Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America's Most Controversial Anti-Poverty Community Organizing Group

Book info: Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America's Most Controversial Anti-Poverty Community Organizing Group (Hardcover, 284 pages) – Vanderbilt University Press, 2010. Language: English.

"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 GitlinSeeds 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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Seeds of ChangeThe Story of ACORN, America's Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing GroupBy John AtlasVanderbilt University PressCopyright © 2010 John Atlas
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8265-1705-0
ContentsList of Illustrations, ix,
Preface, xi,
Introduction, 1,
1 Wade Rathke and the Roots of ACORN, 9,
2 Stepping onto a Larger Stage, 19,
3 ACORN's Model T, 29,
4 The Innovation of Electoral Politics, 37,
5 Organizing a Union in the 'Hood, 47,
6 Partnering with the Enemy, 58,
7 Urban Homesteading, 73,
8 Political Ground Shifts, 80,
9 New York: A New Model, 88,
10 A Living Wage, 99,
11 Never Borrow Money Needlessly: ACORN and the Subprime Crisis, 118,
12 ACORN's Family Party, 132,
13 Atlantic Yards, the Nets, and the Battle of Brooklyn, 138,
14 Then, Overnight, It Is Washed Away, 156,
15 A Rich Gumbo, 178,
16 The Right to Vote, 205,
17 Growing Pains, 219,
18 The Prostitute and the Assault, 236,
Epilogue: A Progressive Social Movement, 251,
Appendix A Finding and Developing Leaders, 259,
Appendix B Running Voter-Registration Campaigns, 265,
Acknowledgments, 267,
Notes, 269,
Bibliography, 307,
Index, 325,


CHAPTER 1

Wade Rathke and the Roots of ACORN

I would not lead you into the Promised Land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else would lead you out. —Eugene Debs

Power is the ability to achieve a purpose. Whether or not it is good or bad depends upon the purpose. —Martin Luther King Jr.

Early on the morning of May 25, 1970, a determined young man packed his belongings—his clothes, his wife's clothes, and his only piece of furniture, a rocking chair—into his 1967 Datsun station wagon. He slid into the front seat and began a 1,500-mile trip from Boston to Little Rock, Arkansas, uncertain of his future but convinced he could transform American politics. He planned to help the poor by organizing them into a powerful political force.

At twenty-one, Wade Rathke had already come a long way. Two years earlier, he had been a sophomore at Williams College. Like many students during that era, he had joined the radical activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and agitated against the Vietnam War. But Rathke found the Williams students elitist, the professors dull, and his courses irrelevant to his aspirations. In January 1968 he dropped out and headed south to New Orleans, his hometown, to organize resistance to the war. His father, Edmann, an auditor who lived in a middle-class neighborhood of New Orleans, was furious. "You were an Eagle Scout," he cried. "Now you're a traitor and a dropout!"

Rathke was disturbed but unmoved by his father's tirade. He didn't live at home and did not want his father's money. To get by, he worked as a busboy, then as a print dryer, and finally as a lift-truck driver. He volunteered as a draft counselor and organized college demonstrations against the war. Yet after six months Rathke found himself as restless and frustrated as he'd been at Williams. He was tired of advising pampered college students on how they could avoid military service. The students "were not the blacks, Puerto Ricans, and working families, many of whom I had worked with and who were really suffering in America." Rathke was not, as he later put it, "interested in setting up a service bureau for upper-middle-class college kids."

Like many activist students in 1968, Rathke believed that the times were ripe for world-shattering change. The antiwar movement had become so powerful that it forced President Lyndon Johnson not to seek reelection. Yet, Rathke felt, the hopes of 1968 were not coming to fruition, partly because many antiwar leaders had contempt for or were indifferent to working-class people.

In August 1968, five days after his twentieth birthday, Rathke married his high school girlfriend, Lee, a secretarial school graduate. Uncertain about what he should do next, he defaulted to a conventional route and headed back to Williams. On the way, he attended a national SDS meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and watched in dismay as the group tore itself apart. A leader of a faction of SDS, called the Progressive Labor Party, talked of unions seduced by "false consciousness"—meaning that workers persisted in supporting the capitalist system that oppressed them—and challenged those attending to start a worker-student alliance. Rathke shook his head in disbelief.

Later he told his wife that the speakers were a bunch of spoiled students who never worked a day in their lives. "The idea that workers were looking for alliances with students, and that students would lead them to the Promised Land, was bullshit," Rathke thought; these student activists were completely disconnected from reality. He sensed that their politics, unlike his own, lacked the vital element of hope. That was his last SDS meeting. A rangy redhead with a long lean face and a prominent Adam's apple, Rathke wore denim shirts and cowboy boots, as if to show the other activists in the North that this Louisiana boy was not one of them. He could have been mistaken for a country-and-western singer.

Back at Williams during the fall of 1968, Rathke set up a draft-counseling center and organized a three-day shutdown of the campus to support a sit-in at the administration hall by African American students. Eventually, though, he imagined a different path—an antiwar movement not simply set on ending the war but growing into a force for fundamental change, addressing issues like economic inequality, the shortage of jobs, and city slum conditions.

