Running in Place

As was often the case, iconoclastic community organizer Saul Alinsky was at the center of controversy in Chicago during the spring of 1959. Alinsky, who had become widely known for his organizing work in the meatpacking district and his predilection for using brash tactics and courting attention, took special pleasure in the uproar. He had been accused of being a Communist, and of committing various “immoral crimes” by “white bigots” he had been condemned by the liberal Catholic Interracial Council as “immoral;” the black community in Chicago had, he reported, responded with a collective “amen!” The entire city of Chicago, he recounted in a letter, “is suffering from severe, chronic color constipation, and I was out to administer a sizable mental laxative… if only you had been there to see the urban bowels move!”

What had Alinsky done? With reporters everywhere and TV cameras rolling, he had outlined his ideas on residential integration before the Chicago hearings of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in May 1959. “No white Chicago community wants Negroes,” he insisted. The only way that any Chicago neighborhood would ever sustain residential integration, he concluded, would be through the use of a locally administered quota system that limited the number of blacks on each block. And his organization, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), was working on the Southwest Side, trying to bring this idea to fruition. 

More than almost any other urbanist of the past half-century, Alinsky was keenly aware of the intersection between race, place, and social belonging. The community organizer had a vision of the democratic city that relied heavily upon the creation and nurturing of territorial identities: connecting people to one another through common ground--literally. He helped to build large and influential neighborhood groups, with local leaders and organizations fighting for local needs.

Since the 1960s, public and private efforts at urban revitalization have mostly followed Alinsky’s place-based approaches. Yet two of his Chicago organizations, both founded in the late-’50s, should serve as cautionary tales. As Alinsky’s experience demonstrates, place-based solutions alone will never solve the problems of the American metropolis.

Uniting a Community Backfires

Alinsky began his organizing career in the late-1930s and early-’40s by gathering packinghouse workers into the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council. Using the parish as an institutional and ideological framework and bringing together local priests and union activists, Alinsky built the Council into a powerful force for community identity, representation, and improvement, overcoming ethnic divisions that had long prevented unified action.

Unfortunately, in the late-’40s, the community identity that Alinsky helped to form became increasingly associated with racial preservation, as black families began to move into adjacent neighborhoods. Terrified by the idea that the racial balance of the neighborhood was “tipping” and that declining property values might ensue, the Council focused on keeping the neighborhood white. Alinsky was embarrassed that the BYNC was promoting segregation, and he began to think deeply about why whites in Chicago seemed to resist the idea of black neighbors so strongly. Seeking new ways to counter segregation, he created two organizations: an interracial group on the rapidly changing Southwest Side and a black community organization in Woodlawn, a poor neighborhood near the University of Chicago that had recently changed rapidly from a mainly white area to a mainly black one. Once organized, he hoped the two groups could work together to control the housing market on the South Side and intentionally foster integration on the basis of mutual self-interest. The city’s problems could not be solved, Alinsky argued, until “the walls of racial partition have been at least partly dissolved.”

Organizing to Change Mindsets

Alinsky launched his Southwest organizing campaign in 1959. At the time, black families were beginning to move into upper reaches of the area. Most white residents in the community didn’t want to flee.Yet encouraged by realtors, the home finance industry, the Federal government’s home mortgage insurance programs, and others, they had come to associate blacks with danger and risk and to believe that they had a right to avoid black neighbors. Those whites who didn’t mind some degree of integration, as well as those few who actively desired it, faced strong cultural and economic disincentives. Alinsky hoped to acknowledge this dynamic and then utilize community organizing to gradually broaden the interests, identities, and perspectives of white homeowners in order to break their fears of interracial living. While racism and segregation are wrong and destructive, Alinsky insisted, “unless we can develop a program which recognizes the legitimate self-interest of white communities, we have no right to condemn them morally because they refuse to commit hara-kiri.”

Through local churches, homeowner associations, and business and social groups, black newcomers and white residents formed the Organization for the Southwest Community (OSC) in 1959. In some ways, the OSC was a remarkable and unprecedented success. Elsewhere in Chicago, areas of racial transition were places of desperate violence, neighborhood decline, and panicked flight. While violence was not absent on the Southwest Side in the early ‘60s, the OSC took affirmative steps to stave off racial conflict and the decline of the neighborhood. The group initiated legal action against real estate speculators who tried to panic whites into selling as black families moved nearby. They pushed the city to enforce its housing and zoning codes to keep the neighborhood stable and economically viable. OSC committees served as public forums in which whites and blacks could discuss their fears and interests.

The OSC also made a variety of attempts to convince whites to stay in the neighborhood. In 1963, it published ten thousand copies of a short play entitled “How to Use Facts to Change Your Husband’s Mind"--a suggested role-play for local wives to convince their spouses that the Southwest Side had the lonely suburbs beat. A Home Loan Program was established to help creditworthy black families move into the area and enable whites to stay. As an OSC publication put it, activists engaged in “hours of ‘hand holding’ with frightened people, informal meetings on threatened blocks, education through parish bulletins, brochures and flyers, conferences with ministers, priests, and civic leaders,” in order to halt racial violence and stem the tide of white panic and flight. Nonetheless, racial turnover on the Southwest Side continued. By the end of the decade, most whites that could leave had done so.

