Remembering John O’Connor: Organizing to Win in the Fight Against Toxics
Written by SP Editor
25 Years Later -- Remembering John O’Connor: Organizing to Win in the Fight Against Toxics
Beth Butler
John O’Connor’s chapter “Organizing to Win,” from the influential 1990 collection Fighting Toxics, remains a practical roadmap even today for grassroots environmental action through use of a direct community organizing model. Though his name may be unfamiliar to many younger activists, O’Connor was a crucial figure in linking community organizing techniques to environmental campaigns — turning resident's concern about pollution into disciplined, winning organizations and campaigns.
O’Connor’s central claim is both simple and enduring: winning requires organization. He insists on building dues-paying memberships, disciplined local groups, and broad coalitions capable of sustained pressure on powerholders. That focus on structure — recruiting, training, and retaining people who commit resources and time — is no quaint relic. It is the same backbone in use by ACORN since 1970.
By 1984, O’Connor’s National Toxics Campaign (NTC) had become the nation’s largest environmental coalition, incorporating not only citizen groups but also organized labor. NTC’s successful campaign to expand the Superfund cleanup law mobilized many across at least 40 states. That campaign exemplifies a core lesson in O’Connor’s chapter: well-organized, broad-based pressure on Congress can reshape federal policy.
O’Connor’s approach advocates a clear embrace of conflict. He foregrounds confrontation as a necessary component of effective organizing — which is usually clouded by the details of the work or unacknowledged. O’Connor discusses that many consider “conflict” a dirty word, but treats it as a clarifying tactic: when interest and power collide, deliberately generated conflict focuses public attention, clarifies stakes, and forces decision-makers to respond. In practice, conflict calibrated by organization turns episodic protest into leverage. It upends the power structure/situation.
“Organizing to Win” functions like a primer. O’Connor lays out page-by-page directives — from identifying targets and building membership to planning actions and sustaining campaigns — that match contemporary community organizing manuals. He explicitly recognizes lineage: Lee Staples’s Roots to Power (itself drawing mostly from the ACORN model acknowledging some of its roots in the Boston model). The tactics O’Connor describes — house meetings, leadership development, issue framing, and disciplined actions.
O’Connor also shows pragmatic use of electoral tools without turning groups into electoral machines for particular candidates. He documents how voter education and mobilization, targeted and nonpartisan, can shift outcomes; he cites examples such as Massachusetts Fair Share where organized civic work moved the needle without endorsing individual candidates. This approach preserves non-profit status, while leveraging democratic processes to further political aims.
The organizing principles O’Connor promoted have been absorbed and scaled into the nation's current largest environmental coalition, the Anthropocene Alliance (A2), as it trains its member groups, and spawns its own direct community organizing programs. It does reflect the trajectory O’Connor encouraged: build power from the ground up, connect across constituencies, and sustain pressure through organized conflict and disciplined membership organization.
Although O’Connor died in 2001, seven years after the end of the National Toxics Coalition, he was building power in another vehicle -- Greenworks. The practical chapters he left behind are surprisingly not out of date or historical curiosities but active how-to steps, and challenges for present-day organizers: deepen membership, embrace disciplined confrontation when necessary, construct broad coalitions, and deploy members’ power strategically. For anyone committed to environmental and social justice, “Organizing to Win” is both a how-to and a call to persist — a reminder that technical policy solutions need the muscle of organized people to become reality.
Beth Butler is the head organizer of A Community Voice, part of ACORN International and based in New Orleans, she has been a community organizer with ACORN for more than almost 40 years. She was also part of the first Organizers' Forum delegation to Brazil.
