On a June night in 1978, a community organizer named Edward Chambers drove through the shattered bricks and waist-high weeds of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville, finding his way along streets that no longer had signs. He was expected at a nearby Lutheran church by a group of local clergy. Its members had reached out to Chambers, a disciple of Saul Alinsky, in the hope that he could help them rescue a section of New York so devastated that Boston’s mayor, on a visit, had declared it “the beginning of the end of our civilization.”