Rochester Gets Religion Anew

The Rochester Area Council of Churches, an affiliate of the National Council of Churches, had long pondered the “race question” in the city. While unwilling to fund Black-led initiatives in the prerebellion period, some of the council’s members had grown increasingly invested in race relations and the civil rights movement. It was this white-dominated council that first organized educational and humanitarian efforts in the migrant camps and employed Black ministers to run the resulting programs after World War II. The council had also developed the Rochester Board for Urban Ministry, a new effort designed to bring together inner-city ministers and churches to address the rapid demographic changes taking place in the city. Once established, the Board for Urban Ministry put its resources into a full-time director, hiring Herb White, an up-and-coming white minister who earned his urban organizing stripes in nearby Buffalo and in Baltimore.

In Rochester, White had immediately set to work getting the lay of the land and building an organizational structure. He introduced himself to the Black ministers, serving as a bridge in many ways between white and Black churches.¹¹ One of his first encounters involved the Reverend Marvin Chandler, a young Black theologian studying at the Colgate Rochester Divinity School. While a divinity student, Chandler worked in the migrant ministry for the Rochester Area Council of Churches and served as a liaison between the migrant community, the Black churches, and the council. Chandler recalled these broader efforts “to move toward … more contact, cross-contact with African-American churches and so forth.” He believed “there was this effort, I think, during those years in the churches to at least not so much integrate as to have some kind of … interconnection.”¹²

Herb White also met Minister Franklin Florence, the fiery Church of Christ leader, who previously fought for the police review board during Rochester’s prerising wave of police brutality cases in 1962 and 1963. Florence later recalled that his early encounters with White were somewhat disappointing. Florence implored White to devote resources to run recreational programs for Black youth, only to be told that White was unable to provide that type of financial assistance. The Board for Urban Ministry simply had not given him the budget.¹³ While White attempted to forge relationships, he also began to develop small programs to build coalitions of citizens, churches, and businesses to address the spread of urban blight. He did all of this with meager resources. White’s work was an important step toward exposing the urban crisis in Rochester, but he struggled to move beyond dialogue and discussion.

By 1963, the council had charged its churches with learning more about the urban crisis. The programs and organizations that the council and the Board for Urban Ministry hoped to build required congregational support and funding. In order to educate its lay and clerical members, to build support, and to fund its efforts, the council assigned contemporary texts for ministers and congregants to read. These included Harvey Cox’s The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective and Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States.¹⁴ The most memorable and influential of these texts, however, was Charles Silberman’s Crisis in Black and White. By capturing several important elements of the northern Black struggle, Silberman made that struggle accessible to a largely white, middle-class, liberal audience. Perhaps this was the book’s appeal to the Rochester Area Council of Churches. Silberman described the collective powerlessness and so-called apathy of the urban poor. He also touted several movements for self-determination, such as those initiated by the Nation of Islam and the Industrial Areas Foundation. Here, he noted the success of those movements for rehabilitating African Americans’ self-perceptions as well as the economic conditions of the Black urban poor. A relevant and significant strength of Silberman’s text was its focus on the Black Freedom Struggle in the North. While northern whites were exposed nightly to the civil rights movement in the South, they remained consciously ignorant of the struggles taking place in their own communities. Silberman’s book helped to contextualize the Rochester events for those who would later ponder how a “riot” could have taken place there.¹⁵

Perhaps more importantly, Crisis in Black and White admonished white liberals to support—rather than to lead—the Black community’s efforts to organize for collective and economic power. Silberman effectively documented the consequences for traditional civil rights organizations when white liberals dominated the agenda and activity: “Negroes remained the junior, and usually silent, partner in the great liberal coalition, deferring to white judgment on strategy and tactics. However unavoidable, this relationship had unfortunate consequences for both the Black and white partners.… But Negroes always resented the relationship; their dependence on their white allies created an underlying animus that was no less real for being carefully suppressed.”¹⁶ For Silberman, then, African Americans taking “the initiative in action on their own behalf” became absolutely crucial to the success of any Black movement.¹⁷ Armed with Silberman’s insights, the Rochester Area Council of Churches set out to find a way to aid the Black community in organizing its ranks. After the uprising, Herb White turned in earnest to people like Franklin Florence and Marvin Chandler. David Finks, a white Episcopal minister, remembered, “Since 1960 several groups had been studying the church’s role in the changing city, and the riots provided the occasion for action.”¹⁸ What could be done to support their efforts? Here, religious leaders sought new inroads to existing movements.

The coalition of Black ministers and Black activists along with the Rochester Area Council of Churches realized they needed each other to make headway in Rochester. The ministers and activists could galvanize the people, while the council had access to resources. Together they needed to decide on a course of action. Georgiana Sibley, better known as Mrs. Harper Sibley, who played an important role in bringing the National Guard to Rochester during the rebellion, would reappear as a key participant in these discussions. Born to wealth and privilege, Sibley led the life of a debutante, which provided her access to people in power, including Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Ethel Roosevelt, who served as one of her bridesmaids. At various points, she served as president of the Rochester Area Council of Churches and of the United Council of Church Women. Sibley was also widely regarded for her skills as a mediator and, having attended the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council in 1962, she believed in the responsibility and the power of the church to resolve social ills. In the organizational frenzy following the 1964 uprising, Sibley’s home “became a sort of headquarters where members of both factions could come together and the head of the Black Muslims was welcomed as graciously as the mayor.”¹⁹ It was in one such meeting that a member of the coalition suggested working with the SCLC. It was not a novel idea.

In the midst of the 1964 Harlem uprising, New York’s Mayor Wagner had also invited Martin Luther King Jr., as the most recognizable face of the civil rights movement, to New York City.²⁰ Wagner, like white officials everywhere, frantically turned to national civil rights movement leaders and organizations to “control their people.”²¹ His invitation to King began a trend that would continue throughout the remainder of King’s life. For his part, King resented these requests, arguing that by turning to national movement leaders, officials in riot-torn cities implied “that in some strange way, the Negro leadership is fundamentally responsible for the acts of violence and rioting which have occurred within these Negro communities.”²² Even so, King did travel to New York City and met with several officials. He ultimately declined the invitation to organize there, on the grounds that he had committed himself to “spending more time in the deep South working in communities that are involved in nonviolent direct action campaigns.”²³

Despite King’s unwillingness to dedicate himself to the urban North, the uprisings in both New York City and Rochester marked a turning point for him and for the SCLC, even if it did not translate immediately. One historian of the SCLC has argued that until this point, “King had given little consideration either to the economic hardship which afflicted most Blacks or to the complex forces which created and perpetuated the ghetto.”²⁴ Though not willing to go himself, King eventually sent organizers into rebellion-torn northern cities in hopes of finding a project north of the Mason-Dixon Line for the SCLC.

