San Francisco Urban Politics and Food Not Bombs

by Chris Crass

What is Food Not Bombs

Food Not Bombs is a social justice movement that challenges militarism and the systems of inequality that create violence and poverty in the pursuit of profit. There are over one hundred FNB groups in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Australia. FNB groups are volunteer run, anti-authoritarian collectives that distribute free vegetarian food at community meals in public spaces to facilitate building a cooperative society and to challenge the current economic structures that create poverty and the political structures which criminalize those who are poor.

FNB groups also share free food at protests, actions, conferences and community events to help build radical movements working for fundamental social change. FNB groups provide direct food services while simultaneously organizing to create a world that will benefit all people. Each FNB group practices the consensus decision making process that promotes collective empowerment and non-hierarchical structures of organizing. Food Not Bombs is committed to the philosophy of non-violence and believes that we must actively work to disrupt and eliminate racism, sexism, the class system, and authoritarianism if we are to remove the specter of violence from our daily lives.

Food Not Bombs' Origins

The first Food Not Bombs group was started by anti-nuclear activists who were participating in the campaign to stop the Seabrook nuclear power plant in the late '70's. The campaign was one of the largest in the history of the anti-nuke movement in the United States. Hundreds of people were protesting and taking part in mass civil disobedience actions to draw attention to the dangers of nuclear power and weapons to society and the environment.

One of the actions that was taken during this campaign was a protest in the city of Boston during a stock holders meeting of the First National Bank. The bank helped build the Seabrook power plant and was heavily involved in the weapons industry. The activists decided that they would set up a mock depression era soup line and hand out literature about the enormous amount of money being spent on nuclear power, nuclear weapons and the arms race generally. The group put flyers up around town about the free lunch and protest. On the day of the stockholders conference a long line of homeless and low-income people came to the groups free lunch and protest. Hundreds of flyers were distributed, and the large number of poor people, over 300, drawn to the free food give away, something that the organizers hadn't quite anticipated, dramatically demonstrated the correlation between money for militarism and poverty in the United States. The group's action was so successful at demonstrating the arguments made by the anti-nuke movement, that they decided to continue distributing free food and anti-war literature. Thus began the first Food Not Bombs group in Boston-Cambridge in 1980; the name clearly stating the message of the activists.

The group went around to health food stores, bakeries, and grocery stores requesting donations of food. FNB quickly found that there was an enormous amount of food being thrown away that was perfectly edible, but could no longer be sold on the shelf. The group would drive to different locations around town and distribute it to various soup kitchens and homeless shelters in the neighborhoods. Once the group had established relationships with various homeless agencies and developed a better understanding of the local homeless community, they began to serve free lunches on the Commons in Boston. The group wanted to serve food in an area that homeless people already hung-out in, but also somewhere highly visible so as to draw attention from the public. The group handed out literature about nuclear weapons, war tax resistance, and peace and social justice protests coming up. The combination of free food and radical politics proved to be an effective way to organize and spread important information in the community.

San Francisco Food Not Bombs and City Politics, 1988-1996

In 1987, one of the original Boston activists, Keith McHenry, moved to San Francisco and brought Food Not Bombs with him. The group started distributing food and anti-war literature in Golden Gate Park in 1988. The groups highly visible servings at the end of Haight Street on Stanyan drew the attention of the neighborhood association that had been trying to get homeless people out of the area. On August 15, 1988 the first 9 FNB volunteers were arrested by the SFPD, for serving food without a permit. Two weeks later a large crowd of supporters and volunteers showed up at the park and 29 people were arrested. The arrests drew media attention and sparked strong support for FNB in the city.

The current Mayor at the time, Art Agnos, had been elected as a progressive, but as Richard Deleon, in his book Left Coast City, points out, "a progressive is not what they [SF voters] got." Mayor Agnos worked closely with big business interests in the city, and his administration was forced to deal with a severe economic recession that was hurting the city's economy. Many of Agnos supporters became outspoken critics of his policies around development growth, style of political leadership that favored elites over constituents, and his responses to homelessness. The arrests of Food Not Bombs activists was one of the turning points for progressive supporters of the Agnos administration.

