Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race

Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race PDF Author: Mark Santow
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226826287
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
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 and the Dilemmas of Race

Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race PDF Author: Mark Santow
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226826287
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

After Redlining

After Redlining PDF Author: Rebecca K. Marchiel
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226815862
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
"The story of how American banks helped disenfranchise nonwhite urbanities and condemn to blight the very neighborhoods that needed the most investment is infuriating. And yet, by digging into the history of urban finance, Rebecca Marchiel here illuminates how urban activists changed some banks' behavior to support investment in communities that they had once abandoned. These developments, in turn, affected federal urban policy and reshaped banks' understanding of the role that urban communities play in the financial system. The legacy of reinvestment activism is clouded, but Marchiel's detailing of it transforms our understanding of the history and significance of community/bank relations"--Provided by publisher.

Let Them Call Me Rebel

Let Them Call Me Rebel PDF Author: Sandord D. Horwitt
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 067973418X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 650

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Book Description
In the course of his flamboyant career as an all-purpose activist, Saul Alinsky went from organizing working-class ethnics in one of Chicago’s most blighted neighborhoods to mapping out strategies for the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. He enlisted allies—from Catholic clergymen to labor unionists and black activists, in battles waged against opponents from slumlords to the Eastman Kodak corporation. The range of Alinsky’s activities, the intensity of his beliefs, and his exhilarating mixture of crudeness and calculation almost vibrate off the pages of this passionate and inspiring biography. This is an important account of a complex and idiosyncratic urban populist who insisted that power was the keystone of social change. Horwitt . . . produce[s] a comprehensive appraisal of Alinksy’s colorful confrontational tactics; as a community organizer and his influence on a succeeding generation of social activists . . . An insightful and well-written study.”—Library Journal

Chicago's Block Clubs

Chicago's Block Clubs PDF Author: Amanda I. Seligman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022638599X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
What do you do if your alley is strewn with garbage after the sanitation truck comes through? Or if you’re tired of the rowdy teenagers next door keeping you up all night? Is there a vacant lot on your block accumulating weeds, needles, and litter? For a century, Chicagoans have joined block clubs to address problems like these that make daily life in the city a nuisance. When neighbors work together in block clubs, playgrounds get built, local crime is monitored, streets are cleaned up, and every summer is marked by the festivities of day-long block parties. In Chicago’s Block Clubs, Amanda I. Seligman uncovers the history of the block club in Chicago—from its origins in the Urban League in the early 1900s through to the Chicago Police Department’s twenty-first-century community policing program. Recognizing that many neighborhood problems are too big for one resident to handle—but too small for the city to keep up with—city residents have for more than a century created clubs to establish and maintain their neighborhood’s particular social dynamics, quality of life, and appearance. Omnipresent yet evanescent, block clubs are sometimes the major outlets for community organizing in the city—especially in neighborhoods otherwise lacking in political strength and clout. Drawing on the stories of hundreds of these groups from across the city, Seligman vividly illustrates what neighbors can—and cannot—accomplish when they work together.

Focus On: 100 Most Popular American Agnostics

Focus On: 100 Most Popular American Agnostics PDF Author: Wikipedia contributors
Publisher: e-artnow sro
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1652

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Book Description


Sweet Land of Liberty

Sweet Land of Liberty PDF Author: Thomas J. Sugrue
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812970381
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 738

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Book Description
Sweet Land of Liberty is Thomas J. Sugrue’s epic account of the abiding quest for racial equality in states from Illinois to New York, and of how the intense northern struggle differed from and was inspired by the fight down South. Sugrue’s panoramic view sweeps from the 1920s to the present–more than eighty of the most decisive years in American history. He uncovers the forgotten stories of battles to open up lunch counters, beaches, and movie theaters in the North; the untold history of struggles against Jim Crow schools in northern towns; the dramatic story of racial conflict in northern cities and suburbs; and the long and tangled histories of integration and black power. Filled with unforgettable characters and riveting incidents, and making use of information and accounts both public and private, such as the writings of obscure African American journalists and the records of civil rights and black power groups, Sweet Land of Liberty creates an indelible history.

