A trenchant history of community organizing and a mustread the next generation of organizers seeking to learn from successes failures and contradictions of the past.The community organizing tradition is long overdue for reexamination. In Organizer scholar and activist Cl Petitjean traces that history its roots in the Progressive movement to its expansion and diverging paths the social movements of the 1960s and 70s when Saul Alinsky became the popular radical in the US while groups like Student Nonviolent Committee Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers organizers as horizontal antihierarchical spadeworkersthose who do the as part of the community rather than standing apart from it.But in the years since the professionalization of organizing work has only despite the critiques. Only by grappling with its limitations and pitfalls insists can we learn to build durable effective organizations for change.