CHICAGO'S "back-of-the-yards" district is a smoky, sprawling area where nearly 1o,ooo packing-house workers live in old, dreary tenements whose rotting walls soak in the acrid stench of the stockyards. The people who live and work here are Slavic, Irish, Negro and Mexican, and national or racial affiliations count greatest as factors of identification. The pattern of their living could easily serve as a model for the standard denunciations of belt-line capitalism: the hard, terrible monotony of work; the frustrations built by the disparity of squalid living and the fantasy world of Hollywood; the long rows of cheap bars and gin-mills; the sense of violence hanging heavily over the neighborhood.

Into this situation, a young sociologist named Saul Alinsky stepped and organized the "Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council." Alinsky, whose specialty was juvenile delinquency and crime, had watched the fumbling efforts of established welfare agencies to get a foothold in the community. These organizations had come in as impersonal outsiders, seeking to direct the community from above. Obviously they had been resented and rebuffed. There was among the people a basic emotional hunger: the need to participate in person in the affairs that concerned them; a need to have a say in the decisions which affected them. The Back of the Yards movement took a new tack. It was not another organization competing with the established neighborhood groups, but a co- operative organization, taking root in the existing clubs, fraternal organizations, churches, trade unions and other interest groups. The Council took up as its main issues racial antagonisms, the lack of playground and recreational facilities, lack of schools, and other such matters vital to the community. Soon the Council grew so troublesome and challenging to the city administration that Mayor Kelly mobilized the local Democratic clubs to break up its organization. Through the intervention of Bishop Sheil -the district is largely Catholic and Church influence is paramount-Kelly's efforts were balked.

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