Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race

"“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 ""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 *"