Georgiana Sibley was only too happy to use her national church connections to volunteer Rochester for that northern project. The SCLC, as a Black-led religious organization, fit nicely within the council’s new effort to support Black-led organizing efforts. And so, with a donation from its national parent group and the blessing of the Black leadership, the council invited King’s men to Rochester. They were hopeful that the SCLC’s brand of social and political organizing might work to quell further disturbances. While “the Black ministers were interested,” the white ministers were ecstatic when the SCLC sent two of its leading lights, Andrew Young and James Bevel, with a team of organizers.²⁵

Once in Rochester, the SCLC facilitators engaged with the youth and the church people. The ministers joined young men on the basketball courts and in the alleys, hoping to win them over to the nonviolent cause. Young would later report on the games with a touch of arrogance: “Much to their surprise, these ‘nonviolent’ soldiers managed to beat them at their own games. The youth’s humiliation was matched only by their respect and amazement when they discovered that half of the team were ordained ministers.”²⁶ But beating the younger men at basketball and dice did not translate into a moral victory. Though Young did not advertise it in the SCLC newsletter, his men were verbally accosted outside Rochester’s African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church after James Bevel finished speaking to a community group. Young men who attended the talk waited until Bevel walked out to challenge him. One explained, “I went along with the preacher until he started worrying about the white man’s soul, until he said he was more concerned for a white man beating a Negro than for the Negro.”²⁷ This young man was not alone in his rejection of southern nonviolent strategies. It was widely reported that “Jim Bevel’s preaching and ‘street raps’ in the Christian rhetoric of M. L. King, Jr. were rejected by the young Black adults,” even as “ ‘What’s all this Jesus shit?’ threatened to become a battle cry.”²⁸ While the young men rejected the turn-the-other-cheek language, their anger reflected a general impatience with SCLC’s strategies. One young man admitted, “I’m tired of waiting. I want to be free to live in Brighton [i.e., a white Rochester suburb] tomorrow.”²⁹

Though it went unreported in the papers at the time, Rochester’s Black leadership was also dissatisfied with the SCLC men. While some viewed their presence as competition, others reported an inability to get in step with the SCLC contingent. Reuben Davis, the contrarian Black NAACP attorney who defended members of Rochester’s Nation of Islam in their legal battle, recalled hosting a meeting at his home with local leaders, the SCLC men, and students from the Colgate Rochester Divinity School. He believed the problem to be a “personality” conflict: “I think that maybe … there was a personality thing that didn’t click with the people who were active in the NAACP and the people from SCLC. And I don’t know but it just never got off the ground … except for these couple of times, SCLC never came back so there was no opportunity to try and develop and create a good working relationship.”³⁰ On the other hand, Constance Mitchell thought the conflict between the SCLC delegation and its Black Rochester hosts centered on a turf battle. Mitchell, who would later travel from Rochester to join King’s famous march in Selma, believed “Rochester never bought into [the SCLC].” She also noted, “Rochester had an NAACP active at that time, and I think there was conflict between that group and a new group coming into town. Turfism—that’s all it was, you know.”³¹ It is little wonder there was conflict between the various Rochester groups and the southern men. The SCLC approached Rochester as a teacher would a student, admonishing, “We’re not here to tell you not to fight, we’re here to teach you how to fight.”³² By all accounts, the SCLC contingent failed to appreciate the history of the Rochester struggle or the dedicated efforts of its leaders; in fact, they seemed downright oblivious to it. What is more, the SCLC rhetoric did not address the economic problems illuminated by the 1964 uprising that African Americans in Rochester felt were of the highest priority.

When the SCLC ultimately declined to organize in the city, the decision brought some relief to those in Rochester. As the SCLC’s James Bevel explained, “Rochester’s economic and social problems were not as clearly defined as those in the South and were ill-suited to SCLC’s church-based organizing methods.”³³ The SCLC’s unwillingness to organize in Rochester was perhaps a missed opportunity for the southerners, though. In Rochester laid a model of the future of the northern movement and in many ways of the Black Freedom Struggle nationally. Adam Fairclough, who produced an organizational history of the SCLC, would remark that the SCLC “made little attempt, apparently, to assimilate and interpret its experience in Rochester.”³⁴ For Rochester, however, the rejection led to further soul-searching and thus became a blessing. David Finks, scholar, activist, and Rochester insider, wrote that while the SCLC’s visit was unsuccessful, “it raised the issue of bringing in trained organizers to assist the Black community in its leadership development.”³⁵ The lack of “definition” to which the SCLC’s James Bevel referred created an opportunity to define the parameters and the interrelatedness of the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’ in Rochester’s struggle, again foretelling the direction the broader movement would take.³⁶

Organizing the Poor

With the SCLC out of the way, the Rochester Area Council of Churches and the Black ministers who organized as the Rochester Area Ministers Conference went back to the drawing board. Through the auspices of the Board for Urban Ministry, Herb White asked that the Black ministers read Silberman’s Crisis in Black and White as well. On White’s telling, after reading the text, the Black clergy asked if the council would contact Chicago’s Saul Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). The IAF came highly recommended. The SCLC had suggested Rochester leaders talk with Alinsky, while Silberman’s book had promoted the IAF, even above the Urban League’s economic efforts. At the time, the IAF’s most impressive and well-known project was The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), a coalition of associations, religious institutions, and civic organizations on Chicago’s South Side concerned with the economic condition of the Black neighborhood.³⁷ In many respects, then, the IAF’s prior work mirrored what needed to be done in Rochester.

By contacting Alinsky, the Rochester Area Council of Churches took a provocative step. To begin, Alinsky’s divisive reputation preceded his arrival in Rochester. A local man trying to make sense of Alinsky’s efforts wrote, “Wherever he has worked, Alinsky has been the center of controversy. Few people who have had contact with him are neutral. They either admire him or hate him. He has been accused of being a Communist, a Marxist, and a Fascist, a tool of the Catholic Church, and a segregationist and an integrationist.”³⁸ Further, leaders of the established social agencies in Rochester, namely, the white-led settlement houses, bristled at the thought of Alinsky’s presence, believing “outside interference” unnecessary. They argued that Rochester could solve its own problems and that the ministers were simply meddling in affairs better left to local professionals, presumably the settlement houses.³⁹ The settlement house directors believed, as one observer put it, that the “poor and powerless people are clients to be cared for” rather than “citizens to be organized to wield a share of power in the metropolis.”⁴⁰ This point was important. Sharing power would ultimately weaken the settlement house directors’ influence. For others, rejecting Alinsky was pragmatic. They simply did not see that “such community-financed projects can become really effective in making drastic changes in the status quo, without antagonizing some influential community interests and jeopardizing their future financial support.”⁴¹

Alinsky positioned himself as a defender of democracy for ordinary people and a radical organizer exposing class and race conflict for what it was. In so doing, he frequently made enemies with the keepers of the status quo, Black and white. He worked from the principle that all communities were organized and had indigenous leadership. The role of his Industrial Areas Foundation, then, involved locating the existing leadership and organizations to brainstorm strategies for assuming power in their communities. His approach made the poor and the powerless commanding agents capable of enacting necessary changes in their communities, not victims to be cared for. In response to his critics, Alinsky responded, “Do you think when I go into a Negro community today I have to tell them they’re discriminated against? Do you think I go in there and get them angry? Don’t you think they have resentments to begin with, and how much rawer can I rub them?”⁴² He had a point, but not everyone in Rochester was ready to concede it.

Despite the hostility of some, the Rochester Area Council of Churches pressed on. In November 1964, a delegation of Black ministers accompanied by Herb White and Constance Mitchell went to Chicago to meet with Alinsky. Some remembered that at that meeting Alinsky played hard to get; he argued that the “entire country’s in a mess” and in need of organization. He wanted to know what was so special about Rochester.⁴³ While Alinsky may have “acted like he didn’t want to come to Rochester,” nothing could have been further from the truth.⁴⁴ His understudy, Ed Chambers, later disclosed that the IAF had actually set its sights on Rochester generally, specifically Kodak: “It’s one of the reasons we wanted to do this town, was to get them.”⁴⁵ After the meeting ended, members of the Rochester delegation recalled a sense that their city would never be the same again. Alinsky warned that current leadership would be displaced by the new organization and that new—and sometimes unpopular—strategies would be implemented. But there was great hope among the group that Alinsky would provide the necessary “connection between the individual and the larger society.”⁴⁶

Back in Rochester, the churches and the Black leaders went to work organizing their various constituencies to meet Alinsky’s demands. The IAF required $100,000 for a period of two years and an invitation from the Black community before setting up shop in Rochester. Herb White took the first request to the Rochester Area Council of Churches, which now consisted primarily of white ministers and Marvin Chandler. Finks later recalled that the council’s proposal emphasized “the class unrest evidenced in the riots rather than merely the racial strife.” Finks continued, “The ‘have-nots’ of Rochester’s slum wards had legitimate grievances which the ‘haves’ were obliged to address.”⁴⁷ Though not a unanimous vote, the members did agree to move forward, requesting funds from their churches and denominational boards.