On Labor Day 1988, hundreds of FNB supporters, homeless people, and city activists marched down Haight Street to Golden Gate Park. Banging on pots and pans and carrying boxes of fruit, buckets of soup, banners and signs the march attracted media and community support. 54 people were arrested for serving food and committing civil disobedience. Outraged by the arrests, neighborhood activists marched to the nearby neighborhood association meeting and spoke out against the anti-homeless campaign and arrests of FNB volunteers. Four days later Mayor Agnos, under pressure from community support, gave the group a permit to operate in Golden Gate Park.

In June of 1988, homeless people created "Camp Agnos", a tent city across from City Hall in the Civic Center. The tent city was a protest against the miserable conditions experienced by people on the streets. It was a protest motivated not only by the failings of the Agnos administration, but also by President Reagan's policies of gutting social spending, reducing taxes for business and the wealthy, and investing monstrous amounts of public funds into military contracts with private industry during the arms race of the '80's. One of the chants that was used at the tent city protest was "we're tired, we're hungry, we don't like the government". Food Not Bombs set up a twenty-four hour field kitchen on June 28th, to provide support for the homeless encampment. The group helped provide crucial logistical and organizational support to the tent city and the Agnos administration recognized this. A court injunction was obtained by the city against Food Not Bombs. The court injunction prohibited FNB from serving food in public spaces in the city, and it was immediately used to arrest FNB volunteers and confiscate food and cooking equipment. The arresting of FNB activists across from City Hall again brought media attention to the homeless situation and generated community support and some fear amongst the elites. An article that appeared in the SF Chronicle explains some of these fears:

"Many of those interviewed said the frustration and anger on all sides of the issue is likely to mount unless more money is found for services. Without more money, they say, this Fall's skirmish between the police and Food Not Bombs could be just mild warnings of conflict to come. 'If the homeless were organized, if they received some heavy leadership... you might have social unrest,' said Harry de Ruyter, director of social services for the Salvation Army in San Francisco. 'You might have an uprising.'"

The tent city was dismantled. Police and city workers confiscated tents, sleeping bags, and personal belongings; much of which were thrown away. FNB continued serving lunches and dinners everyday in front of City Hall, in protest of the City's harassment of homeless people and the attempt of the Mayor to silence opposition with the court injunction. With public pressure demanding that FNB be allowed to serve, the injunction was not enforced after the mass eviction of the homeless encampment.

The problems of homelessness were to plague the Agnos administration, and while many disagreed about the solutions of the problem, "nearly everyone agreed that Agnos had failed miserably in his efforts to cope with the situation", writes Deleon. When Agnos ran for re-election, homelessness was one of the main issues in the Mayoral race. Agnos's challenger Frank Jordan received strong support from downtown business, and with factionalism dividing the city's progressive majority, Jordan won the election. Jordan's proposal for dealing with homelessness followed a law and order logic of cracking down on what were termed "Quality of Life" crimes associated with homelessness: urinating in public, drunk in public, loitering, sleeping in public spaces, and obstructing sidewalks. Jordan's new get tough policies, called the Matrix program, were designed to criminalize poor people on the streets and push people out of neighborhoods, out of Civic Center and other public places and into jail or out of the City entirely.

