Edward Thomas CHAMBERS

CHAMBERS, DOWNING, MARTIN, WHITE, RICHARDS

Posted By: Sarah Thorson Little (email)
Date: 4/28/2015 at 15:27:42

April 2, 1930 -- April 26, 2015

The death has occurred of Edward Thomas Chambers (Kilcoe, Skibbereen), who passed peacefully on April 26, 2015. Born Clarion, Iowa, April 2nd 1930, former Executive Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, Chicago, Illinois USA. Survived by his wife Ann and their children Eve, Mae, Joe, Lily and William. Private cremation. Memorial at later date.

Funeral Home - Daly's Funeral Home, Chapel Street,
Drimoleague, Cork, Ireland

Kilcoe, Skibbereen, Cork, Ireland

*****
May 1, 2015
New York Times

Edward Chambers, Early Leader in Community Organizing, Dies at 85

By SAM ROBERTS

Edward T. Chambers, a lapsed seminarian who succeeded Saul Alinsky as leader of Mr. Alinsky’s social justice foundation, advancing his radical agenda of community organizing and grounding its progressive objectives in the Gospels, died on Sunday at a nursing home near his home in Drimoleague, Ireland. He was 85. The cause was heart failure, his son William said.

After Mr. Alinsky died in 1972, Mr. Chambers became executive director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, the faith-based social justice umbrella for scores of community groups across the nation and abroad. Mr. Alinsky launched the foundation in 1940 in Chicago.

The community groups organized poor people to empower themselves and to push for better housing, improved schools and job training.

Edward Thomas Chambers was born in Clarion, Iowa, on April 2, 1930. His father, Thomas, an Irish immigrant, worked for a railroad. His mother, the former Hazella Downing, was a public school music teacher. He received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and classics from St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., and planned to become a priest. But, more fervent about proposed Vatican reforms than his superiors, he was encouraged to find another calling.

According to The Chicago Reader, a weekly alternative newspaper, Mr. Chambers arrived in New York with $10 and joined an interracial Catholic commune but became disillusioned when he discovered that shoes he had collected for the poor were being sold to buy alcohol. Despairing of conventional solutions to poverty, he apprenticed himself to a tenant organizer in Harlem, read Mr. Alinsky’s book “Reveille for Radicals” and was discovered by one of Mr. Alinsky’s lieutenants, who invited him to Chicago in the 1960s to meet Mr. Alinsky over steak at the Palmer House.

Untutored but impassioned, he was dispatched to Lackawanna, N.Y., then to Chicago, where he tempered fears over precipitous racial change by organizing white Catholic and black Protestant churches to promote “community stability” by integrating neighborhoods more delicately.

In Rochester in the late 1960s, he helped local groups lobby Eastman Kodak and other corporations to offer job training and employment to impoverished minorities. In Brooklyn in the 1980s, he encouraged an Industrial Areas Foundation affiliate and its New York supervisor, Michael Gecan, to combine free city-owned land, no-interest loans from churches, mass production, and the single-minded zeal of a developer, I. D. Robbins, to build thousands of moderately priced single-family homes in East New York.

By the time he retired in 2009, the foundation had taught community groups to pursue their goals methodically and infused organizers with the professional skills he lacked when he began. He wrote a book, “Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice.”

In addition to his son William, he is survived by his wife, the former Ann Martin; his daughters, Lily White, Eve Richards and Mae Martin; and another son, Joe.

Community organizing, Mr. Chambers said, requires persistence and resolve. “Movement is an emotional thing of marches, but organization is different,” he told The New York Times in 1966. “When the marching was over in Selma, Negroes were still getting beaten on the head and nothing was really different. We’re aiming for something much bigger. That’s why a lot of movement people aren’t good organizers: It takes a special cold, rational kind of anger.

“You have to be pretty tough when you talk to someone with a problem that you know you can solve by picking up a telephone. But you don’t because that’s just putting a Band-Aid on the situation,” Mr. Chambers said. “He’ll have the same problem next week. It means nothing unless you gain the power to deal with the problem yourself.”