In many ways, Rochester led the liberal and largely middle-class National Council of Churches (NCC) in new directions. Prior to the Rochester events, the NCC had done little to “think about specific responses to racial issues in northern cities.” According to one NCC historian, “The predilections of these northern liberals, and of the nation at large … for so long … centered on the South and the struggle for equality there.”⁴⁸ As the uprising in Rochester forced the city to face its racial ills, the NCC, which had long been active in the South, acknowledged the need to act in its own backyard. Shortly thereafter, the NCC became engaged in other riot-torn cities, Detroit and Cleveland among them. The NCC would ultimately commit considerable resources, political and financial, to bolster the movements for economic equality in the North.

Alinsky’s other demand, procuring an invitation from the Black community, took a little more effort. For Black Rochester, the decision to invite Alinsky to town could not be discreetly couched in class rhetoric. Alinsky would later recall, “The Rochester Area Council of Churches, a predominantly white body of liberal clergymen, invited us in to organize the Black community and agreed to pay all our expenses. We said they didn’t speak for the Blacks and we wouldn’t come in unless we were invited in by the Black community itself.”⁴⁹ Alinsky was right to be wary. Many in Rochester’s Black communities were opposed to the plan. In fact, Herb White recalled that two young Black men came to his office at one point issuing veiled threats that “it ain’t safe for you … as long as you’re going to be supporting all of this.”⁵⁰ Like the settlement house directors, though for different reasons, some longtime Black residents, such as Eugene “Gus” Newport, believed the Black community could organize its own people and did not require white outsiders to teach them how to do it.⁵¹ Given that Black Rochester had failed to build an organization capable of meeting the community’s various needs, Newport’s sentiments likely reflected his own interest in organizing. Newport had assisted Malcolm X in starting the Organization of Afro-American Unity, thus beginning a long career of leadership and organizing, which culminated in his ascension to mayor of Berkeley, California, in the 1980s. Still, Newport’s organizing aspirations aside, he did raise a troubling point for many in Black Rochester: Alinsky was white, and he had no history with that city.

Few were more troubled initially by Alinsky’s whiteness than Minister Franklin Florence. But in time, Florence would come to see Alinsky as an organizational genius. He recalled that two important events persuaded him—and much of Black Rochester—that Alinsky was an acceptable man for the job. After the Rochester Area Council of Churches agreed to raise the funds, Alinsky began a talking tour in the city’s two Black communities. Florence recounted the wisdom and honesty he saw in Alinsky’s vision:

We got this meeting at Mt. Olivet Church, and Saul [Alinsky] came in … just irreverent, vulgar, anti-establishment, but … on point about digging … the sense of one’s worth, and man’s sense, the manhood, and the sense of who you are as a person, as a man, to take control and charge of your responsibility and yourself and there were all these things. One thing that stayed with me, with Saul, he said, “Never mind my being invited here by the Council of Churches. I refuse to come into Rochester unless you invite me.” But here’s … the genius of Saul and organizing—he said, “You would have to get about three thousand names of people in your neighborhood … before I come in, that they would agree that I come in to work with you.” … “Now—” We’d raised with him, “Well, who’s paying you?” He said, “That wouldn’t be your business, but I’m going to tell you.” He said, “Our contract with the Council of Churches is to come in and offer a service, providing that you invite me.” I said, “Well what about their money?” He said, “Well, I’m going to take their money, but I’m not taking their money to do their bidding. I’m taking their money because they won’t give it to you.”⁵²

For Florence, a light came on; Alinsky was offering to teach them a skill. He had also addressed honestly a plain truth about all of the planning and organizing the council had done. Despite its willingness to assist and raise money, the council had not offered to turn the funds over to any existing Black organization or local leader. Having consulted both Marvin Chandler and Constance Mitchell, the council likely believed the key to preventing further uprisings during the coming summer was to organize the Black community quickly. Here, they believed that trained organizers rather than activists would prove immediately successful. It also seems likely that those churches footing the bill preferred a white national organization with a proven track record. For starters, it was easier to raise the money among their membership on these grounds. Nonetheless, Florence appreciated Alinsky’s honesty. Still, he needed to have one other conversation before he was completely persuaded.

In February 1965, the debate over Alinsky raged in all quarters of Rochester. About that time, another so-called radical made his way back to the city. Malcolm X returned for what would be his final visit to Rochester—just four days before he was assassinated in New York City. Organizers from Colgate Rochester Divinity School requested that Malcolm speak at a conference on world religions, and with some prerequisites, Malcolm agreed. This event, which required incredible collaboration between the religious community and the Black activist community, signaled once more the reemergence of the religious-activist alliance. But for Florence, who had helped to arrange Malcolm’s visit, it was an opportunity to discuss the possibility of Alinsky’s organizing in the city. Malcolm, they knew, had experience in Chicago and would surely be familiar with Alinsky’s organization. Further, Florence and others believed that Malcolm, who had considerable history with Black Rochester, would make for a good sounding board to discuss Alinsky’s whiteness in the local context.

At the close of Malcolm’s formal talks that February day, he retired to his hotel room with various members of Rochester’s Black community. The group engaged in heated debate over Alinsky and the IAF. Florence recalled that despite the intensity of the discussion, Malcolm quietly offered his point of view. “Look, all I can tell you,” Malcolm reportedly said, “is that they have done a terrific job in organizing the south side of Chicago.… He’s supposed to be the best organizer in the country, and one in the world.”⁵³ Still, there were those present who balked: “Alinsky was a Jew,” they argued. Malcolm admonished them that Blacks should always be willing to learn, regardless of the teacher: “One must never turn their minds away from learning a skill, whatsoever, and taking that skill and coming back to work for the good of our people.”⁵⁴ It was the last piece of wisdom that Rochester would take from Malcolm, though long after his death, he continued to be an “absent presence” in the city.⁵⁵ For Florence and many others in the Black community, Malcolm’s endorsement settled the matter. The signatures of Black residents were obtained, and a contract between the Industrial Areas Foundation and the Rochester Area Council of Churches was signed in March 1965.

Within days of the contract signing, the IAF worked alongside a temporary steering committee, initially consisting of several Black ministers and the ubiquitous Mildred Johnson, to identify the community’s existing organizations. Believing that all communities were already organized, Alinsky counseled that they simply needed to be coordinated to act in concert. Thus, he charged the steering committee with identifying the various organizational units in the community. The new organization would not be comprised of individuals, but rather of existing member organizations: block clubs, employment groups, informal youth organizations, churches, barbershops, and the like. The umbrella organization would further have four structural layers of leadership and decision-making authority. First, each member group would elect representatives to serve on the Delegates Council. Then the Delegates Council would elect a steering committee to determine organizational priorities and actions. Thus, members of the steering committee were accountable to the Delegates Council through a yearly election. The steering committee, while holding ultimate decision-making power for the organization, would appoint various committees to investigate and make recommendations to the steering committee. They also would advise and hear suggestions from area vice presidents, who represented various geographic regions, generally specific wards. Any individual from a member group would be able to serve on any committee; however, in practice the steering committee generally appointed the chairs of each action committee based on prior service and area of expertise.

