Perhaps the only thing Barack Obama and I have in common is that we were both once employed by ACORN. The commonality ends there. Obama worked for ACORN as a community organizer for three and a half years. I lasted all of two weeks. Actually, it was one week. I had to return to Canada suddenly when I learned my maternal grandfather had died. My time with ACORN was a short but pivotal chapter in my life. Indeed, it was a job offer from ACORN that precipitated me to move from Canada to the United States in 2000.
So what is ACORN? It is America’s largest organization of low and moderate income families encompassing 800 chapters in over 100 cities. Their membership is predominantly African-American. In recent years, ACORN has expanded into Canada, Mexico, Peru and Argentina. It was founded in 1970 by Wade Rathke, Gary Delgado and George Wiley in Little Rock, Arkansas. Rathke remains the organization’s Chief Organizer to this day and is now based in New Orleans. Wiley, who was Rathke’s mentor, had been the founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO).
In the late 1960s, Wiley recruited welfare mothers to storm welfare offices demanding easier eligibility rules. ACORN, with Rathke as its lead organizer, would attempt to organize a broader constituency in a similar manner but on a broader number of issues including education, housing and wages. It would do so by hiring community organizers to mobilize these communities to agitate government and business to improve their lot in life. Agitate is the operative word.
Suppose there was a vacant lot in the neighborhood that the community wanted to fix up. ACORN would send a community organizer to mobilize a group to crash a city council meeting or city planning committee meeting and noisily disrupt the proceedings. Once removed from the proceedings, the group might start piling up trash in front of city hall. If that didn’t work, the group would make its way over to the home of one of the city councilors or city planners and protest in front of their home. Call it mob rule. More often than not it has worked. So I knew what I was getting into. I rationalized the ends somehow justified the means.
So what were the circumstances that led me to leave my home and native land? In the fall of 1999, I was living in Ottawa and just had been laid off from Revenue Canada (now the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency; it is the Canadian version of the IRS). I took this economic setback as an opportunity to try to find to do what I really wanted to do. Namely engage in some kind of political work. Being a card carrying member of the New Democrat Party (NDP) at the time, I was looking for an organization with left-wing credentials. As a dual citizen of both Canada and the United States, I decided to utilize my competitive advantage and expand my search to seek opportunities south of the border.
In January 2000, I was contacted by ACORN and was invited to come down to their National Headquarters in New York City for an interview. My interview actually lasted a good part of the day. Most of it was spent out in the field with an organizer (who as I recall was pregnant). She took me to a couple of appointments she had in Brooklyn with potential new members. I remember that we paid a visit to a single mother in a public housing project. For a poor woman, she had the largest big screen TV I had ever seen. She also had the volume turned all the way up. Even if I could have understood Spanish it would have been impossible to decipher anything she actually said.
That evening, I was taken to an organizing meeting by the Working Families Party (WFP) for Hillary Rodham Clinton, who at the time was running for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. This was a high profile race as she was pitted against then New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Of course, this was before Giuliani had been diagnosed with prostrate cancer and withdrew from the race.
ACORN, along with several labor unions, founded the WFP in 1998. Under New York state law, smaller parties can endorse candidates from either the Democratic or Republican parties and thus influence the outcome of elections. This is something New York’s Conservative Party has also done with great success. Mrs. Clinton would receive more than 100,000 votes on the Working Families Party ticket that November.
I was advised there were no openings in New York but was asked if there was anywhere else in the country I might be interested in working. On this I had no particular fixation one way or the other. But I did make a point of mentioning that my parents had visited Boston the previous summer and they had quite liked it. As it turned out, the Boston chapter of ACORN was planning to field a candidate to challenge then Massachusetts House of Representatives Speaker Tom Finneran for his seat in the House. Finneran, a fiscally conservative Democrat, was deeply unpopular in the African American community in the Boston neighborhoods of Dorchester and Mattapan where Finneran held his seat. Given my campaign experience with the NDP, it was thought Boston might be a good fit. The following day I was given the good news. Thereby prompting my departure from a country I had called home for more than a quarter century. I had hoped to remain in Canada if I could. Shortly before my ACORN interview, I had two interviews with two NDP Members of Parliament. Had either of them opted to hire me I would have remained in Ottawa. Alas neither did. So I went where I was wanted.
Since I had a couple of months to make all the necessary arrangements, I took it upon myself to do as much reading about ACORN as possible. One of ACORN’s co-founders, Gary Delgado, had written a book about it in 1986 titled Organizing the Movement: The Roots & Growth of ACORN. I knew that ACORN organizers did not earn much money receiving an annual salary of $16,000. To collect that salary, organizers work 55 hours a week including a half day on Saturday. Ostensibly this would help organizers more effectively sympathize with the constituencies they were mobilizing. What I did not know at the time was that ACORN in California had sued to get itself exempt from state minimum wage law so it could hire more organizers. A California court rejected ACORN’s petition as did the appellate courts.
Within minutes of my first day at work I knew something was horribly amiss. When I walked into the office in Dorchester no one had remembered that I was supposed to start that day. It wasn’t like I had just walked in off the street. Not only I had been in touch with the ACORN office in Boston by phone prior to my move but I even visited the office with my father a few days earlier. I tried to reassure myself that this was just a simple oversight as I walked to the Radio Shack down the street to pick up some electronic equipment they needed.
