Many Americans first heard of ACORN when the nonprofit activist group became a whipping boy for Andrew Breitbart, Fox News, and Republicans in 2009. Founded by Wade Rathke in the 1970s as a network of community activists coalescing into a nationwide force to fight systemic poverty and unfair housing, ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) had a proven grand strategy. Building on successes with progressive campaigns in individual cities and states, Rathke brought the leaders of those regional movements into a kind of high command to steer national policy on behalf of the powerless and impoverished.
As we see in Nick Taylor’s fine documentary The Organizer, the plan worked very well, giving heft, for example, to populist demands that all of New Orleans be rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina, rather than omit communities traditionally and inconveniently awash in poverty. ACORN was taken with increasing seriousness by U.S. politicians as well, as we see in several archival clips, including high praise from then-Vice President Al Gore in the 1990s. But as Taylor shows us through extensive interviews and other materials, while ACORN was growing, rancor and opposition was developing internally over the concentration of power and resources at the top. Many dues-paying ACORN members went back to working in their local communities under new auspices.
These changes made ACORN vulnerable to attacks from the right, which branded the group anti-American. In time, ACORN collapsed, yet some of the richest footage in The Organizer was shot after that demise. We see a great deal of the late Rathke in interviews, leading workshops, and globetrotting as the leader of ACORN International, a new organization applying the lessons of ACORN to new activism in Africa, Asia and South America. This is an eye-opening yet well-rounded film portrait of ACORN when it was at its peak and then was demonized by those who profited from slander. Strongly recommended. I, J, H, C, P.