The community members who first interviewed Saul Alinsky, with a few additions, formed a temporary committee and began holding meetings. Though most of the members were skillful activists, few of them had experience establishing a large-scale organization. At their first meeting, then, temporary steering committee members recognized the need for, and then established, three guiding principles. For the benefit of the community, they clarified the intended role of the IAF in the formation of their new organization. Second, they established parameters for negotiating with Rochester’s power structure. Third, they provided an organizational tone that they based on three values: discipline, respect for authority, and self-respect (see figure 4.1).

Having been chosen temporary chairman of the committee, Franklin Florence’s first public statements clarified the role the IAF would play in the new Black organization. Florence and the temporary committee addressed their immediate concern: mollifying those in the Black community who initially rejected Alinsky and the IAF. They further hoped to win over longtime Black community members, such as Gus Newport, who rejected Alinsky specifically and outside interventions generally. The committee hoped to assure Newport and others that Black leaders would be calling the shots. The IAF, Florence explained, would “consult with the temporary committee,” “aid in the development of the Negro staff organizers,” and “carry out all policy as directed by the temporary committee.”⁵⁶ The IAF would not direct the Black community. Florence’s message was clear: the Black leaders ran the show; the IAF assisted. After announcing this policy at its meetings, the organization publicized it in the local papers: “This is a Black organization to be directed by Black people for the betterment of other Black people.” Florence counseled, “We call the shots. Mr. Chambers [i.e., the white IAF organizer] and Mr. Alinsky are not in it. Mr. Chambers will only be used as consultant as needed.”⁵⁷ Apparently the strategy worked; the new organization attracted more African Americans to its initial meeting than any other organization in Rochester ever had.

A second order of business established an organizational practice that leaders would follow for years to come. In advance of the organization’s first meeting, Rochester’s commissioner of public safety, Harper Sibley Jr. (Georgiana Sibley’s son), extended a meeting invitation to Minister Florence. Despite his relationship with Mrs. Sibley, Florence was slow to accept the son’s invitation. While the burgeoning Black leadership recognized a need to meet with Rochester’s “power structure,” they resisted any efforts to elevate or single out one representative from the Black community to occupy that role. A long history of Black organizing in Rochester (most recently in efforts to negotiate the placement of public housing under the NACCP president, Father Quintin Primo) demonstrated the perils of this practice. Instead, the steering committee aimed to privilege “cooperative action in meetings with [the] power structure.”⁵⁸ Thus, it was decided that the entire committee would meet with Sibley at a mutually agreeable time. The decision was important for the new organization for two reasons: First, it established communal organizing and decision making as a central tenet of the group. Second, it made it difficult for the white establishment to recruit any one Black leader to a cozy relationship at the expense of the Black community.

While the temporary committee fostered a spirit of communal organizing, they remained mostly churchmen brought up in traditions that honored discipline and order. For this reason, two speakers presented back-to-back speeches at their first organizational meeting privileging unity and discipline. The Reverend Herbert Shankel spoke on “strength in unity,” while the Reverend Murphy Greer emphasized discipline and respect for authority.⁵⁹ These themes addressed the two central concerns in the community at that time. In advance of the 1964 uprising, the Black community had established a strong sense of unity around the issue of police brutality. In the absence of a specific and galvanizing issue, the committee hoped to continue Mildred Johnson’s call, “We are Black folks first.” Not surprisingly, Mildred Johnson served on the temporary committee and spoke at its initial community meeting. Though women would rarely serve as spokespersons for this newly galvanized movement, they were central to its organizing efforts and played a critical role in defining issues and setting agendas for the nascent group. Publicly, however, men served as the voice of the organization. While Johnson’s unity plea continued to be an organizing principle, the minister leaders believed that discipline and respect for authority had diminished during the uprising. They hoped the two—discipline and respect for authority—would foster self-respect, a key component for membership in the new organization, and would aid in the prevention of future uprisings.

Once the temporary committee—which was comprised almost entirely of Black ministers, Johnson notwithstanding—established these organizing principles, it set out to choose a name for the nascent organization. The name, the members felt, would establish them as a new presence in the community. Several suggestions of undefined acronyms floated among them—LIGHT, LOVE, and others. But despite their desire to instill discipline, the group maintained a certain respect for the rebellion and for those who had risen up. They were also cognizant of the constituency that had rejected the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and its nonviolent strategies. The organization’s name, they felt, ought to reflect the spirit of the event that birthed it. A temporary committee member, Herbert Shankel, suggested the name FIGHT. Florence recalled his suggestion: “Well look, why [don’t] we just fight the good fight of faith? That’s a term different than the scriptures second Timothy.”⁶⁰ Once they had decided upon FIGHT, the group sought to define the acronym. The “F” they agreed stood for “freedom.” The “I” was for “integration,” a concession made by the more militant members of the group to the more moderate. The group struggled with “G” and so left it for last. The “H” was for “honor,” an attribute they took seriously, and the “T” was for “today”—there would be no more waiting for rights to come in due course. Their deliberations had been lengthy and at times stressful. Exhausted, they decided to leave the “G” until their convention in June. Alinsky, the atheist of the group and a latecomer to the meeting, suggested the obvious to a group of ministers: “Why not ‘G’ for ‘God’?” For Marvin Chandler, at least, the inability of the ministers to locate God in the formation of a Black Power organization represented a larger struggle between the secular and the sacred. He remembered asking himself,

How did I locate myself as a clergyman and a Black man? What were the theological themes … being experienced: Humanity? Sin? Repentance? The Cross? Salvation? How was God operating in all this—in all of us? Each morning, as I left my office, I would look at a cross that an artist friend had given me. I felt that the goals towards which we struggled were proper and right, but I also knew the ambiguity that was present in the situation, and that I might be very wrong, so I prayed for honesty, humility, and the strength to face my private fears.⁶¹

God, they ultimately decided, was for Black Power. Having decided upon the acronym, the group unveiled the name FIGHT to its membership and to the community. Not surprisingly, there were those who felt the name should reflect a more positive or conciliatory tone. Yet Florence defended the name and its meaning for the organization: “Why ‘FIGHT’? But, you know, the history here—the riots, or the rebellion, gave birth to FIGHT. Nothing else would have caught the sense of our feeling, that the righteous indignation that we had, that would express the other drivenness that we held for what was going on, and the sense of power that that word gave us to relieve all that … this expressed, not what we will do, but who we are.”⁶²

With an operating ethos established and having declared themselves FIGHT, the group began to recruit additional members. Once again, they owed a great deal to a timely intervention by Mildred Johnson. In her typically unapologetic fashion, Johnson abruptly interrupted Florence in a meeting with Ed Chambers and several other steering committee members early that summer. She brushed past the secretary at the door and barged into Florence’s office. She demanded their immediate attention to a community issue. When Florence and others suggested she bring it to the community meeting that night, she scoffed. The issue had to be addressed expeditiously. As Johnson explained, a young Black woman had attempted to use the restroom at the New York State Department of Labor in Rochester, where she had an appointment. Employees there had denied her access to the restroom, indicating that it was for employee use only.

