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Download Title: Saul Alinsky and the Politics of Racial Geography in Post
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Title: Saul Alinsky and the Politics of Racial Geography in Post-World War II Chicago Author: Mark Santow Affiliation: University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth Abstract: At the time of his death in 1972, Saul Alinsky was the most famous and successful community organizer in America. In the forties and again during the sixties, Alinsky achieved national celebrity with his controversial writings, attention-grabbing tactics, abrasive rhetoric, and political effectiveness. By bringing together black and white urban residents in territorially-based organizations, Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) strove to articulate and implement a democratic vision of race relations and the American city. In particular, Alinsky searched for local solutions to perhaps the most intractable problem faced by his native Chicago in the years following the war: racial segregation and the pattern of ghetto expansion, racial violence and white flight that caused neighborhood after neighborhood on the city’s South Side to be transformed virtually over night from white to black residency. Through community organizing, Alinsky hoped to create an ‘alternative racial geography’ - a new vision of an integrated city – that could overcome the close connections between race, security and property that characterized many of Chicago’s white neighborhoods. This presentation will explore Alinsky’s unfolding ideas with regard to race in the post-WWII decades. Drawing mainly on the large, unique and unpublished study of racial transition in Chicago neighborhoods Alinsky put together for the Catholic Archdiocese in the late 50’s, I will outline his search for a means to both empower and structurally improve black communities, while still retaining residential integration as a necessary goal. Alinsky's organizing work in the 60's dealt with these two goals, and his writings through the decade reflect lessons learned, as well as the unfolding goals and tactics of the broader movement for racial justice.
