When I moved to San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood in 1979, its
predominately Latino residents appeared largely unorganized, if not
disenfranchised. I asked a longtime Latino activist if my sense was
correct, and he replied, “We haven’t had a real grassroots peoples
organizations since the MCO (i.e. Mission Community Organization).”
This was the first I’d heard of the MCO, and would often hear the
activist’s comments echoed by others. Now, Mike Miller, who was staff
director of MCO during its 1969-71 heyday, has written A Community Organizer’s Tale,
a book that chronicles MCO’s success, and its all too soon demise.
Miller raises important questions about the impact of nonprofits on
community advocacy, the role of public money in stifling dissent, and
the challenge of maintaining a broad-based “peoples” organization when
the “people” it seeks to represent have profoundly conflicting
interests.
Mike Miller is a legend in community organizing
circles, and for years word has spread that he was working on a book
about the MCO. It has finally emerged nearly four decades after
Miller’s leaving the organization, but he kept contemporaneous notes
and the final product may have benefited from the perspective he gained
from the passage of time.
People Power in the Mission
MCO’s founding convention was held on October 4, 1968. It included 800
delegates from 66 organizations, reflecting the group’s goal of
including each and every of the Mission’s diverse constituency groups.
MCO was among the many groups of the times inspired by Saul Alinsky,
which meant that church groups and labor unions played key roles.
MCO’s founding coincided with the implementation of the federal Model
Cities program. Model Cities would inject millions of dollars into San
Francisco, and MCO would play a leading role in deciding where these
funds were spent. Joe Alioto was San Francisco’s Mayor at the time, and
as part of his effort to secure MCO’s support, he largely delegated
decision-making around Model Cities to the now powerful Mission
organization.
Miller spends considerable pages discussing how MCO addressed Model
Cities, because it sparked an internal conflict that some felt led to
the group’s demise. On the one hand, Miller and others thought the
federal money should go to existing institutions, whose work program
would be shaped – if not entirely decided – by MCO.
But a competing faction felt that Model Cities funds should go to
independent nonprofit organizations. They saw this as ensuring
“community control,” and felt that allowing existing institutions to
get the funds would lead to “downtown” taking over the Mission.
The latter faction prevailed. This would transform the federal program
into a jobs program for local activists, while creating power bases
independent of MCO.
Miller quotes Rich Sorro, leader of the Mission Hiring Hall and a key MCO leader, on how Model Cities impacted the organization:
“The Mission Coalition fell apart over Model Cities. People were
fighting for titles, positions on board of directors and administrative
jobs in the funded agencies … You had a whole pack of neighborhood
people carrying briefcases around. This was the fundamental cause of
the weakening, and later breakup of the MCO. People got divided up into
different agencies that were getting Model Cities money. And it wasn’t
all that much money to begin with.”
MCO’s Demise
By the summer of 1970, internal conflicts among key MCO leaders
threatened the group’s future. Miller left as staff director in 1971,
and MCO’s last convention was in 1973. The Mission would never again
have a “people power” mass organization – one that, as Miller
repeatedly emphasizes, organized “everybody.”
How did an organization that began with such promise, and which Miller
describes as the City’s single most powerful community organization,
dissolve after such a brief tenure? True, as Miller, Sorro and others
note, the rise of individual nonprofits led to a model of patronage
that worked against the MCO’s efforts to empower its members.
But there was a structural problem with MCO that Miller largely
overlooks, and which explains why it has not been replicated in the
Mission in the past four decades. The fact is that “the people” of the
Mission have conflicting interests that prevents their harmonious
membership in a single organization.
For example, in the 1971 mayoral election, MCO strongly backed Mayor
Alioto against the liberal Jack Morrison. The ILWU, Laborers Union and
other labor unions were strong backers of Alioto’s pro-development
policies, yet by the mid-1970’s neighborhood activists across the city
were organizing to slow what the Bay Guardian historically labeled the “Manhattanization” of San Francisco.
Had MCO not fallen apart over Model Cities, the group likely would have
broken up over development policy. Or even more likely, as rising rents
in the mid to late 1970’s sparked calls for rent control, MCO could not
have survived internal conflicts between its landlord and tenant
members.
The Mission’s Future
While Miller sees the absence of a mass organization as limiting the
Mission’s capacity to avoid gentrification, one could argue that
“people power” has long existed in the community in a different form.
This form is the Mission’s impact on city elections, as the
neighborhood’s strong voting support for a series of tenant protection
measures – from reducing annual rent hikes to expanding rent control in
small buildings to strengthening code enforcement to boosting eviction
protections – has protected the vast majority of Mission tenants from
displacement.
Further, strong Mission District support for Art Agnos in the 1987
mayoral campaign paved the way for new laws protecting the community’s
single room occupancy hotels (SRO’s), and for transforming city
homeless policy from one night stands in SRO’s to permanent housing in
the Mission and elsewhere. And for all the controversy over new
development in the neighborhood, high-rise buildings remain barred in
the Mission under zoning laws, and commercial development is still
prohibited in much of the community.
Ultimately, Miller’s focus is less on the Mission’s history since the
late 1960’s and more on the tough strategic questions about organizing
and building grassroots power. These questions are strikingly relevant
today, and activists will benefit greatly from discussing issues Miller
raises and applying them to their own campaigns and organizations.
Everyone interested in the history of San Francisco politics should
thank Mike Miller for telling the long overdue story of one of the
city’s great community organizations. And those outside San Francisco
will likely see parallels between the MCO and their other groups, as
maintaining “people power” organizations remains as difficult today as
during the MCO’s heyday.
Randy Shaw is the author of Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century
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