by its parishioners, but to residents who depended on its food pantry or its clothing exchange, the church was simply “the Catholic,” as though it were another of the welfare institutions they dealt with on a weekly basis. OLG’s fifty families—all of them either from the Gardens or from Golden Gate, a nearby working-class neighborhood—could rarely muster even $200 for the Sunday collection plate. A grammar school, which charged $300 a year, offered a chance for the brightest students to win a scholarship to a Catholic school in the suburbs, although most ended up at all-black Carver High, a Chicago public school.
No diocesan priest would accept a posting at OLG, so throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s, the pastor was a black man from the Carribean island of St. Kitts. Father Stanley Farier belonged to the Society of the Divine Word, whose mission was working with people so poor that only Jesus would acknowledge them.
“It was like a village in itself,” Farier would remember years later, after he had left the priesthood. “Self-enclosed, often abandoned in a sense, transportation-wise. When I was there in the seventies, you would tell people where you worked, and they would say, ‘Oh, Altgeld Gardens.’ It had that kind of a name: drug ridden, crime ridden, and poverty ridden. There was a gang problem, too. There was no job that you could get in Altgeld, except teaching in the school. If you had a job outside, if you didn’t have a car, you couldn’t hold down a job.”
Because they had no jobs, the people of Altgeld Gardens were scarcely affected by the crisis that struck the Calumet region in the early 1980s: the steel mill closings. The southeast side of Chicago once forged so much steel that it was known as the Ruhr of America, although that was hardly fair, since weapons built of Chicago steel defeated weapons built on the original Ruhr. At its wartime peak, in 1944, the U.S. Steel plant on Lake Michigan employed eighteen thousand men and women—nearly a division of industrial labor. But U.S. Steel had a newer plant in Gary, Indiana, and, slowly, the company allowed its Chicago mill to die of old age. In 1980, it still employed seven thousand steelworkers. Three years later, only a thousand remained. Nearby Wisconsin Steel expired even more abruptly. One afternoon, the workers were simply told to go home, because the mill was bankrupt. The furnaces went cold, the gates were padlocked, the innards sold for scrap.
The steelworkers refused to admit the jobs weren’t coming back. But Jerry Kellman, a dark-haired, tight-featured, intense community organizer, could see it. Raised in a Jewish family in the New York City suburbs, Kellman had followed a radical’s path to the South Side. While attending the University of Wisconsin—where he demonstrated against the school’s ROTC program—he road-tripped to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. After watching Mayor Richard J. Daley’s police go wild on his fellow protesters, Kellman decided Chicago was not a place he ever wanted to live. But he returned a few years later, to learn about organizing poor people from one of Daley’s nemeses, Saul Alinsky. Alinsky had founded the community organizing movement in the 1930s by working with progressive Catholic churches to organize meat packers in the city’s notorious stockyards.
Alinsky’s model of building political power was based on the local Democratic Machine and was one of the Machine’s few rivals in an era when Chicago was becoming a one-party town. The churches were the dominant institutions in most people’s lives; if you asked a Chicagoan where he lived, he’d name his parish, not his neighborhood. Liberal priests believed in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical on labor: A worker had a right to organize for a wage that would “maintain himself, his wife and children in reasonable comfort.” As a result, Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation received large grants from the archdiocese.
Kellman stayed on in Chicago and was working for a group that organized Latino churches when he got an idea for his own campaign. Why not work with churches in the Calumet region to find new jobs for steelworkers who’d been thrown out of work by the recession that coined the term “Rust Belt”? Kellman, who had converted to Catholicism the year before, set about visiting parishes on the South Side and in the south suburbs. Alinsky’s model could still work in the mid-1980s, even though religious and neighborhood ties were weaker by then.
“I need board members,” he told the priests, “you,