Over time the claim made for community action became attenuated: the program was not so much reducing poverty as it was developing a new generation of black leaders. Indeed, many people have since gone from jobs with community-action agencies to elective office….
It was in a way inevitable, given the roots of community action in the theory that juvenile delinquents turn to crime only because of a lack of legitimate opportunity, that the [Office of Economic Opportunity] would come to the idea of funding youth gangs.
…The Woodlawn Organization, in Chicago, founded by Saul Alinsky in a black neighborhood on the South Side, was by the mid-sixties a national model…. Two gangs, the Blackstone Rangers and the East Side Disciples, were engaged in violent warfare over the turf of Woodlawn. Inside the community-action world, the feeling was that the gangs were really part of the legitimate leadership structure of the community and could be made into a positive force if provided with opportunity in the form of a federal grant… $927,000 to run a job-training program that would use the gang structures of the Rangers and the Disciples to teach teenagers the skills they needed to enter the labor force. …The grant was made in June [1967]. By December two of the gang members receiving funds had been arrested on murder charges. (The Blackstone Rangers went on to change their name to the El Rukns and to run into legal trouble for such activities as dealing cocaine and contracting with the Libyan government to carry out terrorist activities in the United States.) The Chicago press and the conservatives in Congress, having been handed an example of criminal-coddling by Washington liberals more perfect than they could have dared dream of, launched a flotilla of exposes, denunciations, and hearings. [Lyndon] Johnson was furious, and the grant was canceled in 1968 — but it is a testament to the power of the idea of community action that many of the people who were leaders of the OEO at the time are still proud of it.
–“The Unfinished War: an inside look at how personal enmity, political calculation, and policy misjudgments prevented any effective prosecution of the War on Poverty…” by Nicholas Lemann, The Atlantic, January 1989, pp. 60-61.
…and now, the rest of that story.
The Rangers had a number of their people working in CETA positions for the City, and some of them transferred to Chicago PD clerical staff, where thay used their access to police computers to subvert the CPD Intelligence Division, tipped off the gang to all planned enforcement activity against them, and eventually started direct action against CPD narcotics detectives.
When CPD fially got on to them, the “community organization” protected the infiltrating gang members. It had been the “community organization” which had insisted that the City NOT do background investigations on the “gone stright” gang members.
This situation is THE essential example of how NOT to staff critical-access government positions. Well, it WAS until the City of Portland hired, then elected a pedophile predator queer as first a Councillor’s Aide, now Mayor.
Holy crap!