Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race : Community Organizing in the Postwar City

**A groundbreaking examination of Saul Alinsky's organizing work as it relates to race.** Saul Alinsky is the most famous—even infamous—community organizer in American history. Almost single-handedly, he invented a new political form: community federations, which used the power of a neighborhood’s residents to define and fight for their own interests. Across a long and controversial career spanning more than three decades, Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation organized Eastern European meatpackers in Chicago, Kansas City, Buffalo, and St. Paul; Mexican Americans in California and Arizona; white middle-class homeowners on the edge of Chicago’s South Side black ghetto; and African Americans in Rochester, Buffalo, Chicago, and other cities. Mark Santow focuses on Alinsky’s attempts to grapple with the biggest moral dilemma of his age: race. As Santow shows, Alinsky was one of the few activists of the period to take on issues of race on paper __and__ in the streets, on both sides of the color line, in the halls of power, and at the grassroots, in Chicago and in Washington, DC. Alinsky’s ideas, actions, and organizations thus provide us with a unique and comprehensive viewpoint on the politics of race, poverty, and social geography in the United States in the decades after World War II. Through Alinsky’s organizing and writing, we can see how the metropolitan color line was constructed, contested, and maintained—on the street, at the national level, and among white and black alike. In doing so, Santow offers new insight into an epochal figure and the society he worked to change. "Saul Alinsky was the most famous--and notorious--community organizer in America. In a long and controversial career, Alinsky helped organize communities nationwide, stressing the power of locally grounded decision-making. Mark Santow here foregrounds Alinsky's attempts to grapple with the impact on race on urban communities in and around Chicago, as metropolitan color lines were constructed, contested, and reinforced. He focuses on Alinsky's work with the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, the Organization for the Southwest Community, and the Woodlawn Organization, showing how his emphasis on local organizing and territorial identity both abetted the pursuit of justice and made residential integration all the more elusive. Santow's account of Alinsky's successes and failures enriches the social history of urban America and its enduring dilemmas"-- Provided by publisher Contents Figures Introduction 1. “Americanism in the Truest Sense?” 2. “Dissolving the Walls of Racial Partition” 3. Chicago’s “Great Question” 4. The “Benign Quota,” Racial Liberalism, and the OSC 5. “And Just All of a Sudden, They Left” 6. “We Will Not Be Planned For” 7. Truth Squads and Death Watches 8. Maximum Feasible Alinsky 9. Model Cities, TWO, and the Spatial Dilemmas of Metropolitan Segregation Conclusion: Mending Walls and Building Bridges Acknowledgments Notes Index