Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race - by Mark Santow (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race deserves
praise for its detailed description of community
organizing in Chicago and for its attempt to recast
an important and interesting public figure, as well as
for its moral clarity."-- "American Historical Review"

"Saul Alinksy and the Dilemmas of Race is more than an intellectual biography of Alinsky, though it certainly is that. The book is also a fascinating anddetailed exploration of how Alinsky and his Chicago organizations wrestled with the challenges of race in their organizing strategy. This conversation is significant because Alinsky-style organizing has long been criticized as failing to grasp how deeply this country's politics and economy are shaped by race."-- "The Christian Century"

"The Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain once called Saul Alinsky 'a great soul'--a mahatma, devoted to promoting human dignity through the pursuit of radical democracy. In his exemplary new book, Mark Santow brings Alinksy's vision up against the brutal realities of race in midcentury Chicago. The result is a consistently compelling, sometimes exhilarating, often sobering story of idealism, activism, and reactionary resistance in one of the nation's most segregated cities."--Kevin Boyle, author of The Shattering: America in the 1960s

"Saul Alinsky and the Dilemma of Race is a major contribution to scholarship on postwar racial politics in northern US cities. Writing at the intersections of urban, labor and African-American histories, Santow has forged an analytical narrative that depicts Alinsky's decades-long efforts to bridge Chicago's racial divide neither as a quixotic challenge to white flight nor as a broad strategy that might have prevented northern resegregation. Rather, he provides a nuanced portrait of both the potential of Alinsky's organizing for promoting neighborhood integration and its inability to address the structural forces driving racial transition in mid-twentieth-century Chicago."--Matthew Countryman, author of Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia

"What do race in the US and Saul Alinsky have in common? Both are mercurial, shrouded in myth, and caricatured across the political spectrum. Mark Santow confronts each, illuminating the intersection of the community organizer and the pragmatics of racism in the crucible of Chicago."--Amanda I. Seligman, author of Block by Block

About the Author

Mark Santow is associate professor and chair of the History Department at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. He is coauthor of Social Security and the Middle Class Squeeze.