Seeds of Change

John Atlas

Description

"There is more value on a single page of Seeds of Change than in a year's worth of Rush Limbaugh screeds combined with a lifetime of Sarah Palin sneers at community organizers." --Todd Gitlin


Seeds of Change goes beyond the headlines of the last Presidential campaign to describe what really happened in ACORN's massive voter registration drives, why it triggered an unrelenting attack by Fox News and the Republican Party, and how it confronted its internal divisions and scandals.


Based on Atlas's own eyewitness original reporting, as the only journalist to have access to ACORN's staff and board meetings, this book documents the critical transition from founder Wade Rathke, a white New Orleans radical to Bertha Lewis, a Brooklyn African American activist.


The story begins in the 1970s, when a small group of young men and women, led by a charismatic college dropout, began a quest to help the powerless help themselves. In a tale full of unusual characters and dramatic conflicts, the book follows the ups and downs of ACORN's organizers and members as they confront big corporations and unresponsive government officials in Albuquerque, Brooklyn, Chicago, Detroit, Little Rock, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and the Twin Cities.


The author follows the course of local and national campaigns to organize unions, fight the subprime mortgage crisis, promote living wages for working people, struggle for affordable housing and against gentrification, and help Hurricane Katrina's survivors return to New Orleans.


The book dispels the conservative myth that we can only help the poor through private soup kitchens and charity and the liberal myth that the solution rests simply with more government services. Seeds of Change, not only provides a gripping look at ACORN's four decades of effective organizing, but also offers a hopeful analysis of the potential for a revival of real American democracy.

An offering of The Progressive Book Club.

Sujets

• Political Advocacy
• Political Process
• Human Rights
• Political Science
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 28 juin 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826517074
• Langue: English

Extrait

Seeds of Change
The Story of ACORN, America's Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group
 
 
John Atlas
 
Vanderbilt University Press Nashville
© 2010 by John Atlas Nashville, Tennessee 37235 All rights reserved First edition 2010
This book is printed on acid-free paper. Manufactured in the United States of America
Cover design: John Thompson, e-volution design Text design: Dariel Mayer
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Atlas, John. Seeds of change: the story of ACORN, America's most controversial antipoverty community organizing group / John Atlas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8265-1705-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8265-1706-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. ACORN (Organization) 2. Community organization—United States. 3. Community development, Urban—United States—Citizen participation. I. Title. HN85.A3A85 2010 307.1'4097309045—dc22 2009035855
ISBN 978-0-8265-1707-4 (electronic)
For my children, Reuben and Becky Atlas
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1.    Wade Rathke and the Roots of ACORN
2.    Stepping onto a Larger Stage
3.    ACORN's Model T
4.    The Innovation of Electoral Politics
5.    Organizing a Union in the 'Hood
6.    Partnering with the Enemy
7.    Urban Homesteading
8.    Political Ground Shifts
9.    New York: A New Model
10.    A Living Wage
11.    Never Borrow Money Needlessly: ACORN and the Subprime Crisis
12.    ACORN's Family Party
13.    Atlantic Yards, the Nets, and the Battle of Brooklyn
14.    Then, Overnight, It Is Washed Away
15.    A Rich Gumbo
16.    The Right to Vote
17.    Growing Pains
18.    The Prostitute and the Assault
Epilogue: A Progressive Social Movement
 
Appendix A Finding and Developing Leaders
Appendix B Running Voter-Registration Campaigns
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
 
