Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“
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
"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
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. “Americanism in the Truest Sense?” Alinsky and Race in Packingtown
2. “Dissolving the Walls of Racial Partition”: The 1957 General Report
3. Chicago’s “Great Question”: Racial Geography and the Creation of the Organization for the Southwest Community, 1958–1959
4. The “Benign Quota,” Racial Liberalism, and the OSC
5. “And Just All of a Sudden, They Left”: The OSC and the Challenges of Neighborhood Integration, 1961–1969
6. “We Will Not Be Planned For”: The Creation of the Woodlawn Organization
7. Truth Squads and Death Watches: TWO, Schooling, and Spatial Strategy
8. Maximum Feasible Alinsky: TWO and the War on Poverty
9. Model Cities, TWO, and the Spatial Dilemmas of Metropolitan Segregation
Conclusion: Mending Walls and Building Bridges
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
