Dear editor,
In the Sept. 7 edition of The Korea Times, Bill Costello wrote a piece, “Teachers’ union sells its Saul,” for the Thoughts of the Times section, mentioning the work of Saul Alinsky and calling him a communist sympathizer.
He then went on to say that Alinsky's biographer Sanford Horwitt described him as a "communist fellow-traveler." Evidently Costello has a very conservative and probably far right agenda to propose. That's his right and privilege.
What I write here has very little to do with the National Education Association’s strategy or program that he opposes. I'm not involved in that controversy in any way. However, his description of Alinsky was more than a bit overboard!
Alinsky was most certainly a man of the left but he was too much his own self to allow Marxism or any other "ism" dominate his spirit or thinking. He's considered the father of community organization in the United States.
And, yes, he did his best to empower people who were at the bottom of American society from the 1930s to the 1970s. He worked with numerous Christian leaders like Jesse Jackson.
He trained the Farm Workers' Union very Catholic Ceasar Chavez and had an ongoing friendship with Dorothy Day of the New York Catholic Worker. He even received the Pacem in Terris and Freedom Award sponsored by the Davenport Diocese of the Catholic Church.
Alinsky was a flamboyant and in-your-face community organizer. He made rich and oppressive people feel very uncomfortable. People on the far right of American society found him obnoxious but, again, he was never a communist. Similar to Dorothy Day he afflicted the comfortable and comforted the afflicted. To call him a communist seems like red-baiting or McCathyism.
I met Alinsky when he visited Korea ― I believe it was in the latter part of 1971. I can't recall the exact date. We met in Cardinal Kim Sou-hwan's office in Myeongdong, central Seoul.
If he were, as Costello asserts, a communist, how did he manage to enter into the very anti-communist Korea then ruled by President Park Chung-hee?
During our conversation, Alinsky was quite up fronf in saying that he doubted his method of organizing people would work in Korea or any other autocratic regime so long as the government was not democratic and the press was controlled.
Alinsky died in June 1972. His visit to Korea just before he died showed that he was interested in the Korean peoples' struggle for democracy and a level playing field that allowed all Koreans to advance.
Alinsky deserves to be remembered for what he was and not labeled a communist ― something he was not!
Rev. Jack Trisolini
Labor Pastoral Center
Seongbuk-gu, Seoul
jacktkorea@yahoo.com