Jim Dickson and I faced the door of the house in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. He had knocked at the homes of complete strangers many times before. Not me; I was in foreign territory.

I had arrived in the city a few months earlier. Before then, I was in Jackson, Miss., where I worked as a community organizer with Operation Shoestring. The Methodist Church-based program helped low-income residents. I was successful — organizing the first citywide rent strike, for example. But mostly I worked on instinct.