69-year-old community activist with Arkansas roots is focus of new documentary

Wade Rathke marches alongside health care workers in this still from Nick Taylor’s documentary The Organizer. Rathke will be present at Saturday’s free screening of the fi lm at the Central Arkansas Library System’s Ron Robinson Theater.
Wade Rathke marches alongside health care workers in this still from Nick Taylor’s documentary The Organizer. Rathke will be present at Saturday’s free screening of the fi lm at the Central Arkansas Library System’s Ron Robinson Theater.

At 69, community activist Wade Rathke is the focus of a new documentary by directors Nick Taylor and Joey Carey. But Rathke, the founder of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), is quick to point out he’s no movie star.

While Al Gore spent much of An Inconvenient Truth and its follow-up, An Inconvenient Sequel, traveling in relative comfort, in The Organizer, Rathke rambles though Louisiana and the rest of America in an aging SUV with a broken windshield.

“A joke in my family is that the 1998 (Chevrolet) Suburban that I bought used many years ago is now a star in this documentary, and I may never be able to get rid of it,” Rathke says from his New Orleans office. “If it’s any comfort to you, to get a brake tag in Louisiana, I finally had to fix that crack about two years ago. Other than that, it looks worse because of all the rust on the top.

“We are still an organization of lower to moderate income families. It’s first-class people, but it’s not first-class travel.”

Viewers can see Rathke and his vehicle on screen Saturday at the Central Arkansas Library System’s Ron Robinson Theater, 100 River Market, in Little Rock. The event starts at 12:30 p.m., the free screening is at 1 p.m. and there’ll will be a reception afterwards with Rathke in attendance.

At its height, ACORN had nearly half a million dues paying members and engaged in activities as diverse as advocating for a living wage, cleaning up vacant lots in Philadelphia, registering voters, foreclosure mitigation, housing assistance, working to help keep utilities running in low income homes and even starting up Little Rock’s community radio station KABF in 1984.

ARKANSAS RAISED

From the way it has been reviled and praised, it’s easy to forget that ACORN has Natural State roots. The “A” in the acronym originally stood for “Arkansas,” and in 1970, Rathke says Little Rock proved to be fertile ground for activism.

“If you’re going to start up to something that might scale up to being a national organization, starting it up in California, New York or Boston, that’s death,” he laughs. “You’re walking on your knees if you’re starting something national from Boston, or New York or California … The same was true almost 50 years ago… I thought we could try to do some things in Arkansas outside of the glare, if you will.”

In Arkansas, Rathke and ACORN united people around problems such as utility rates. In addition to getting welfare recipients and the working poor united on campaigns, the organization represented a cross-section that included a wide variety of ethnic groups.

“People are expecting all Latino, all African-American,” he says. “One of the unique things, and I believe it was one of the huge strengths of the organization throughout the 38 years I worked there, was the diversity. It brought real vigor and strength to the whole thing.”

The Organizer also includes footage of Little Rock that hasn’t been seen in decades. In the 1970s, ACORN had used the Sony Betamax format to make video recordings of training sessions and the like. But the format, though widely thought superior to standard VHS videocassettes, didn’t survive.

“We backed the wrong horse on that,” Rathke says. But The Organizer’s producers made arrangements with a lab in Toronto and the Wisconsin Historical Society to have the footage digitized.

“Some of it was very moving,” Rathke says. “Gloria Wilson passed away probably more than 20 years ago [Wilson, who for many years was a member of the Little Rock Board of Directors, died in June 2006], and so it was great to see her interview and some of the other folks who aren’t with us today but were certainly key to building the organization.”

BECOMING A PARIAH

ACORN made headlines during the final 2008 presidential debate when Republican nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain warned, “We need to know the full extent of Sen. Obama’s relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

The Organizer includes footage of Glenn Beck condemning Rathke and ACORN, as well as images of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe posing as pimp seeking ACORN advice on how to run a prostitution ring without paying taxes. In the wake of O’Keefe’s 2009 videos, ACORN lost federal grants, and ended operations in 2010.

“I think we represent change,” Rathke says when asked why he believed ACORN was targeted. “One of the things that was moving to me was Dan Cantor at the very end of the film talks about the threat of an organization of lower to moderate income people might have ‘purchase on democracy’. That’s such an interesting line. Most people don’t use the word ‘purchase on democracy’ outside of Wall Street and Washington, D.C.

“They were shocked that they weren’t shown more support by the White House at that time. It turns out that sometimes justice is ‘just us.’”

While O’Keefe scored an early victory with ACORN, his later sting operations have backfired. An attempt to discredit women who have accused Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual impropriety only proved that The Washington Post reporters who covered the story checked their sources before going public.

Another incident in Rathke’s backyard led to more amusement than damning revelations against O’Keefe’s targets.

“O’Keefe is still a magic guy,” he says. “He has been involved in more ridiculous escapades ... Somehow on the right, he’s still catnip.”

The film shows then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thanking ACORN for support, but it also demonstrates how the organization’s goals often varied from those of Clinton and her husband and former Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton.

“I’ve never not run into him where you didn’t get a handshake and a hug,” Rathke says. “But what he was in 1970 is different from what he was in 1996 as president. He went a different direction, and certainly the most vivid example was his notion of ending ‘welfare as we know it.’ If anything, we needed to improve welfare for families. With children or dependents, he looked the other way.”

The organization also had issues from within, and The Organizer recounts how Rathke’s brother Dale, who was instrumental in founding ACORN, misappropriated $900,000 from 1999 to 2000 and hid it from the board. The organization’s American Express statements weren’t available to read online at the time, so it took months to discover the theft.

“It was certainly more difficult in reality than it was watching the movie,” Rathke says. “Certainly, my brother’s situation was tragic for the organization, for our family, for him personally. There’s no way to put sugar in that coffee.”

RADIO FREE ARKANSAS

Despite including these regrettable incidents, neither The Organizer nor Rathke himself seem to be looking back. Through ACORN International, Rathke teaches people organizational techniques in places such as Peru, South Korea and the United Kingdom, and he manages Little Rock’s community radio station KABF. The station still plays gospel, blues, bluegrass, jazz, rock and other genres and addresses subjects other media outlets often ignore. On Aug. 29, the station will celebrate its 34th anniversary.

“We were looking for a way to compete with money being spent against referendum issues we were raising, in fact lifeline utility rates in Little Rock in ’76,” Rathke says. “We won the election, but we watched the utilities spend several hundred thousand (dollars) in the last couple of weeks. It was very clear we could never compete with that. Noncommercial radio was a place where we could get the word out somehow. Radio is a special thing.”

Asked how and why he persists, Rathke replies:

“I came knowing this was a struggle. That’s what I’ve found from 50 years of work. There’s a sort of resilience when you know that every day is a fight. You’re not shocked. That’s the nature of opposition.”

*CORRECTION: James O’Keefe and three other men who were dressed as telephone repairmen when apprehended were arrested in New Orleans in January 2010 and charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony, at the office of United States Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat. The charges in the case were reduced from a felony to a single misdemeanor count of entering a federal building under false pretenses. O’Keefe pleaded guilty to “entering real property belonging to the United States under false pretenses.” He was sentenced to received three years of probation, a fine of $1,500 and 100 hours of community service.

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