Simultaneously, Alinsky and his staff created The Woodlawn Organization (TWO). Alinsky saw the all-black TWO as a tool for both improving the lives of local residents and furthering the larger goal of racial integration. Success in addressing the everyday needs of Woodlawn residents, he believed, would eventually make the organization powerful enough to address the broader structures that impoverished them economically and politically. It would also help participants to draw connections between their local troubles and larger issues. Specifically, Alinsky was confident that TWO would move beyond just improving daily life in the inner city--"gilding the ghetto,” some would say--in the direction of residential integration.

By the mid-1960s, TWO’s membership included nearly 150 local groups representing 40,000 of Woodlawn’s 100,000 citizens. Yet while TWO became powerful in the city, it quickly moved away from the issue of integration. Taking seriously its mandate of “maximum feasible participation” of the poor in social programs, TWO sought to gain control over locally administered Federal social and housing programs during the “War on Poverty.” TWO’s vision of black ghetto residents as citizens to be mobilized and empowered, rather than clients to be served, became widespread in the urban North by the mid-1960s. Beginning in the late-’60s, TWO launched one of the nation’s first community development corporations (CDCs). For the next few decades, it focused primarily on making Woodlawn a more livable place for its largely poor residents, with only a few attempts to enable some residents to leave the area for better opportunities elsewhere. Woodlawn remained a place of desperate and increasingly concentrated poverty into the 1990s.

The Force Alinsky Couldn’t Beat

The primary difficulty with Alinsky’s approach both on the Southwest Side and in Woodlawn was that he attempted to construct local solutions to problems that were increasingly metropolitan in scope. The causes of black poverty in Woodlawn lay in larger regional structures of racial geography and political economy. Reorganized social services, locally controlled job training programs, and non-profit housing construction, no matter how brilliantly and democratically conceived, did little to make Woodlawn a more stable, safe, and livable community. Neither did gaining control over under-funded Federal programs that were premised on the notion that improving human and social capital could fix concentrated black poverty in Woodlawn. Decent-paying jobs left for the suburbs, and upwardly mobile residents generally followed when possible.

Alinsky’s local approach to integration on the Southwest Side, while admirable, was similarly limited. Without a more open housing market in the city and its surrounding suburbs, the relationship between race and place would continue to undermine the possibility of lasting integration on the Southwest Side. White residents could flee to the suburbs while black families for the most part could not. At best, groups like TWO and OSC provided a means for some black families to run up the “down escalator” of opportunity in urban America. While these successes were not inconsequential, the ghetto remained in place. The changes Alinsky pursued--and those that he tried to prevent--were beyond his reach without a more concerted attempt to connect his organizations to the broader political and economic issues affecting their communities.

By the late 1960s, Alinsky had come to this conclusion himself. As he gruffly put it in 1969, “a political idiot knows that most major issues are national, and in some cases international in scope. They cannot be coped with on the local community level.” He advocated alliances across the boundaries of race, class, and geography to deal with the broader issues that could not be addressed by neighborhood-based identities and organizing. In the years before Alinsky’s death in 1972, his umbrella organization, the IAF, created the city-wide Citizens Action Program (CAP). CAP brought together people of different races, classes, and neighborhoods in the Chicago area to address red-lining, neighborhood deterioration, environmental problems, and consumer issues. It shifted the focus of white neighborhood anger away from blacks and towards the government and housing market institutions largely responsible for the social geography that continued to impoverish inner-city areas and set the races against one another. Activists and organizers have built similar coalitions around the country in the last decade, ranging from the IAF’s United Power for Action and Justice (UPAJ) in Chicago to Gamaliel’s Interfaith Federation. As Myron Orfield, William Julius Wilson, and others have argued, only coalitions like these have any hope of diminishing the structural problems of the nation’s cities.

A Broad Consensus Behind A Failed Idea

Given the conservative tilt of American politics since 1968, the abandonment of residential integration in recent decades is more of a tactical retreat than a moral choice. This retreat is not without costs, however. Alinsky’s experiences in Chicago point to some of the limitations of focusing exclusively on the “inside game,” as David Rusk puts it, while ignoring the “outside game.” Alinsky’s story doesn’t tell us that local means for addressing urban problems are a dead end, but it does make us aware of the problems with neighborhood-based approaches in our segregated cities and suburbs.

Most public and private approaches to the problems of the American city today and in the past tend to be place-based. For the right, welfare reform, faith-based initiatives and the right market incentives will solve the problems; for the left, community development and more funding for schools and job training will uplift the urban minority poor. These approaches all accept racial segregation as a given, and thus reproduce the politics, interests, and identities that generated racial inequality and urban decline in the first place, and which resist broader solutions.

Place-based policies--specially the small-scale and short-lived policies created in an era of limited Federal spending and modest private interventions--ask the victims to deal with the effects of institutional problems over which they have little power. They allow white suburbanites to rest comfortably with the belief that their wealth is unrelated to the deprivation in nearby cities, even when that wealth actually comes from the asset-generating opportunities offered by generations of segregated housing markets.

Perhaps expediency demands such place-based approaches. Justice, however, demands more.