Organizing the South Bronx / Edition 1

by Jim Rooney

Overview

This is a story of heroic and articulate individuals who were able to defy overwhelming odds and build affordable housing in the South Bronx. It is about the process of teaching citizens in a low-income neighborhood how to participate in public life.

Very little is written about the catastrophic and precipitous collapse of the South Bronx, although its fate is universally cited as emblematic of urban hopelessness. This inquiry focuses on community organizers who are sifting through the wreckage and making progress in battling an inept municipal government and the centrifugal forces of decay. The locus is a coalition of forty minority congregations, who battled the city of New York for vacant land in order to build owner-occupied row houses. This is a study of how to educate adults in a democracy to find their voice and wield the power that is inherent in large numbers of organized citizens.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791422106
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	11/04/1994
Series:	SUNY series, The New Inequalities
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

Table of Contents

Foreword by Nathan Glazer

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Design and Purpose of the Study

Part One: Context

1. The Bronx: "The City Without a Slum"

2. Why Did the South Bronx Collapse?

Part Two: The IAF in New York City

3. Alinsky, Chambers, and Citizen Movements

4. The IAF in Queens and Brooklyn

5. Old Testament Builders Nehemiah and Robbins

6. Relational Organizing: Launching South Bronx Churches

7. South Bronx Civics: Morris High School

Part Three: South Bronx Case Study

8. Here We Will Build!

9. War on 404! The Reaction to the Action

10. Digging in for the Long Haul

11. Armistice in the War on 404

Part Four: Analysis

12. Was It a Just War?

13. Learning from South Bronx Churches

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"This book tells a fascinating story about the relationships between a viable network of organizations and the political leadership of New York City. It provides a real feel for the people, interests, and issues that were part of these debates." — Joe R. Feagin, University of Florida

"This is an outstanding book—well-written, clearly organized, engaging, interesting, important." — Bill Ayers, University of Chicago

From the Publisher

For urban social-change activists, the strategies and movements inspired by the late Saul Alinsky are the stuff of legend. Alinsky, who died in 1972, taught professional organizers to serve as catalysts, enabling local residents in poor communities to form and control their own movements. Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) has been around for decades. But because the IAF's activities have received little publicity, just how Alinsky-style movements work is not well known. Now Rooney, a Rye, N.Y., high school teacher, has given us a valuable study of South Bronx Churches (SBC), an IAF project begun in one of the nation's most blighted urban communities in the late 1980s. This is a thorough and insightful book, combining astute historical research with firsthand reporting of SBC's activities. Rooney describes how suburbanization, government neglect and unwise policy transformed the South Bronx from a model community for upwardly mobile immigrants into a slum. He combines that tale with the story of Alinksy and the IAF, bringing them together at the turn of this decade, as people in a Church-based organization set out to reform their community and how it's governed. Along the way, the author gives nuts-and-bolts organizing lessons, making this a useful tool for students and others interested in social change and community empowerment. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A study of the process by which the residents of an impoverished urban neighborhood were educated and organized to fight the city government for vacant land and build low-cost, owner-occupied housing. Such organizing, mainly working through traditional churches, is a rapidly growing phenomena in the US and has close analogies throughout Latin America. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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