Chambers counseled the group to raise this at the meeting. He failed to appreciate the immediacy of the issue for Black Rochester and was roundly rejected. Florence recalled that as soon as they understood the issue’s severity, the Black ministers aborted their meeting: “We get in our cars, get down to St. Paul. We go into the room, into the huge room they were in, Blacks around here, whites around there, but a sister was over here.”⁶³ Johnson demanded to know why the man at the counter had denied access to this Black woman, who was no different than the white women who worked in the office. The supervisor attempted to explain that it was not a public restroom when Florence cut him off: “This is in Rochester, not Camilla, Georgia.… New York State don’t—you don’t let her use that restroom, so tomorrow we’re going to be back here, close this place down.”⁶⁴ On Florence’s reporting, a group of thirty or forty people organized overnight, then turned up at the Department of Labor the following morning to demand a change in policy. They were shocked to find that the state agency was so anxious about conflict with FIGHT that by ten o’clock that morning, the office building had been reconstructed to include a public restroom. It was a significant victory for the burgeoning FIGHT organization. Once the story gained currency throughout the community, membership expanded exponentially.

That experience at the Department of Labor served as a lesson to Chambers, the outsider of the group. If simply declaring that the IAF would take direction from FIGHT and not the other way around was not enough, Johnson single-handedly transformed that assertion into practice. Mildred Johnson was a community mainstay. Her ability to attract attention, her unfailing desire to speak truth to power, and her insistence that action be immediate made her a natural leader and a voice for the community. Johnson understood an old saying of Alinsky’s that leaders had followers, whether or not they belonged to an organization. Chambers found her natural abilities and her insistence on immediacy disconcerting initially. She was beyond his reach and control, and worse, the people responded to her. Johnson was a thorn in his side. After lengthy discussions with Alinsky, however, Chambers acknowledged the folly of fighting the tide in Rochester. He offered Johnson a paid position in FIGHT and put her organizational and leadership skills to use for the community group.⁶⁵

Johnson was not the only woman to serve a leadership role in the early development of the FIGHT organization. Rochester women, married and single, consistently made up one-third of the steering committee, with ministers contributing another third, and nonclerical male leaders making up the remainder. Women also served as chairs of various committees, spoke at public meetings, and served as recruitment liaisons for the organization.⁶⁶ Hannah Storrs, president of Rochester’s CORE branch, participated as one of two speakers at an early meeting in 1965. Women such as Ruth Tyler and Joan Smith served as delegates to the Delegates Council representing the National Negro Women’s Association and the Clarissa Street Block Association, respectively. Alma Greene served as chair of the housing committee, investigating landlords and organizing actions when appropriate. Still another FIGHT mover and shaker, Mary Davidson, gave speeches on FIGHT’s behalf to potentially supportive organizations.⁶⁷ While a great deal of the Black Power studies scholarship cites an ongoing tension for Black women in Black Power organizations, Rochester women navigated this space, providing their expertise in effective ways.

Women also took charge in the more traditional organizing roles. Constance Mitchell, now Third Ward supervisor, also devoted time to grassroots organizing on FIGHT’s behalf. She and her husband, John, spent weeks pounding the pavement to organize block associations, which were then eligible to join FIGHT. John Mitchell recalled,

We went to people and talked to ’em about joining up as a block association, but joining up primarily to be concerned about the living conditions that they had in their immediate residence. Then we started getting flower seeds and things like this. And we started planting flowers and when the flowers came up in the yard, the people saw what the block association could do. And they says, “Ooh, you got nice flowers in your yard.” And we said, “Yes.” And then the next thing you know, we were able to get ’em more involved in the other things. And then we got ’em involved in politics and we got ’em involved in education and we got ’em involved more in the schools, and, you know, being concerned about their children. And how much their kids was learning in the schools, and the kind of teachers that the kids had. And so, you know, you build on things like that. And you have to start small, in order to build those things up to those kinds of things that you want to.⁶⁸

Organizing city blocks into associations became an important component of Black organizing in Rochester and particularly for women, for two reasons. First, the associations became politically involved in the most basic concerns of each particular block; for some this was trash removal or filling potholes. Still for other block associations, the urgent concern remained the creation and maintenance of appropriate and safe recreational facilities. It was at a block dance to raise money for recreational facilities that the 1964 uprising touched off, after all. These independent groups thus addressed specific neighborhood concerns with unity.

The block associations served a secondary purpose. Once organized into a block association, the group of individuals could become a voting member of the FIGHT organization, able to send delegates to the annual conventions. This strategy was a signature of Alinsky’s IAF. The IAF’s mode of operation had been the “organization of poor communities including all classes and religious groups within these communities; operationally, this [consisted] mainly of the poor with the militant potential and the activist clergy.”⁶⁹ Each group had equal sway in FIGHT. The method was ingenious; organizations whose membership possessed less cultural, economic, or educational currency were no less valuable than churches, the highly educated, and the like. Washington Post reporter Nicholas von Hoffman explained, “They must pool their power to form an instrument for taking charge in an affirmative sense. By coming together in larger and wider unity they can consecrate leaders of sufficient power and backing to force recognition. Moreover, a larger and wider union permits the leaders to conceive and promulgate specific concrete and affirmative programs.”⁷⁰ FIGHT, with its member organizations, set out to do just that.

Once organized at the supralevel, the newly created FIGHT organization held its first annual convention in June 1965 (see figure 4.2). The block associations were not the only groups to report; churches turned up, businesses such as George Cunningham’s Service Station collected its employees into an official FIGHT member organization, and women’s groups such as the Marian Anderson Federation, the Ernestine Burke Federation, and the Booklover’s Federation attended in full force.⁷¹ Each member group was allotted voting delegates and seats on the floor. Here, for the first time in Rochester, the Black community would elect its own leadership, adopt its own constitution, and vote to prioritize its policies and issues. With an audience of more than fifteen hundred people, five hundred delegates representing 136 community organizations—many of them recently formed—met to adopt FIGHT’s first constitution.⁷² Not since the days of the Baden Street rally had an organized Black meeting turned out such numbers in Rochester. White observers, the press, and nondelegates were relegated to the bleachers to watch as delegates held their convention and formally adopted the constitution.⁷³ Appropriately, Section 4 of that document declared, “Blackness is a color of honor which is to be worn with pride.” In Rochester, an indigenous Black Power organization supported by a wide and varied swath of the Black community and funded by white churches came to fruition in 1965.

Choosing a Leader

In addition to adopting the constitution, the FIGHT organization proceeded to formally elect a leader to replace its temporary committee. Perhaps the most logical figure to be elected was Minister Franklin Florence, FIGHT’s new chairman. Florence, a Southern transplant from Miami, was first and foremost a man of the cloth known to many in the community. His status as a migrant, though not of the agricultural variety, likely convinced the vast array of Black newcomers to Rochester that he understood their experiences. He was also a veteran of the police brutality cases that had shaken Rochester in the prerebellion years. Florence had attended the Baden Street rally and had demanded access to A. C. White, one of the victims hospitalized after a police beating. Florence was also a young, no-nonsense minister in the Church of Christ, who had developed a relationship with Herb White and the Board for Urban Ministry. Despite Florence’s displeasure with the board’s early refusal to fund Black initiatives, he was prepared to work with them in the months after the uprising. At the same time that Florence worked with Christian ministers of all stripes, he maintained a close relationship with Malcolm X. In fact, Florence traveled to Harlem on a monthly basis to visit with the former Nation of Islam leader, confessing that at one point he even considered joining the Nation of Islam.⁷⁴ As a result of these internal conflicts, Florence occupied incongruous, though not entirely incompatible, roles in the community. His relationship with Malcolm X would have been viewed as something of an anomaly for most Church of Christ leaders. On the one hand, he was an upstanding churchman committed to a conservative theology. On the other, he appreciated—harbored even—a more militant and radical worldview. He certainly advocated immediacy in his approach to rights.