Opposition to Jordan's Matrix program was immediate. The Coalition on Homelessness and Food Not Bombs were immediate thorns in the side of the Jordan administration. Under Matrix, the court injunction against Food Not Bombs was enforced and the SFPD were ordered to arrest volunteers who continued to serve across from City Hall. On September 2nd, 1993, the SFPD arrested 15 FNB volunteers. Some of those arrested were charged with felony conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor, which allowed the City to hold activists in jail longer, and increased the level of intimidation for those who opposed the Mayor's program. The arrests galvanized community support and generated a flurry of articles in the City's dailies and weeklies. The dailies generally supported the Matrix program and condoned the arresting of FNB, while the alternative weeklies solidly opposed Matrix and supported FNB. For the next few months police routinely arrested servers and often arrested people who were eating FNB food. Hundreds of arrests were made, over a dozen FNB vehicles were confiscated, literature, literature tables and FNB signs were confiscated as evidence, and food was either thrown away or taken away as further evidence.

Food Not Bombs found support in the Board of Supervisors. Supervisor Terrence Hallinan denounced the arrests and actually served once with FNB in protest. Supervisor Angela Aliota, who ran against Jordan for Mayor, sharply criticized both Matrix and the FNB arrests. Another supporter of FNB was Sheriff Michael Hennessey, who also condemned the Mayor's actions and on numerous occasions advised those in the Sheriff's department to quickly release FNB volunteers from jail.

During this period of intense arrests and in some instances, police violence, FNB activists went to work documenting the servings and the actions of the SFPD on videotape. These tapes were used as organizing tools to build support for FNB internationally. Media press releases were made that contained various scenes of police brutality, and were distributed widely. These press releases were shown on community access, were used in various FNB documentaries, and news clips around the country. The video documentation was also sent to the United States Civil Rights Department, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and to Amnesty International. While the US department found no violation of civil rights, the UN committee began an investigation, and Amnesty International began advocating on behalf of FNB. Amnesty International wrote letters to Mayor Jordan, District Attorney Arlo Smith, and Governor Wilson regarding FNB. In a letter to the DA, Amnesty writes,

"Amnesty International remains concerned at the apparently selective harassment to which Food Not Bombs activists have been subjected by the police. Evidence continues to suggest that this group is being penalized on account of its beliefs, and is being prohibited from exercising its right to freedom of assembly and the right to impart information. Once again, I would draw your attention to the fact that these rights are enshrined both in the US Constitution and in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the USA has ratified and is bound by."

Food Not Bombs arrests were included in Amnesty Internationals yearly book-length report on human rights abuses around the planet.

The arrests of FNB activists and the criminaliziation of homelessness under Matrix was originally a rallying point of the Jordan administration. At a US Conference of Mayors held in San Francisco, Jordan put his homeless policies forward as a possible option for city governments around the country. FNB activists also organized nationally and internationally to oppose Matrix. Rallies were held by other FNB groups and FNB supporters in dozens of cities across the country as "Calls for Days of Action in Solidarity with SFFNB" were put out. FNB activists from other cities, such as Santa Cruz, San Jose, Berkeley, and Palo Alto came to SF to serve food, risk arrest, and show solidarity. Other groups in SF began serving food and risking arrest, one such group was the National Lawyers Guild.

The story of FNB was picked up in alternative and activists publications around North America, and helped spread the message far and wide. The international press also covered the story of FNB and Matrix. Articles appeared in either mainstream newspapers or television news programs in Canada, England, France, Germany, Spain, India, Brazil and Japan. These organizing efforts to reach out to the media and publicize what was happening in San Francisco dramatically helped draw public attention to poverty in the United States and the use of coercion to silence opposition.

During the struggle against Matrix coalitions and alliances were formed. Many of the religious community supported the work of FNB, and this was demonstrated when three priests were arrested for serving lunch. In an article in the SF Weekly, Father Louis Vitale of St. Boniface Church credits FNB for raising concern in the religious community about Matrix. Religious Witness With Homeless People held vigils and protests against Matrix. The Coalition on Homelessness launched campaigns to challenge Matrix citations in court and lobbied the Board of Supervisors to denounce Matrix: which the Board did in a vote to end the program, unfortunately the Mayor ignored the Board's decision. A group called Street Watch began documenting police arrests and sweeps of homeless people with video cameras. Street Watch and other groups also distributed information to people on the street about their legal rights. FNB not only continued serving daily, but also organized various protests included some in front of the Mayor's house in Pacific Heights.