Renewal

Renewal PDF Author: Mark Wild
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022660523X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
In the decades following World War II, a movement of clergy and laity sought to restore liberal Protestantism to the center of American urban life. Chastened by their failure to avert war and the Holocaust, and troubled by missionaries’ complicity with colonial regimes, they redirected their energies back home. Renewal explores the rise and fall of this movement, which began as an effort to restore the church’s standing but wound up as nothing less than an openhearted crusade to remake our nation’s cities. These campaigns reached beyond church walls to build or lend a hand to scores of organizations fighting for welfare, social justice, and community empowerment among the increasingly nonwhite urban working class. Church leaders extended their efforts far beyond traditional evangelicalism, often dovetailing with many of the contemporaneous social currents coursing through the nation, including black freedom movements and the War on Poverty. Renewal illuminates the overlooked story of how religious institutions both shaped and were shaped by postwar urban America.

Shades of White Flight

Shades of White Flight PDF Author: Mark T. Mulder
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813575478
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Since World War II, historians have analyzed a phenomenon of “white flight” plaguing the urban areas of the northern United States. One of the most interesting cases of “white flight” occurred in the Chicago neighborhoods of Englewood and Roseland, where seven entire church congregations from one denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, left the city in the 1960s and 1970s and relocated their churches to nearby suburbs. In Shades of White Flight, sociologist Mark T. Mulder investigates the migration of these Chicago church members, revealing how these churches not only failed to inhibit white flight, but actually facilitated the congregations’ departure. Using a wealth of both archival and interview data, Mulder sheds light on the forces that shaped these midwestern neighborhoods and shows that, surprisingly, evangelical religion fostered both segregation as well as the decline of urban stability. Indeed, the Roseland and Englewood stories show how religion—often used to foster community and social connectedness—can sometimes help to disintegrate neighborhoods. Mulder describes how the Dutch CRC formed an insular social circle that focused on the local church and Christian school—instead of the local park or square or market—as the center point of the community. Rather than embrace the larger community, the CRC subculture sheltered themselves and their families within these two places. Thus it became relatively easy—when black families moved into the neighborhood—to sell the church and school and relocate in the suburbs. This is especially true because, in these congregations, authority rested at the local church level and in fact they owned the buildings themselves. Revealing how a dominant form of evangelical church polity—congregationalism—functioned within the larger phenomenon of white flight, Shades of White Flight lends new insights into the role of religion and how it can affect social change, not always for the better.

Block by Block

Block by Block PDF Author: Amanda I. Seligman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226746658
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
In the decades following World War II, cities across the United States saw an influx of African American families into otherwise homogeneously white areas. This racial transformation of urban neighborhoods led many whites to migrate to the suburbs, producing the phenomenon commonly known as white flight. In Block by Block, Amanda I. Seligman draws on the surprisingly understudied West Side communities of Chicago to shed new light on this story of postwar urban America. Seligman's study reveals that the responses of white West Siders to racial changes occurring in their neighborhoods were both multifaceted and extensive. She shows that, despite rehabilitation efforts, deterioration in these areas began long before the color of their inhabitants changed from white to black. And ultimately, the riots that erupted on Chicago's West Side and across the country in the mid-1960s stemmed not only from the tribulations specific to blacks in urban centers but also from the legacy of accumulated neglect after decades of white occupancy. Seligman's careful and evenhanded account will be essential to understanding that the "flight" of whites to the suburbs was the eventual result of a series of responses to transformations in Chicago's physical and social landscape, occurring one block at a time.

City of Lake and Prairie

City of Lake and Prairie PDF Author: Kathleen A. Brosnan
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822987724
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Known as the Windy City and the Hog Butcher to the World, Chicago has earned a more apt sobriquet—City of Lake and Prairie—with this compelling, innovative, and deeply researched environmental history. Sitting at the southwestern tip of Lake Michigan, one of the largest freshwater bodies in the world, and on the eastern edge of the tallgrass prairies that fill much of the North American interior, early residents in the land that Chicago now occupies enjoyed natural advantages, economic opportunities, and global connections over centuries, from the Native Americans who first inhabited the region to the urban dwellers who built a metropolis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As one millennium ended and a new one began, these same features sparked a distinctive Midwestern environmentalism aimed at preserving local ecosystems. Drawing on its contributors’ interdisciplinary talents, this volume reveals a rich but often troubled landscape shaped by communities of color, workers, and activists as well as complex human relations with industry, waterways, animals, and disease.