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Post-Roe, Facing the Whirlwind
New energies are flowing into the abortion rights fight, but it remains to be seen if organizers can marshal them into effective change
“I think that we should toss out everything we are doing organizationally and work on the premise that this is the moment of the whirlwind, that we are no longer organizing but guiding a social movement.”
That was a young organizer named Nicholas von Hoffman (who later became a journalist) describing the overflow crowd that came to a community meeting in Woodlawn, Chicago in May of 1961 to listen to a group of Freedom Riders speak about their experiences in Mississippi organizing for civil rights. He was breathlessly describing the crowd to his boss Saul Alinsky, the veteran Chicago-based community organizer. Alinsky was a champion of structured organizing campaigns, often starting with seemingly apolitical issues like building a block association to get a stop sign installed or garbage picked up. That was work that could steadily build power, but it required patience and careful leadership. The huge crowd that came out to support the Freedom Riders surprised Alinsky and von Hoffman, but they were living through a new era, when people could be galvanized en-masse by far-away events brought into their living rooms by the mass media. In this…