By the time Frank Jordan ran for a second term as Mayor, his administration generally and his Matrix program in particular were widely criticized and all other candidates running stated their opposition to Matrix in order to gain voter support. In an issue of the Guardian, all candidates were asked there position on Food Not Bombs and how they would act towards the group if Mayor. Mayor Jordan was the only one to argue for continued arrests. Most of the other candidates strongly condemned the arrests and stated that as Mayor they would either try to provide financial assistance to the group or at the very least endorse the group's actions as a resource to the City. The one candidate that opposed the arrests, but maintained a law and order stance was Willie Brown; the soon to be elected Mayor. In the race for the position of District Attorney, Terrence Hallinan campaigned to not only work to end Matrix but promised that as DA he would refuse to prosecute FNB members for violating the court injunction. Hallinan won the election, and the court injunction has laid dormant since.

While the election of Willie Brown has done little to alter the situation facing homeless people - in fact, many believe that while the Matrix program no longer exists in name, it continues in practice - the defeat of Frank Jordan and the popular denouncement of the Matrix program have served as important indicators of the publics disaffection with programs that criminalize poor people and offer no solutions to the problems of poverty and housing. While policies that punish poor people continue in SF and across the country, the electoral revolt against Jordan offers hope to activists working to not only oppose such policies, but to also develop more far-reaching solutions to poverty.

Food Not Bombs and the Building of a Movement - a brief sketch

In November of 1992, a national Food Not Bombs gathering was held in San Francisco. The gathering was attended by about 70 people representing about 12 groups around the US. This gathering marked an important turning point for Food Not Bombs. While a dozen or so FNB groups were operating autonomously in various communities, the gathering helped broaden the possibilities for collective action and fostered a sense of movement in the participants. The gathering consisted of workshops and discussion groups and ended with participants joining the massive 500 Years of Resistance march organized in SF to coincide with the Columbus Quincentennial.

Over the next few years, Food Not Bombs groups sprang up by the dozens across the United States and Canada. A significant factor in the quick growth of FNB groups was the media attention created by the Matrix program in SF and the arrests of FNB activists. Radical publications, activist newspapers, and independently produced 'zines carried reports and stories from San Francisco along with information about FNB politics and activities. Another important factor was the Gulf War that had polarized people into pro and anti-war camps and aroused an emerging anti-war movement around the country. Groups in Long Beach and Berkeley for example served food to thousands of protesters at anti-war demonstrations and helped spread the ideas of FNB through their constant example. For various reasons, groups of friends in cities, towns, and suburbs in both urban and rural environments organized FNB groups. While many of these efforts were short-lived, many have also been able to survive and work for social change in the local community. FNB groups around North America were serving free food to hungry people in parks, plazas and other public spaces. FNB groups were also frequently involved in campaigns to resist local anti-homeless ordinances, and protested the economic structuring of society that forced people into poverty. FNB groups often worked with other social justice groups in their community. For example, some FNB groups worked with local needle exchange programs, some worked with local unions of the Industrial Workers of the World, many worked with radical environmentalist groups like Earth First!. FNB groups often either emerged out of already existing activist communities, or they played a significant role in helping build such communities if none existed prior in the local area. FNB groups expanded their base of support by extending their solidarity to other organizing projects. By providing food to protests, conferences and other events, FNB groups not only showed support for various struggles such as anti-police brutality, housing rights, ecological sustainablity, anti-nuclear testing and political prisoners, but they also helped sustain and build the larger social justice movement by making these connections.