Constance Mitchell recalled that initially they looked for someone “who had the leadership qualities, that could really take the helm, and who had the respect within the community.” She continued: “We looked at certain criteria that were built in, that this person needed to have. And could take the helm immediately and get that ship to rollin. So, Minister Florence’s name came up with everyone.”⁷⁵ Local NAACP attorney Reuben Davis recalled that Florence had a reputation as a “forceful personality,” one who understood that things needed to change expeditiously.⁷⁶ Darryl Porter remembered the sense that “when we started talkin’ leadership, we were talkin’ about people who had been in the community, who been doin’ things out in the community—didn’t show up today and decide they wanted to be a leader.”⁷⁷ Gus Newport concurred with that position. Like many of the young Black people who grew up in Rochester, Newport was tired of organizations the he viewed to be led by white people and overeducated African Americans emulating white people. He believed in the Black community’s ability to produce indigenous leadership. Once FIGHT was established, Newport supported Florence’s election. He explained, “I’m not suggesting that we knew Florence that well. But, Florence got right in there with the radicals right away, you know—and he played a role.”⁷⁸ Florence’s credibility in multiple parts of the community made him a consensus choice.

Early on, Florence straddled the line between a Christian civil rights orientation and the burgeoning militancy of Black Power. He began his activist career negotiating a space between the more traditional, conservative members of the community and those who advocated self-determination and immediacy. In many ways, Florence had his finger on the pulse of the Black movement, and Rochester residents recognized this, even as some sought to fight it. Addressing a crowd in neighboring Buffalo a few years later, Florence demonstrated his oratorical skills: “Blacks are determined to take charge of their own destinies. We intend to have Black run organizations, based in the Black community, run by the grass-roots people of the Black community, speaking in the terms that make sense to the Black community.” Florence declared, “They will not be the polite language of the middle class conference or seminar; nor will the tactics be the polite tactics of a gentle resolution or request.” He continued: “We will picket, sit-in, shop-in, mill-in, mess-in, demonstrate and do whatever is necessary to bring our adversary to the conference table.”⁷⁹ Florence’s ability to “talk tough” drew recruits to him and to FIGHT in ways that the SCLC leadership simply failed to do.

As Minister Florence’s presidency progressed, he increasingly delineated the FIGHT approach and tactics from those he identified as “middle class.” In order to organize those most in need, and therefore considered most likely to engage in rebellion, Florence and FIGHT were determined to create an independent organization that, in many ways, became an antithesis to the civil rights organizations that remained unsuccessful or unviable in Rochester. In so doing, they fostered what scholar Angela Dillard has described as “oppositional consciousness.” Dillard argues that in Detroit,

activists joined the more militant factions of the city’s Left community not only in sympathy for what the civil rights community represented but also in opposition to the ideas of their racial and ethnic compatriots. Generating an “enemies list” and defining one’s position as more militant than that of groups such as the NAACP and JCC were important organizing actions that produced and sustained an oppositional consciousness. Indeed identifying the individuals and groups that the civil rights community defined as external adversaries is a helpful step in understanding how this community constructed its own identity and particular commitment to civil rights and social justice.⁸⁰

This was precisely Florence’s approach.

In its first year, FIGHT became something of a grassroots political machine. Steering committee members actively sought out and encouraged the creation of new member groups. Each steering committee member was responsible for distributing squad sheets to recruit actively for FIGHT. Among the targets for additional recruitment were barbershops, public housing complexes, and organizations such as the Elks, the Masons, and the Knights of Pythias.⁸¹ Once members had recruited all potential member groups, they began to organize new groups. Young people, they instructed, should form social groups in order to become member groups with voting delegates. Though recruitment occupied a great deal of time in that first year, it benefited the organization immensely. Aside from the excitement FIGHT generated in the Black community, its organizational structure provided something of a clearinghouse for community issues. In 1965, during FIGHT’s first year, those issues spanned housing, media reporting on African Americans and the Black community, and job referral and creation. Some of FIGHT’s efforts were immediately visible to the public. Others were transmitted through member groups to the larger constituency.

By the end of 1965, FIGHT had earned a reputation for acting effectively on community concerns. It was a reputation well deserved. One example proves instructive. In April, FIGHT picketed two known slumlords at their own residences. A group of approximately one hundred African Americans arrived at each landlord’s home, located in an all-white suburb, armed with signs and placards. Once there, they marched on the sidewalk for hours, all the while drawing the neighbors’ attention and embarrassing the landlord. A member of the housing committee had notified the media of the events in advance, the better to provide citywide coverage of the action.

That particular action drew new member groups, initially encouraged by FIGHT, to join the Delegates Council. Groups such as the Edward Vose Neighborhood Association formed and approached FIGHT’s steering committee for assistance. Apparently unable to sway their landlord, Mr. Gray, to respond to concerns about a property at 31–33 Thomas Street, the tenants brought a list of more than thirty issues to FIGHT. In response, the FIGHT housing committee organized an action plan consisting of several steps. First, they facilitated a meeting between the tenants, the housing committee, and the city’s building bureau to investigate the tenants’ concerns and the building’s condition. Second, FIGHT housing committee members secured a copy of Rochester’s housing code so as to serve as an informed assistant to the tenants’ association. Third, they invited the landlord to meet with FIGHT representatives. Should he fail to meet with the group, members of the committee would organize additional action against him. Their plan was flawlessly executed. A building inspector cited twenty-three violations, and the landlord agreed to turn up at a FIGHT housing committee meeting to address tenant concerns.⁸² Plans to continue picketing Mr. Gray’s personal residence were aborted.

Immediate action, such as that taken in the case of Mr. Gray, convinced community members that FIGHT would amplify their voices on all matters. At the same time, evidence suggests that FIGHT increasingly took an active role in mediating and adjudicating their housing concerns. Like the tenants at 31–33 Thomas Street, residents of Hanover Houses, a local housing project, formed a tenants’ association under the tutelage of Mildred Johnson. In trying to resolve “violations existing on apartments in the projects [and] tenants dissatisfaction with Hanover Houses Management,” the tenant association’s spokesman, Mrs. Hampton, approached FIGHT’s steering committee. In turn, FIGHT proposed a solution that would “unite the thinking and efforts of all groups concerned—all to the benefit of the tenants of the project.” Mrs. Hampton took the proposal back to the tenants for approval, and FIGHT turned the matter over to the housing committee to follow through should the tenants agree.⁸³ It is unsurprising that one of FIGHT’s foremost concerns at its inception was housing, particularly given Black activists’ loud calls for housing reform in the prerebellion moment.

While housing proved a central concern to residents and FIGHT alike, the various committees, from steering on down, acted upon other issues of local concern. Representatives from member groups registered matters that were raised at their individual meetings. For a particular group, a traffic light at an intersection might be needed, so the issue was brought to FIGHT. In turn, FIGHT would use its collective might to lobby city government to provide the necessary improvement. All FIGHT actions were driven by suggestions, feedback, and concerns of member groups.

