Articulating and Disseminating Atlanta’s Community Organizing Strategies

Despite the proliferation of community action agencies after the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act in 1964, and amidst the organizing wave that included such groups and movements as the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the southern civil rights movement, and the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), organizations struggled to craft an effective community organizing praxis in the mid-1960s. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s interest in formulating an urban organizing strategy and the Southern Regional Council’s desire to articulate and disseminate community organizing models converged in the Vine City neighborhood in northwest Atlanta in 1965 and 1966.  While Vine City was unusual in that it was one of the few southern, urban sites that drew the attention and resources of multiple organizations, the neighborhood’s experience reflected the struggles of the larger community action movement, which made it valuable as a case study in community organizing.  At the same time, materials generated by the Vine City residents themselves display a largely resident-led movement that was decidedly southern and hybrid – a movement that poached readily from southern civil rights strategies, embraced black power rhetoric, and eschewed New Left philosophies.  Using the Vine City experience – “experiment,” as the SRC referred to it -- the SRC and SNCC both sought to formulate and then articulate and disseminate effective community organizing strategies to politicize and mobilize communities.  Ultimately, SNCC would fold before fully completing its urban project.  SRC would go on to identify and circulate strategies they thought applicable to other action agencies, eliding tactics that reflected Vine City’s southern context.