ABSTRACT
The man recognized as the greatest community organizer in American history at least pretended to be too big, too gruff and too implacable a foe for such sentimental gestures. It seems impossible that young organizer Obama would not have absorbed, almost in the air of the place, some of Alinsky’s miasmic presence. Newsweek magazine states without equivocation that the president’s Inaugural Address was “the furthest-reaching community-organizing speech in the history of community organizing” and it suggests that “if President Obama gets his way, we’ll all be working more—and working harder—for causes greater than ourselves.” As Obama writes in his evocative book Dreams of My Father, those were pivotal, but also immensely difficult years for him. He went into a far South Side neighborhood where the big plants had been shut down and where the people, mostly African-Americans, were mired in hopelessness.