One of the connections that was being made by Food Not Bombs groups, especially in San Francisco, was the widening economic gap between rich and poor, the widespread policies of criminalizing poor people through city ordinances and laws and the economic human rights stated in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In San Francisco, the group moved it's meals to United Nations plaza and began organizing an international FNB gathering to coincide with the United Nations fiftieth anniversary celebrations which would be taking place in SF in the summer of 1995. The UN50 gathering took place in June of 95 and lasted two weeks. Hundreds of FNB activists from around North America converged on SF. The gathering was to a major event, not only for it's protest activity around the United Nations celebration and the attention it generated around US poverty and human rights abuses, but also because of intense sense of movement that it built in participants. Dozens of groups from the US and Canada came together for workshops, discussion groups, panel discussions, and daily protests. The gathering took place towards the end of the Jordan administration. In preparation for the UN50 celebrations the Jordan administration began conducting police sweeps in Civic Center and in United Nations Plaza. Part of Jordan's efforts to 'clean up' the city involved increased police harassment of FNB, but with the arrests that took place during the celebration, people from around North America were exposed the brutality and repression of the SFPD and the Jordan administration. Day after day for two weeks, FNB activists were arrested for violating the court injunction, and on several occasions mass arrests were made during FNB protests and civil disobedience actions. One of these protests was a march to the campaign headquarters of Frank Jordan. The Jordan campaign was holding a fund raising party, and was met with over a hundred FNBers protesting the Matrix program and demanding an immediate end of FNB arrests. Dozens of riot police held the protest back across the street, and as media reports of this action stated, 'FNB continued to show its opposition as one of the Major's staunchest critics'. In addition to the political pressure created by the gathering, enthusiasm was heightened among FNB participants, as the possibilities for large scale collective organizing and action were realized on many different levels. FNB activists returned to their many different communities and continued organizing. Since the '95 gathering, the number of FNB groups has continued to grow, and the level of organizing has increased. Regional gatherings have taken place in the US and in Canada to further the building of movement and to increase the possibilities for social change through direct action organizing. During the summer of '98, there was a Western Regional Gathering called - Organizing for Radical Social Change - that took place in SF, and the focus of the gathering was to develop strategies of resistance, share organizing skills - media work, coalition building, community organizing - and strengthen the network of FNB groups so as to facilitate improved communication and joint actions.

The Food Not Bombs movement is organized along decentralist lines. Each local group is autonomous, in that each group sets its own priorities and agenda according to agreed upon principles shared by all groups. Power is rooted at the local level, and while national and international organizing is possible, it is dependent upon the local groups to shape the form that this organizing takes. In a certain sense, FNB groups share some of the organizing principles of the cities, towns and suburbs that they are operating in - in the United States, that is. In the US, there is no national urban policy and cities maintain a greater amount of autonomy then any other industrialized nation. This helps to explain why FNB groups have experienced such varied responses from city governments - some are ignored, some are celebrated, some are arrested, and still others are threatened and then left alone.

The local autonomy of FNB groups creates the space for different groups to engage in different kinds of organizing depending on their particular situation and/or focus. It is important that FNB groups make themselves familiar with city politics and the factors that have shaped the development of cities and the possibilities for effective organizing given the local political landscape. As the FNB movement continues to develop and expand, these are important lessons that must be learned, shared and discussed.

San Francisco Food Not Bombs and Day-To-Day Work

While the big protests, mass arrests, media attention and city repression have dominated my discussion so far of FNB generally and SFFNB particularly, I want to focus on the day-to-day work that people engage in that make big protests and political victories meaningful. Civil rights organizer Ella Baker referred to day-to-day work as spadework; as in boring, tedious, back-breaking work that eventually prepares the soil for seeds to be planted. In a book on the Civil Rights movement, I've Got the Light of Freedom, the author, Charles Payne, writes that by "Overemphasizing the movement's more dramatic features, we undervalue the patient and sustained effort, the slow, respectful work, that made the dramatic moments possible." While Payne develops this analysis throughout his amazing study of the organizing tradition developed in the Mississippi freedom struggle, his argument about the importance of day-to-day organizing is important for any student and/or participant of a movement.

