Abstract
The book explores the historical origins of housing and school segregation in the Chicago area, and efforts to grapple with it through policy and activism. Segregation remains a fundamental fact of life in the nation’s cities and suburbs, concentrating people of color in low-opportunity communities across multiple generations. It took a long time and much effort to create these patterns. It will take time and effort to unravel them, if we wish to do so. But first we must see them for what they are: a tightly wound human construct, creating and amplifying – but also obfuscating – inequality for generations of Americans.
More than almost any other American public figure of the past century, community organizer Saul Alinsky was acutely aware of and grappled with the relationship between social geography, activism, and racial justice. He possessed a keen sociological imagination, honed by the heat of Chicago’s postwar racial politics. This book is an attempt to explain and explore that imagination, the actions it inspired, and the lessons it may have to teach us about the struggle for social justice. Because he confronted these issues 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, and over a thirty-year period, his story gives us a unique perspective on the racial politics of the era.
By the mid-1960s, portions of the black freedom movement and the broader Left – including Saul Alinsky -- had developed a sophisticated and historically-informed understanding of how racial and class privilege shaped (and was shaped by) metropolitan space. This insight briefly appeared ready to erupt into our national policy discourse. But just as quickly, the moment passed. By the mid-70s constitutional and political barriers had been thrown up around metropolitan segregation that remain in place today. Ever since, federal courts have consistently construed civil rights and fair housing law narrowly, viewing metropolitan social geography as the product of individual choices within a non-discriminatory market -- a kind of black box, beyond the legitimate capacity of government action to control (or too politically explosive to open). Through Alinsky, and his organizations in Chicago’s Back of the Yards, Southwest Side, and Woodlawn, we can see how the metropolitan color line was constructed, contested, and maintained. We can also discern paths that were not taken, but perhaps should have been – and still could be.