It was the first major piece about the radical civil rights movement in the context of the larger civil rights movement, for a national liberal audience. It was impressionistic, but it included political analysis. It got a lot of comment because this hadn't been formulated before. I got very excited. I remember talking to Arthur Waskow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Community organizing' sounds great.
It sounds funny now, but the vocabulary and the ideas were, to most people, completely new then. This was in the spring of '65 and the genie was out of the bottle. I wound up in Chicago, which was a matter of organizing white tough hillbillies, usually immigrants from Appalachia, and the people there included Rennie Davis and Todd Gitlin. Then I went to Cleveland and there were Carol McEldowney and Paul Potter and Sharon Jeffrey. The next year Kathy Boudin came, and Billy Ayers and Terry Robbins, the whole crowd.