But that fall, organizing the poor and working class would have to wait. Running short of cash, Rathke trudged fruitlessly from factory after factory, warehouse to warehouse looking for work. After several weeks he landed a job with a federally funded antipoverty program in North Adams, Massachusetts, not far from Williams. The program advised welfare recipients regarding their rights. When Rathke read an article in the Nation about a plan to reduce poverty, the rigor of its arguments intrigued him. The authors, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, urged leftist activists to help the poor get on the welfare rolls. They noted that throughout history, only when the poor used disruptive protest tactics did they succeed in significantly improving their lot. Their break-the-bank strategy would require adding millions to welfare, which in turn would "precipitate a profound financial crisis," since cities lacked the funds or the staff to accommodate the spiraling number of desperate people seeking financial assistance. This strategy, Piven and Cloward predicted, would force mayors and governors to lobby for a guaranteed adequate annual income for the poor.

Soon after Rathke started working at the antipoverty community center, he joined several staffers on a bus trip to Boston to attend a rally for the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Rathke stood on the Boston Commons that summer day with several hundred others listening to NWRO leader George Wiley urge the crowd "to join our crusade for welfare rights." Wiley, a black man in his late thirties, cut a formidable figure with his large Afro and his billowing African dashiki. A former leader of a civil rights organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), with a PhD in chemistry, he had created the NWRO in 1966. Wiley wanted to achieve economic gains for welfare recipients comparable to the rights won in the civil rights movement in the South. In their influential article in the Nation, Piven and Cloward had shown that for every family on the federal welfare program Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), at least one other family was eligible but not enrolled. These activist sociologists advocated mobilizing the poor in racially tense big cities in states that were of crucial electoral importance to Democrats, the party then in power. By picketing outside welfare offices for more food, clothes, and money, they argued, the poor would pressure mayors and governors into lobbying Washington for increased benefits and possibly reform the welfare system with a national minimum income for poor families.

Partly spurred by federally funded antipoverty programs, Wiley as well as Cloward and Piven had noticed that small local welfare rights organizations were hatching in Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, and other cities, their intent to encourage the poor to apply for welfare. Wiley modified the Cloward-Piven plan by focusing his organizers on those who were already on welfare but had not received all the benefits they were eligible for. Within two years, tens of thousands of single minority mothers in hundreds of local demonstrations disrupted welfare offices, demanding an end to the arbitrary eligibility restrictions and stingy payments. One egregious rule allowed a social worker to deny aid to a mother if the worker believed—no proof required—that a man was living in her home. This arbitrary rule also discouraged a father from living with and supporting his children.

Conservative critics claimed that expanding the welfare rolls would create a "culture of dependency." Even Wiley's liberal critics believed the answer was more jobs, not more welfare. (Sen. Robert Kennedy, running for president on an antiwar and antipoverty platform in 1968, shared this view.) Civil rights leader Whitney Young, director of the Urban League, said it was more important to get one black woman into a job as an airline stewardess than it was to get fifty women on welfare. At the rally Rathke attended, Wiley responded to his critics: "Many theorists say we need to get people off the dole, find more jobs, cut costs, solve poverty. That's fine. But I say, any welfare reform that doesn't leave poor people better off, is no reform at all." His voice rising, he continued: "What we're doing is getting the people involved in demanding rights as human beings from a system that treats them like animals."

Wiley believed that NWRO's success would in large part hinge on his ability to recruit and train skilled organizers who could energize welfare mothers. Attending the rally was one of Wiley's early recruits and the head organizer of the Massachusetts NWRO chapter, Bill Pastreich, a young white man with hawk eyes that gave him an almost predatory appearance. Before joining NWRO he had served in the Peace Corps and had been forced by his host country in Latin America to leave because he had organized a number of rent strikes. He went on to study community organizing in a Syracuse University training course based on the methods of Saul Alinsky, the guru of community activism, then worked for César Chávez's United Farm Workers. Just before the NWRO rally, the Boston Globe Magazine had run a profile of Pastreich titled "The Organizer."

Pastreich knew about Rathke's antiwar organizing and approached him at the rally with an offer: "We need you to open up a welfare rights office in Springfield, Massachusetts." Rathke replied, "Let me think about it." He saw in Wiley a charismatic leader with a hopeful strategy, and he wanted to work for him. Even though it would be only a summer job, he and his wife, Lee, agreed that the welfare rights movement had more potential to change things than did his work at the local antipoverty agency. He called Pastreich, trying to leave him with the impression that he was an experienced organizer. "I don't know much about your welfare rights group," Rathke said, "but let me take a look at Springfield to see if it's ripe for organizing." In fact he knew nothing about organizing poor people and years later would say, "I wouldn't have known if a neighborhood in Springfield was ripe for organizing if it bit me on the ass." Pastreich was not fooled, but he knew Rathke was smart, had organized students, and had that fire in the belly that, with good mentoring, helped turn young idealists into effective activists.

"How soon can you do that?"

"I'll check it out next weekend," Rathke promised.