Having become the conduit for all things Black Rochester, FIGHT’s steering committee began to tackle larger, systemic issues. Media coverage of the Black community remained unsatisfactory, despite the hiring of the well-known African American reporter Earl Caldwell a few years earlier. Urban renewal plans continued, often without any input from the residents affected. Corporations failed to hire Black applicants despite a labor shortage. For each of these issues, the steering committee formed an issues committee. Each issues committee was comprised of a cross section of delegates or representatives from member groups, with a chair appointed by the steering committee. The chair and his/her committee members identified a specific problem, secured the necessary materials for making an informed decision, debated and agreed upon a course of action, and then made a recommendation to the duly elected steering committee before acting upon the proposed plan. In its first year, FIGHT’s success was threefold: First, the group grew its membership by organizing people into small member groups, encouraging a sense of belonging that many had never experienced. Second, as this brought various groups together, FIGHT’s membership multiplied its strength and magnified its voice. Third, FIGHT’s impressive numbers convinced landlords, city hall, and corporations to sit down at the table with the organization to negotiate its demands.

Countering FIGHT

FIGHT would emerge as the loudest and brashest response to the 1964 uprising, but it was hardly the sole organizational effort in the works. Given the hit that Rochester’s corporate reputation had taken as a result of the rebellion, many in the city explored “riot prevention” strategies. However, city leaders and corporate executives sought organizational vehicles that would remain under their control. They looked to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (EOA), passed by Congress and signed into law by President Johnson shortly after the Rochester uprising. A central component of Johnson’s Great Society and the War on Poverty, the EOA provided funds for development and implementation of locally run programs such as Head Start, Job Corps, Work Study, and Adult Basic Education. In addition to creating and funding such programs, the EOA legislation called for “maximum feasible participation” by the poor. The curious and unprecedented phrasing continues to be shrouded in mystery, one scholar noting that “even among those who framed the Economic Opportunity Act, there is little consensus about how the phrase ‘maximum feasible participation’ was formulated or about its intended meaning.”⁸⁴ If the framers of the legislation were unclear about its intended meaning, local communities wasted no time in defining it. This particular requirement became at once a source of contention and a powerful weapon for the poor across the United States.

In Rochester, the EOA legislation prompted the formation of Action for a Better Community (ABC) to serve as a conduit for the federal EOA funds. Walter Cooper—Constance Mitchell’s campaign manager, Baden Street Rally veteran, and research scientist at Eastman Kodak—was chosen to serve a six-month stint as the interim associate director. A skilled organizer, he abandoned his scientific research for a period to establish the various policies, procedures, and committees that would make up ABC. For Cooper, economic poverty was rooted “generally in a lack of educational achievement.” He noted, “Earning power today is closely correlated with education.”⁸⁵ As children, Cooper and several of his running mates had escaped abject poverty through educational attainment.⁸⁶ It is no surprise then that the major thrust of his ABC efforts created educational opportunities for both children and adults in Rochester’s ghettoes. He apparently met with some success. Within a year of ABC’s inception, Congressman Frank Horton, representing Monroe County, would proudly boast at congressional hearings, “The private nonprofit agency which was created last year to carry out the various community action programs of the Economic Opportunity Act … ABC, Inc., draws its membership from a considerable cross section of Rochester and Monroe County. Public and private social welfare agencies, educational institutions, business, labor organizations, religious faiths, civil rights movements and government are all represented and all participate actively in the formulation of policies and programs.”⁸⁷ Despite the glowing recommendation provided by Congressman Horton, his lengthy list of participants made no mention of the poor themselves, a crucial component of “maximum feasible participation.”

A second crucial dimension of ABC’s efforts turned on its Neighborhood Services Committee. This particular committee was charged with creating neighborhood service centers for one-stop, social-service shopping. Once established in a neighborhood, community members could find childcare, physical and health services, and education and tutoring services, in addition to job referrals. Each of these services reflected the committee’s position that “the major problems faced by people living in poverty … [are] housing, education, employment, discrimination, cultural deprivation, etc., as well as the more subtle problems of hopelessness, apathy, lack of motivation, etc. Concomitants related to all of these problems are family disorganization and break-up, delinquency, crime, illiteracy, mental and physical health breakdown, plus many others.”⁸⁸ By June 1965, less than a year after its inauguration, ABC received $900,000 in funds from the federal government for programs ranging from daycare to training centers to Head Start. By August, its budget had increased by nearly $3 million in federal grants.

At the same time, FIGHT had begun its campaign for the hearts and minds of Rochester’s Black communities, building its reputation on self-determination. Poor Black people should decide what they needed, who should get it for them, where it should happen, and how to go about getting it, FIGHT boldly declared. That ABC’s board of directors—consisting of corporate officers, settlement house directors, and members of city hall—selected Cooper and others to head the antipoverty organization without consulting FIGHT or its member organizations smacked of paternalism. ABC was not an indigenous operation and therefore became a foil for building FIGHT’s oppositional identity. The Citizens Advisory Committee, especially, became a target of FIGHT’s ire.

The Citizens Advisory Committee attempted to meet the requirement for maximum feasible participation by choosing members from among those who lived in the designated poverty areas. FIGHT argued, however, that ABC’s directors handpicked the members, leaving the poor no opportunity to choose their own representatives. Therefore, FIGHT concluded, ABC spent federal antipoverty funds without meeting the stipulation of maximum feasible participation. In typical fashion, FIGHT members stormed the first public meeting of the Citizens Advisory Committee. With only six committee members present, the FIGHT contingent of forty to fifty people overwhelmed the meeting.⁸⁹ The FIGHT supporters listened patiently for thirty-five minutes to reports on ABC programs. When the session was opened for questions, FIGHT pounced. They demanded of the new director, “How much money do you make?” Rather than answering, as Ed Chambers described it, “he came charging down the center aisle saying, ‘What’s behind that question?’ ”⁹⁰ What lay behind that question, of course, was an assertion that poverty funds created more jobs and revenue for middle-class professionals than for the poor.

The neighborhood community centers, which were slated for discussion at this meeting, came under specific attack. FIGHT’s criticism was twofold. Some members of the community felt the centers were poorly constructed and poorly run. An official from the 4-H Club, a youth development and mentoring organization, agreed that ABC’s first neighborhood service center was open, functioning, and had appropriate funding, but that the “roof leaks … [and] floors are in dire need of repair.… There are no shades or curtains of any sort for the windows, and there is ‘minimum’ equipment in the way of tables, chairs, etc.”⁹¹ For this individual, the center, intended to be a beacon for advancement and self-respect, was not up to the task. Likewise, members of FIGHT charged ABC with negligence in creating the centers. That a white woman directed the first such neighborhood center compounded FIGHT’s anger and backed its claim that ABC only created jobs for middle-class professionals. While the neighborhood community centers would eventually employ some poor Black women as nursery aids and cooks, ABC readily admitted that they did not “have many jobs to give to the poor.”⁹²

FIGHT’s second criticism dispensed with the center’s operations to address its purpose. ABC advertised that neighborhood community centers brought together “all kinds of services, including medical, mental, welfare, employment, and legal.”⁹³ The Reverend Marvin Chandler, now a FIGHT vice president, scolded ABC: “I’m saying to you that we are neither sick nor crazy. We don’t need physical examinations. We need job[s] and money.”⁹⁴