ACORN had a seven step organizational method called “The Rap.” It was a process you had to memorize and repeat over and over again. If you missed a step you would be yelled at and told that you were doing everything wrong. It was as if they were trying to break me. This criticism would be repeated in the field if one was not successful in gaining a new member. “So what did you do wrong this time?” was a question I was often asked after leaving yet another home empty handed. At other times I would be told, “You just didn’t want it enough.” It was the closest thing I think ever experienced to being in a cult and I didn’t like it one bit.
In all fairness, this treatment was meted out by the organizers who were nearly all white (the only African American who worked there full time was with ACORN Housing which is technically a separate entity from ACORN). The members, who were almost entirely African American, were very nice and down to earth. I felt badly that I would have to spend evenings calling these members and to tell them each of the 642 things ACORN was doing at that moment in time. Of course, I am overstating. But there were usually seven or eight things we were required to tell members each night. The human ear can only absorb one or two things at a time especially if one is trying to sit down to dinner and spend time with family.
In fact, I remember during a staff meeting that we were being collectively admonished for not recruiting enough members to go to an upcoming ACORN meeting in Philadelphia. I pointed out the Philadelphia meeting was the last or next to last item on our list. If the convention was so important why not make it the first or second item on the list? My candor was not appreciated.
One of the mantras that other ACORN organizers would emphasize was “ACORN is run by the members” or “ACORN belongs to the members.” In retrospect, I wonder if the other organizers weren’t trying to convince themselves of that as much as they were trying to convince me.
Enter Willie Mae O’Neal. She was a 65-year-old grandmother that ACORN was supporting to unseat Tom Finneran. I met her once. She seemed nice enough but didn’t strike me as someone who was formidable to put up much of a fight much less take down a political giant. But that would have been fine if the ACORN members had been behind her. I’ve been involved in enough NDP campaigns where the candidate finished a distant third but for whom the membership had gone the extra mile. Unfortunately for O’Neal, nearly every time I mentioned her name an ACORN member I received a negative reaction. Some I spoke to said they would vote for Finneran. Not good.
If ACORN was, in fact, run by the members there was no way in hell O’Neal’s challenge would get off the ground floor. I pointed this out to the other organizers but they didn’t want to hear it, especially from me. Sure I could understand veteran organizers being told what to do by the new kid on the block. But I thought they had hired me because of my previous political experience and thought that giving them direct feedback from the membership was pertinent. Needless to say, there was a lot of tension and I was under a great deal of stress. I wondered how I found myself in this pickle jar and how I was going to extricate myself from it. I managed to do under the saddest of circumstances.
As mentioned earlier, in the midst of all this my grandfather had passed away. He had been ill for some time but his death still came as a shock. I am ashamed to admit that as sad as I was at his passing I was relieved to get away from Boston for a few days. Quite frankly, I was not sure I wanted to come back. But I knew I had to eventually.
I returned to Boston on a Sunday. After a 9 hour bus trip from Ottawa to Montreal to Boston, I was not ready to return for 10 hours of work the following day. As it turned out the following day was Patriots Day. Observed only in Massachusetts and Maine, it marks the shots fired at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1774 which started the American Revolution. In the present, Patriots Day means the Boston Marathon and an 11 a.m. game for the Boston Red Sox. Yes, it was that day that I attended my first game (of what has turned out to be many) at Fenway Park. The Sox played the Oakland Athletics and lost 1-0. I was absolutely freezing in my sports jacket but enjoyed every minute of it.
The following day I went back to work. I lasted half the day. It was just more of the same. Reciting the rap and being told I wasn’t doing anything right. When an organizer tried to make me do the rap in the car following a visit to an ACORN member, I told him enough. He promptly drove me to a T stop in Quincy and dropped me off. Thus ended my association with ACORN with little lament and no regret. Fortunately for me I managed to find another job within three weeks.
I was still a man of the Left at this point. The tragic events of September 11, 2001 that would shatter my allegiance were another 16 months away. Yet I think the episode with ACORN would leave cracks in the foundation. There was a considerable gap between rhetoric and reality. There was a considerable disconnect between the black membership and the white organizers. ACORN was all for a living wage as long as they didn’t have to pay one to its employees. ACORN was all for a better world but had no room for improvement. Some lessons can only be learned the hard way.
But it wasn’t all bad. More than eight years have passed and I still live and work in Boston. I still go to Red Sox games. I’ve been here for three Super Bowl Championships and two World Series and I could have the chance to be here for the Celtics to win the NBA Finals. I walk to Cambridge on a regular basis and go to Walden Pond three or four times a year. Two weeks at ACORN has been a relatively small price to pay.
But four years of an Obama White House would be considerably more costly especially if ACORN is standing guard outside the Oval Office.
Aaron Goldstein was a card carrying member of the socialist New Democratic Party of Canada (NDP). Since 09/11, Aaron has reconsidered his ideological inclinations and has become a Republican. Aaron lives and works in Boston.
