Community Organizing
During and after World War II, despite the resistance to social change, disenfranchised and marginalized communities across the nation continued to seek out niches of opportunity, build on their successes, and press for social justice. In 1942, A. J. Muste, James Farmer, and others founded the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), an offshoot of the Quaker-sponsored Fellowship of Reconciliation, and began to use techniques of nonviolent direct action to fight racial discrimination at the University of Chicago. In 1943, members of CORE used sit-in demonstrations to desegregate a Chicago restaurant, and, in April 1947, CORE and its allies sent African American and White freedom riders into the South to test compliance with federal court decisions on interstate bus routes, developing tactics that would later be used all over the South by civil rights activists. At the some time, social workers continued to engage in grassroots neighborhood organizing in settlement houses and neighborhood centers. Many social workers "studied neighborhood problems,helped organize block associations, neighborhood organizations, and tenant councils and got involved in social action" (Hallman, 1984, p. 119).