Why Organizers Fail

Why Organizers Fail: The Story of a Rent Strike by Harry Brill offers a rare inside look at the dynamics of grassroots political action and the difficulties of sustaining power among the poor. Based on the author’s close association with a fourteen-month rent strike in “Presentation City,” the book documents how four black militants—steeped in the rhetoric of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panther Party—organized tenants to resist deteriorating conditions in public housing. While the strike created significant public commotion and drew national figures into local struggles, it ultimately collapsed. Brill examines why: despite tenants’ grievances, organizers failed to translate outrage into durable political organization, leaving them unable to secure meaningful concessions from the Housing Authority. The book moves beyond exposé to argue that poor people’s powerlessness is not simply the result of hostile elites, but also of internal weaknesses, miscalculations, and non-political factors shaping the behavior of organizers themselves.

Blending case study with broader reflection, Brill situates the rent strike within the history of 1960s poverty programs, black political activism, and urban unrest. He shows how community leaders won leverage over the city’s anti-poverty bureaucracy partly by bluffing officials in the wake of riots elsewhere, and how moratoriums on eviction inadvertently enabled tenant militancy. Yet he emphasizes that fragile organizations, personality-driven leadership, and apolitical motives often undermined political action from within. Drawing on two decades of experience in community organizing, Brill generalizes from this case: whether black or white, middle-class or poor, moderate or radical, organizers’ behavior is often shaped less by cold calculation of political utility than by cultural styles, personal traits, and organizational structures. Why Organizers Fail remains a powerful analysis of the limits of grassroots mobilization, challenging reformers and activists to confront the internal as well as external obstacles to building effective, lasting power.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.