1.   Wade Rathke and marchers in Springfield, Illinois, 1969
2.   Wade Rathke, Little Rock office, 1975
3.   Anti-blockbusting, Little Rock, 1972
4.   ACORN delegates planting platform labels, Memphis, 1978
5.   ACORN marching to the Democratic convention, Memphis, 1978
6.   Steve Kest and L. V. Darrough, Little Rock, 1978
7.    Fast Food Worker weekly
8.   Mary Lassen and ACORN members, Missouri, 1976
9.   Rathke and demonstrators, Citibank, New York, 1988
10. Maude Hurd, national convention
11. Jon Kest, Brooklyn office
12. ACORN member in minimum-wage campaign
13. Bill Clinton, Maude Hurd, and ACORN members, Philadelphia
14. ACORN leaders with John Edwards
15. Minnesota ACORN leader Paul Satriano
16. ACORN Housing president Alton Bennett with demonstrators, Los Angeles
17. ACORN member protesting HFC lending practices
18. Bertha Lewis, Mayor Bloomberg, and Bruce Ratner, Brooklyn, 2005
19. ACORN protest signs against Atlantic Yards, Brooklyn
20. Bertha Lewis, Brooklyn ACORN office, 2008
21. Hurricane Katrina flood zones map
22. Dorothy Stukes, Rebuilding New Orleans forum, November 2005
23. ACORN No Bulldozing protest, New Orleans, 2005
24. Delery Street press conference, New Orleans, 2006
25. Senator Ted Kennedy addressing ACORN rally, Washington, D.C., 2005
26. Door-to-door voter registration, Columbus, Ohio
27. ACORN directors Zach Polett and Kevin Whelan
28. Toni McElroy at ACORN rally, U.S. Capitol, February 2009
29. Bertha Lewis addressing ACORN board, Las Vegas, April 2009
30. ACORN Votes endorsement of Barack Obama for president, February 2008
31. California ACORN voter registration effort
32. ACORN member's T-shirt, “Today we march, tomorrow we vote!”
Preface
F or forty years I worked on the front lines of anti-poverty and social justice efforts and discovered how hard and frustrating it is to make a difference. I played many roles—lawyer, executive director, board member, organizer, fundraiser, mentor, editor, public speaker, writer and publicist. I shared some of these experiences through a biweekly radio program in New York, television shows, dozens of magazine articles, and a book, Saving Affordable Housing . As a legal aid lawyer I helped hundreds of families threatened with losing their homes and organized civic groups like the New Jersey Tenants Organization, whose members successfully lobbied to protect renters from slumlords, unfair evictions, and skyrocketing rents. In 1976 I helped launch Shelterforce , a magazine for anti-poverty activists and practitioners engaged in housing and saving neighborhoods, and served as an editor and its president for thirty-three years. I have joined forces with ideologically diverse groups to promote policies that would strengthen civil society and fight poverty. 1
In 2003, I took time off from work as a lawyer to evaluate my efforts and those of others who had dedicated their lives to the cause of democracy, equality, and justice since the late 1960s. What had we accomplished? What were the strengths and weaknesses of our efforts? What lessons could be learned that would be useful to a new generation of progressive activists, policy practitioners, and thinkers? I received a Charles H. Revson Fellowship at Columbia University and in 2004 used that opportunity to start writing a book about poverty, democracy, and politics by looking at ACORN.
ACORN was founded in 1970, about the same time I committed myself to helping poor and working-class Americans improve their lives, so its history coincided with the time frame I wanted for examining anti-poverty efforts in America. As a legal aid lawyer, I had worked with a local ACORN chapter in Paterson, New Jersey, and watched its members and their children, armed with black garbage bags, gardening gloves, and shovels, clean up a local park, removing newspapers, broken glass, and beer bottles to turn a neighborhood eyesore into a community asset. ACORN also organized a campaign to prevent lead poisoning in young low-income and minority children. I observed its members providing sound advice to families filling out tax returns, carefully showing eligible families how to obtain the federal tax credit for the working poor, a benefit supported by presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. ACORN's largely black and Hispanic members seemed unafraid to protest and loudly confront local politicians to get what they wanted to improve their neighborhood. The organization's successes and failures, I thought, might provide valuable lessons about the subject and era I hoped to focus on.
I thought a book about ACORN would complement other books about the poor that were at odds with my own experiences. The best of them— American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and A Nation's Drive to End Welfare by Jason DeParle (Viking Books, 2004), The Working Poor by David Shipler (Knopf, 2004), and Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Scribner, 2003)—document the plight of the working poor and provide a valuable, complex portrait of what it's like to be deprived in a wealthy society. But each of these writers presents poor people as mostly passive victims. Some work in low-wage jobs, while others are jobless. Some are good parents, while others neglect their children. Some are responsible citizens, while others drug addicts, criminals, or moral deviants whose actions separate them from normal society. Absent from all these books are stories of collective efforts by the working poor to lift themselves up and change public policy, like families in ACORN and those involved in New Jersey's tenant movement.
My book, Seeds of Change , offers a look at America's poor and challenges the assumptions of conservatives and liberals who presume that the poor are helpless victims unable to change themselves or society. ACORN reflects the American tradition of helping the poor help themselves. Its work suggests that the best prescription for reducing poverty should start, as many organizers have said, with the maxim, “If you give a man a fish, he will eat that day, but if you teach a man to fish, he will eat every night.” But what if the river where you fish is polluted and the fish are dying? The hungry person who learned how to fish will need to organize or join a community group that can mobilize public opinion, demonstrate against the polluters, and sue them, as well as pressure government officials to clean up the water. In other words, we must teach people how to fight as well as fish.
In the chapters to come, I follow ACORN's organizers, leaders, allies, and opponents, weaving their stories into a tapestry that includes the broader context of American culture, democracy, and politics. I take you behind the recent headlines about ACORN and follow the lives of leaders of the organization like Maude Hurd, Beatrice Jackson, Paul Satriano, and Pearl Gilbert—black and white, poor and working class, each of whom joined after an organizer