Organizers Vs. Activists? the Black Lives Matter Movement and Community Organizing in Chicago

Over the past decade, Chicago has been a hotbed of collective action, should it be around immigrants’ rights, economic justice, education or police violence. It is also the place where organizer Saul Alinsky developed his professionalized model of community organizing. In October 2015, the release of a video tape showing a Police Officer firing shots at 17-year-old Laquan McDonald sparked weeks of protest in the city and led to the electoral ousting of State’s attorney Anita Alvarez the following spring. In the process, a variety of organizations and individuals participated. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Chicago between 2015 and 2017, this paper will look at the multi-layered relationships between community-based organizations engaging in community organizing and groups associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. My research suggests that the distinction between organizing and activism played an important role in structuring collective reaction to police killings. Paid organizers working for community-based organizations often favored a more institutional response to police killings, working through orchestrated action, electoral channels, and policy changes. Unpaid activists, on the other hand, tended to prefer disruptive mobilizations, “shutting down” traffic, official police events or public hearings. As a result, conflict often erupted between organizers and activists over the most effective way of addressing police violence issues. But the empirical data also suggests overlaps, transfers, and borrowings between community organizing and Black Lives Matter groups that paint a more complex picture of antiracist politics and the broader social division of political labor in the United States.