Buying the Night Flight by Georgie Anne Geyer Page A

nice-looking young black men standing on the corner and I greeted them cheerfully, with a big "hello." They responded in kind.
    But up on the third floor, where the meeting was supposed to be, I found only two very drunk, very disreputable black women, their eyes glassy with drugs. I left quickly only to find, as I approached the front door, two strange and very threatening black men entering. There was no question of the threat--a look passed between them and on to me. And they stopped just inside the front door. I took a deep breath and rushed through them, pushing their arms aside. To my continuing terror, outside they continued to follow me. But the four men I had greeted were still at the corner. Incredibly, they formed a line facing the two threatening men and stopped them from following me across the street. In my memory until this day is etched the scene of that strange and fortunate standoff.
    The experience also represented something else to me. Reporters working in a different neighborhood -- or another culture -- must always establish themselves in the turf. The Press must always act as though they belong and also establish friends and collaborators, who become protectors. This is the law of the street. That first time I didn't do it calculatedly. I liked the four young men, but I was also from the South Side of Chicago, so it all came quite naturally.
    Around this time I also met a man who was to influence me deeply, Saul Alinsky. Saul, a big husky man from a Jewish family from way, way behind the tracks, was to become the organizational genius -- and conscience -- for many in his and my Chicago generation.
    He founded and ran the Industrial Areas Foundation, which trained organizers and organized neighborhoods or groups that were powerless, in order to gain power. Saul's methods were highly confrontational, always putting the big powers like corporations and city governments and universities on the spot, and he was not above doing a lot of awful things to empower the "people" he believed in. If you were a friend, Saul could be wonderful company, full of wit and irony and gentler than the most dedicated big puppy. If you were an "enemy," his wit became scathing; his instinct was to kill. In short, people either loved him excessively or hated him excessively. I loved him, but not without an understanding of why he was hated.
    What his critics never understood was that Saul was quintessentially, almost embarrassingly, American. He would never, for instance, go overseas -- he would never go outside the borders of "my country." He loved it with the mystic, stubborn, unquestioning patriotism of the immigrant, even though he was second generation.
    What many -- City Hall, the Democratic machine, big companies, others in power -- hated him for was his "revolutionary" or "radical" philosophy of organizing. In Reveille for Radicals, for instance, called a "manual for ... revolution," he wrote, "This is the story of People's Organizations, ever-growing in number and irrevocably committed to the rallying cry of democracy: 'We the people will work out our own destiny.' They are on the march toward a common goal -- full democracy for the common man."
    It all sounded very radical, but in practice what Saul did was very conservative: to organize the down-and-out quarters of American society into the American system. Thus he might strengthen and in his mind even save it. But it was the way he did it that made him a lot of enemies. He organized against the biggies, whether the University of Chicago or City Hall or Eastman Kodak. What they couldn't see was that in many ways he was saving them and their way of life!
    After I interviewed him for a long series I wrote on The Woodlawn Organization, the first successful black neighborhood organization in Chicago, Saul and I became close friends. There was never anything overtly romantic about our relationship, but there was a special kind of "romance" about it, even though he was some