When Lee came home from work, Wade told her about his plan to visit Springfield that coming weekend, August 15, 1969. "I got tickets to the Woodstock Festival," she protested.

"But I promised Bill I would go check out Springfield," Wade answered. "There'll be other rock concerts." Looking back, Rathke would think of Woodstock as a symbolic moment that separated the political activists from the mostly tie-dyed and beaded cultural ones.

Rathke hitched an hour and a half ride from Williamstown to Springfield, where he bedded down in a sleeping bag on the porch of Wally Foster, the editor of Springfield's underground newspaper. Early the next morning, Saturday, Rathke confidently canvassed community centers, black churches, and public-housing projects. He knocked on doors, enjoyed talking to the people he met, and managed to identify neighborhoods where significant numbers of poor people lived. He had always imagined himself embedded in a cause consistent with his deeply held values about equality, which could change the lives of the poor for the better.

Back home, Rathke let Pastreich know that he would accept his unconventional job offer, which turned out to be more like accepting a mission. As Rathke quickly learned, NWRO was not going to pay him; he would have to hustle money from friends in the antipoverty agencies. In the summer of 1969, he moved to Springfield, which would prove the first stop on a lifelong road.

Pastreich's plan for building an uprising in Springfield exploited a little-known provision in the welfare laws. Although federal and state government funded the welfare program, counties and cities implemented it and were required to provide for the "special needs" of the recipients. If a family needed clothing or furnishings, for instance, the law compelled the Welfare Department to give that family a check to cover their cost. Pastreich instructed Rathke to hire some organizers, find some community leaders, and then "flood the welfare offices by applying for more benefits."

As Rathke walked through the poor neighborhoods of Springfield, he kept in mind his decision to recruit blacks, Puerto Ricans, and whites simultaneously, because "if you brought in blacks first, then you would have a tough time with whites or Puerto Ricans later." At a large housing project that Rathke targeted as the main locale to canvass, he found the people he needed, including Barbara Rivera, a white welfare recipient; her Puerto Rican husband; and Roger Brunelle, a social worker at a Springfield community center. They agreed to help Rathke locate leaders, who in turn would help them find people on welfare. None of these initial recruits had any experience in community and political action—for example, in the civil rights movement or in union or church activism—but they were angry about the low welfare grants and wanted to improve their lives. In six weeks, with Rathke's seat-of-the-pants training, they became leaders in the community and ready to put NWRO's scheme into effect.

The welfare rules entitled a family of three to three chairs, a family of four to four, as well as linens and household furnishings. Rathke and his recruits went door knocking in the low-income neighborhoods of Springfield, asking residents what they had and what they lacked. Entering an apartment, they would ask, Where's your fourth chair? Your third bed sheet? Your missing pillows and pillowcases? Rathke, charming with his southern drawl, would point out, "You have a right to these things." Upon leaving, he'd give the family a flyer inviting them to an upcoming welfare rights meeting.

Many welfare recipients were attracted to the campaign. It was simple to understand, it appealed to their self-interest, and it encouraged them only to exercise their legal rights. Rathke's pitch added to the appeal. In one-on-one organizing, he projected confidence, with sad eyes that conveyed empathy and deep respect for the poor.

At the meetings, women filled out the proper forms to apply for welfare benefits and paid their one-dollar dues to the NWRO. Right after the meetings, fifty to sixty women would take buses to the welfare office in Springfield, where they presented caseworkers with their properly completed applications specifying the chairs, sheets, pillowcases, and school clothing that they were entitled to. Rathke accompanied them, but the women did the talking, sometimes the shouting. Some of the caseworkers were sympathetic, others were intimidated and even frightened, but all were overwhelmed by the load of paperwork set in motion by the NWRO campaign. The applicants would make it clear that they would be back in two weeks to pick up their checks. The next day another busload would arrive. Within two weeks, word spread in the housing projects, and soon hundreds were filling out forms to get welfare for the first time, and others to get money for their special needs.

The actions got the city officials to pay attention and negotiate with the new members of a loose group called the Springfield Welfare Rights Chapter of NWRO. Rathke and the group reached an agreement with the city Welfare Department to designate a pick-up day when all the mothers could go to the department to obtain their checks. Eventually, two hundred mothers would arrive to apply for welfare on a pick-up day, while another hundred were collecting their checks for school clothing for their children or for furniture.

Rathke quickly gained a reputation as one of NWRO's best organizers. Pastreich said to him, "Maybe you do know what you are doing."

Rathke replied, "I thought you knew what you were doing when you hired me." "Hired" continued to be a misnomer, since like most NWRO organizers, Rathke was expected to live off the land. He worked out a deal with Teddy Sylvester, director of an antipoverty program, to pay him eighty dollars a week to organize for NWRO. Lee Rathke supplemented their income working as a bank teller and secretary. Some NWRO organizers lived on small donations or depleted their savings. Pastreich spent four thousand dollars of his savings in the first year he organized in Boston. Rathke commandeered free stationery, flyers, and NWRO buttons.

(Continues...)Excerpted from Seeds of Change by John Atlas. Copyright © 2010 John Atlas. Excerpted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press.
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