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

Saul Alinsky was an important yet complicated man who deserves study in the polarized times of the early twenty-first century and not just because Barack Obama once claimed him as inspiration. Indeed, the trained criminologist turned community organizer of the mid-twentieth-century urban United States, and author of the much-read 1971 Rules for Radicals (and lesser-read 1946 Reveille for Radicals), developed a bellicose public persona as the self-described “Kosher Cardinal” of Chicago. But this representation belies the real story of Alinsky's political prowess. He was, as his most recent biographer, Mark Santow, calls him, foremost, “a citizen” (p. 16). In Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race, Santow suggests that, ultimately, “Alinsky is fascinating because he doesn't fit the standard liberal-conservative-radical typology” (p. 10). As Santow shows, Alinsky became “the most famous—and notorious—community organizer in America, a man who almost single-handedly invented a new political form: the community federation, a kind of neighborhood trade union” (p. 5). As the architect of Back of the Yards neighborhood councils in Chicago—made up of primarily Eastern European immigrant communities and their pastoral leaders—Alinsky became a key figure for engaging faith and cultural organizations in neighborhood identity formation and conservation. Many of the communities he helped organize were instrumental in interracially organizing packinghouse and meat-packing workers in Chicago through the early to mid-twentieth century on the city's Southside through the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Alinsky continued his important organizing activities in the city through the Industrial Areas Foundation and various community organizations (such as the Black American–led Westlawn Organization on Chicago's Southside) focused on local political empowerment and representation at the municipal level. Alinsky's impact was not just in Chicago; it extended to cities across America at midcentury such as Kansas City, St. Paul, Buffalo, and to Mexican American communities in California.

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