy
Southwest Parish and Neighborhood Federation
Phillips, Jon
Southwest Parish and Neighborhood Federation
Smith, Mike
Southwest Parish and Neighborhood Federation
Wogstad, Erik
Southwest Parish and Neighborhood Federation
Ziff-Resnick, Ellen
Southwest Parish and Neighborhood Federation
Jim Keck's Coachees
Who did you mentor, coach, or consult with you in your organizing career? (Please list people who have stayed in the field or a related field for at least 3 years.)