In San Francisco FNB work involves transportation to pick-up daily food donations that will be used at the cookhouse to prepare for either the nightly community meal in United Nations Plaza or the lunch serving at 16th and Mission, Golden Gate Park, or the new serving in the Castro protesting the merchant associations anti-homelessness campaign. Everyday people are needed to cook and organize the cookhouse that rotates from different volunteers' kitchens around the city. Once the food makes it down to the serving people are needed to ladle out food, or hand out fruit, or pass out literature. In order for the daily meals to be organized, there are weekly meetings - that can sometimes make your head spin in either frustration or delirium. The meetings require someone to facilitate, take notes, watch the time. In the meeting we need to find volunteers to deal with the dozen or more random tasks that come up, someone to check messages on the group's voicemail, someone to update the outgoing message, someone to call the volunteers on the phone list and try to get more help at the cookhouses. The bills need to be paid, the finances need to be attended to, and people need to make sure that literature is reproduced and available. The group needs someone to commit to taking food to the protest this weekend and the forum next week. Then there are all the different work groups organizing various projects - like the Western Regional Gathering this summer. Meetings, phone calls, long discussions about personality conflicts and group dynamics, outreach to new volunteers and potential new volunteers, trying to figure out if there is enough beans and rice for the different cookhouses, and finding non-violent ways to break-up fights between homeless people - that is what FNB organizing is about, and so much more.

Our daily work is framed by the goals building community and reclaiming public space, and while the fullest expression of these goals is rarely met, we strive to realize them nevertheless. In our efforts to collect donated food that would otherwise be thrown away, and cook in volunteer cookhouses so as to share free food in public spaces, we are working to build alternative models of addressing community needs and challenging economic inequality. By building counter institutions based on the principles of cooperation, mutual aid, and egalitarian organizing, we are trying to not only call attention to the crisis of hunger, but also put forward alternative models of how we can organize.

The community meals are located in public spaces and this is done so that we can draw public attention to homelessness and inequality and also reclaim these public spaces. By serving in United Nations Plaza, or Civic Center, we are asserting our right to freedom of assembly in public spaces. These locations are often sites of police sweeps, and there are generally a host of ordinances designed to keep poor people out.

Reading the book, City Politics by Dennis Judd and Todd Swanstrom, one becomes aware of the extent to which cities have been organized and structured so as to maintain race and class based segregation. One's location in the design of cities is related to income level and social status. While the Civil Rights movement of the '50's and '60's was able to challenge segregation on the basis of race, the class based segregation has remained a legitimate organizing principle of urban areas and remains largely unquestioned in society. Yet, despite the efforts of the Civil Rights movement, both race and class based segregation have increased dramatically in recent history. By holding opens meals in public spaces, we hope to challenge the legitimacy of segregation on the basis of both race and class.

We hope to challenge the policies that enforce it and the social logic that grants it legitimacy. The social logic that blames the individual for the situation that they are in. By connecting food distribution and poverty to issues of militarism and economic inequality we strive to bring critical perspectives into the public discourse on poverty. We believe that discussions of homelessness and poverty that do not also speak of the corporations and the wealthy that benefit under the same economic system that creates poor people are dislocated from the economic reality facing us. Without the connections made to broader social and economic structures, discussions of homelessness tend to pathologize those who are poor and not only blame them for their poverty but also naturalize the process of becoming homeless, as if it were nature's course to render some poor and some rich - and there is nothing one can do about it, but perhaps ease the misery of the poor through acts of charity. We reject this understanding of poverty and actively work to included those who benefit under capitalism into the discussion - the bosses, the banks, the landlords, and the corporations. What we are trying to do is create the public awareness and collective activism necessary for radical social change. In their book, Poor People's Movements, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward outline the three changes in consciousness and behavior that help build a protest movement. The first, is that people must come to believe that the rulers and arrangements of society are unjust and wrong. Second, that people who are normally fatalistic begin to demand rights that imply changes in how society is organized. Third, people who normally see themselves as powerless begin to see the potential of their own agency and the agency of others to act effectively.