At a second meeting of the Citizens Advisory Council, FIGHT continued its critique of ABC. The mild-mannered Chandler said, “Those of us who represent the poor are saying that ABC ought to be more of the poor than for the poor.… I ask you, who chose you to represent us?”⁹⁵ Another FIGHT vice president chimed in, invoking the federal legislation. He stressed “that the law calls for maximum feasible participation of the poor and asked that boards representing the poor, and appointed from the poor, be set up to establish programs and policies for antipoverty neighborhood service centers.”⁹⁶ FIGHT’s mouthpiece, the FIGHTER, would identify the community centers as “another example of thinking for Negroes, without asking us what we want before anything is done. After all, we only live there, we are not supposed to know what’s best for ourselves and our children.”⁹⁷ Desmond Stone, a local reporter sympathetic to the Black struggle, noted that at that meeting, “there were several further exchanges between FIGHT and ABC spokesmen on whether the centers should be run by the poor or by qualified professionals.”⁹⁸

Walter Cooper, now head of the ABC nominating committee, sought to mollify FIGHT. He informed the group’s president, Franklin Florence, that he and two other FIGHT members had been nominated to the ABC board of directors.⁹⁹ Cooper clarified, however, that the nominees would be appointed “specifically as individuals and not as members of any organization.”¹⁰⁰ Apparently viewing Cooper’s condition as a distinction without a difference, the FIGHT members joined the ABC board and promptly sought to change its operating procedures. Among other things, they argued that meetings held in the middle of the day for the convenience of businessmen and government officials discriminated against the working poor, who were at their jobs, thereby violating the maximum feasible participation clause. If meetings were held in the evening, more of the poor would be able to attend to voice their concerns, the FIGHT members countered. They also asserted their right to hold up any plans for community centers in their neighborhoods and asserted the right of residents to determine how the centers would be staffed and where they would be located.¹⁰¹

FIGHT’s goals in attacking the antipoverty program were twofold. First, in order to be successful, FIGHT believed it needed to be the voice of the Black poor in Rochester. Florence and others understood that if a more moderate Black organization existed in the community, the “power structure” would always use that alternative organization to subvert FIGHT’s efforts, while at the same time extolling its racial progress. FIGHT’s aggressive tactics were intended to expose ABC as a tool of the establishment. According to FIGHT, “many of the ABC programs now in progress generally embody the paternalistic philosophy of existing social welfare programs and heavily reflect the so-call ‘zoo keeper’ attitude, the attitude that the poor, like animals have to be taken care of and given enough to keep them quiet.… Such programs provide temporary relief but do not attack the causes of the poverty problem.”¹⁰² Second, FIGHT rejected any practice that made poverty more endurable by resisting ABC programs that simply provided escape routes to a few, insisting instead on structural changes to eradicate ghetto poverty more broadly.

FIGHT and ABC were not the only two competitors in the scramble for Black Rochester. The settlement houses, long providers of social services, viewed the conflict between FIGHT and ABC as an opportunity to reestablish their dominance in the afflicted wards. The settlement houses had long served the wards in which African Americans now lived. When European immigrants of various stripes resided in such wards, the settlement houses aided their transition, focusing on education and job training. As Black migrants replaced the white immigrants, the settlement houses increasingly came to focus on the “cultural deprivation” of the residents.¹⁰³ In 1967, the settlement house executives, chomping at the bit, used FIGHT’s ongoing attack on ABC as a way to discredit the Black Power group in certain circles and to bolster their own influence. In fact, a statement drafted by three settlement house executives boldly tagged ABC and FIGHT as competition to their agencies and asserted the settlement houses’ right to control the funding stream: “We Settlement executives feel that for any program to work to the best advantage of the community it must be a program developed in a cooperative, coordinated way with Agencies that have had the know-how for many years in terms of many types of services that people require.”¹⁰⁴ This was the language FIGHT decried. The antipoverty programs were created to meet the needs of the poor, not for “the best advantage of the community.”

At FIGHT’s prompting, in 1967 the federal government interceded. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported that the Citizens Advisory Council’s appointment of people to sit on the board of ABC “does not qualify as ‘democratic,’ because the council members are not themselves chosen by the neighborhoods they are supposed to represent.”¹⁰⁵ Here, a federal ruling vindicated FIGHT’s position. The council—consisting of corporate officers, settlement house directors, and members of city hall—could not appoint the representatives of the poor. Rather, the poor would choose their own representatives. It was an important victory for the FIGHT organization. Even so, FIGHT continued to confront resistance from Rochester’s power structure. Thus, in response to the policy change mandated for the ABC board, the editor of the Rochester Times-Union maintained, “There are some competent people on the ABC board who know how to get things done for the poor. But those whose only qualifications for a directorship are their personal poverty and obstreperousness should get out of their way.”¹⁰⁶

Less than a year into its existence, FIGHT was everywhere in Rochester, criticizing and opposing anything that did not lend itself to Black self-determination. It had taken on the poverty program. FIGHT members had also successfully picketed the suburban homes of white absentee landlords, embarrassing them in their own neighborhoods, to powerful effect. When the city’s Human Relations Commission hired a white secretary, FIGHT demanded to know why a Black candidate had not been considered. As the city enacted stricter code enforcement in a Black neighborhood recently abandoned by white people, FIGHT demanded answers from the city government. Florence recalled, “This was during the formative days of the organization and we were, you know, we were fighting everything. I mean, to just, you know, to get out there.”¹⁰⁷ In essence, FIGHT made it impossible for others to operate in the city of Rochester without considering how the organization would respond.

Perhaps no other event signaled FIGHT’s rise to prominence more effectively than the rapid funding and formation of an Urban League branch in Rochester. To curb FIGHT’s dominance in the new political landscape, the corporate community and city leaders sought a more moderate and tractable alternative. The Urban League was known for its work to assist African American migrants in the urban North. As such, it would have been ideal to help facilitate the post–World War II Black migration to Rochester. But rather than welcoming it, for years Rochester’s industrial powers dissuaded local residents from forming a branch of the Urban League. It was not until FIGHT established itself as a controversial organization willing to challenge the pillars of the community that the city’s industrial leaders and its Community Chest agreed to fund a branch of the Urban League.¹⁰⁸

The Community Chest was Rochester’s version of the United Way. It was “the major reservoir of charity funds and the pride of the city establishment. Its directors each year include[d] the chief corporate officers of such firms as Xerox, Eastman Kodak, Bausch & Lomb and the banks.”¹⁰⁹ Walter Cooper, the architect for much of Rochester’s antipoverty program, recalled approaching the Community Chest for funding to establish an Urban League chapter. “They came forth,” Cooper recalled, “with forty-nine thousand dollars.”¹¹⁰ The Community Chest and many of the city’s industrial leaders hoped an Urban League chapter would blunt FIGHT’s popularity.

Yet not everyone in Black Rochester felt the need to choose between the newly formed Urban League chapter and FIGHT. One person who sought to split the difference was John Mitchell, at once a founding member of the Urban League chapter and a FIGHT supporter. Mitchell, however, was something of the exception. He recalled the class distinction between the two organizations: “The Urban League … picked up the banner and started comin’ in and bringin’ in more of the middle or professional Blacks into the Urban League.” Such cleavages in turn served to fuel the oppositional consciousness of FIGHT and its leader, Minister Florence. Marcus Alexis, a professor of economics and one-time president of the Urban League, noted that some FIGHT members disparaged the educational attainment of many in the League: “You know, the same old names: [Drs.] Knox, Lee, Cooper, Woodward, and Alexis. And we were known as the Ph.D.’s.… And then of course, three of the Ph.D.’s worked at Kodak.”¹¹¹ These African American PhDs working at Kodak felt their skills and experience with the business community offered them an opportunity to fulfill the Urban League’s mission. The question was whether the business community would actually fund the Urban League to bring real change to Black Rochester, or just use it as a foil in the fight against FIGHT.