Piven and Cloward write, "For a protest movement to arise out of these traumas of daily life, people have to perceive the deprivation and disorganization they experience as both wrong and subject to redress. The social arrangements that are ordinarily perceived as just and immutable must come to seem both unjust and mutable."

By serving in open spaces and attracting public attention we hope to demonstrate the unjustness of the social arrangement, and also show the possibility of changing them through the direct action that we take and also through the direct service that we provide. We also work to make connections between different issues by distributing literature about a broad range of concerns and also actively supporting a broad range of struggles. The group hopes that by working with unions, with community organizations, with local artists, with national campaigns and in coalitions that the issues facing homeless people on the streets will be connected to the struggles of working people, of low-income families, of prisoners and many others, and that through these connections homelessness is not relegated to the margins of society - a body to overstep on the sidewalk.

In the book Homeless: Policies, Strategies and Lives on the Street, by Gerald Daly, the author writes:

"In Western societies we mystify homelessness. The inability to separate results from causes leads to mystification. By creating a form of analysis which hides the cause of problems, this process re-entrenches the status-quo; it diverts analysis from underlying structures. As soon as the problem is mystified, it can be denied or dismissed as unwieldy, abstract or diffuse, even intractable..."

This aspect of Food Not Bombs work is what has fueled many of the conflicts between local groups and local governments. Conflicts in Whittier, San Jose, San Diego, Worcester-Mass., New York City, Berkeley, Montreal, Palo Alto, Quebec, Arcata, and many others, have focused around the location where these groups serve, and the high level of visibility that is created. In most of these cities the efforts against FNB have been part of a larger move to gentrify the parks and public spaces where FNB is at. For example, St. James Park in San Jose has been targeted for 'renewal', and according to the daily paper, the first step that needs to be taken is ending the free food program that exists and serves as support for homeless people - that group is FNB.

Food Not Bombs and Lessons in City Politics

There is much that FNB activists and organizers can learn from studying city politics and the formation of community groups and coalitions to influence local power. Understanding the real financial limits of cities and the power of redistribution on the federal level is crucial. Looking at the historic development of cities also allows us to see how and why cities operate the way that they do, and this information can improve the strategies we develop. One of the issues that I found particularly interesting is the relationship between city and suburb and urban and rural.

As FNB groups operate in all of these environments, there are some real possibilities for organizing. FNB activists also need to explore the tensions between local and federal levels of government, and also continue to explore the potential of international campaigns directed at local governments, as has been the case in San Francisco. How can we maximize the effectiveness of our actions, work in coalition with other groups and campaigns, and agitate for radical social change while also winning immediate gains in the here and now.

Chris Crass has been an organizer with FNB since 1993.
Chriscrass1886@hotmail.com

Bibliography

Browning, Rufus P, Dale Rogers Marshall, and David H. Tabb eds. Racial Politics in Amrican Cities, second edition. 1997, Longman Press.
Daly, Gerald. Homeless: Policies, Strategies, and Lives on the Street. 1996, Routledge Press.
Deleon, Richard. Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco 1975-1991. 1992, University of Kansas Press.
Payne, Charles. I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. 1995, University of California, Berkeley Press.
Piven, Frances Fox and Richard A. Cloward. Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed. How They Fail. 1977, Vintage Books.
Much of the material on FNB came from past issues ot the Food Not Bombs Menu, which is a newsletter that contains reprinted newspaper articles, protest flyers, reports from various FNB groups, and articles about FNB work. The newsletter is distributed amongst FNB groups and supporters. Letters from Amnesty International, articles from the Chronicle, Guardian and SF Weekly were all found in back issues of the FNB Menu.

Email: editors@practicalanarchy.org

Updated: April 3, 2000