ShareThisBy DIANA NELSON JONES
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Denise Johnson was recruited from a $5-an-hour job at McDonald's last winter to become a community organizer for ACORN at $8 an hour.
In Pittsburgh, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now employs four full-time organizers whose ranks swell to 20 in the weeks before elections.
"I want people to know they can do something to make a change," Johnson said. For starters, "I want them to vote. Politicians only work for people who vote."
During her door-knocking _ as many as 50 doors a day _ she asks everyone who answers, "Are you registered?"
If she gets an off-hand "yeah," she cocks her head and says, "Are you? Did you vote in the last election? Are you voting this time?"
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
"OK," she challenges, "I'll be looking for you at the polls."
ACORN is a network of chapters in 118 U.S. cities and several countries. It was founded in Arkansas in 1970 on the principle that people in poor neighborhoods have as much right to assert their will on public policy as do power brokers and their minions.
Members own the association through dues; the group also holds fund-raisers.
ACORN has rallied for minimum-wage increases and holds neighborhood cleanups. Its staff advises residents on topics from predatory lending to crime prevention. IRS-trained staffers prepare members' taxes at no cost. Commercial development and crime prevention lead the list of its members' goals.
Johnson, 47, has a husky voice that cuts out on her sometimes, and she winced at being singled out for a story. Nobody at ACORN is more important than anybody else, she said. But when people appear in their doorways and stare at her, she plows right in, ebullient with spiel, one part practiced, one part win-'em-over.
"Our goals are going to be met," she said. "We're going to do this thing with everybody's help."
She came to community organizing with the persistence of someone who can't bear losing ground. A mother of six and a licensed manicurist, she worked in hotel housekeeping before taking the job at McDonald's.
"I believe there's a born leader in everyone," she said. "This is the first job I've ever really loved, that I felt God sent to me. And I think Homewood is a beautiful place because it believed in me. I want to show my kids my strength."
One of her favorite questions to people she meets is, "If Ed Rendell was standing at your door, what would you tell him?" The answer, invariably, is, "Do something about all the guns."
"I tell kids (on the streets) that guns don't make them men. God gives us choices and consequences. You have to do the next right thing. The system does not have to adjust to you; you have to adjust to it. It's uncomfortable, but it's a beautiful world out there, and I want everyone to get it."
On a chilly and tranquil afternoon, Edward Blair answered the door of a ship-shape home with flowerbeds around the edges of the postage stamp yard he tends. Across the street, a row of abandoned houses stares back.
He stood on his porch and listened kindly to Johnson before shaking his head, saying he's been there. "I started in block clubs when I was 25. I used to be secretary of the Young Colored Democrats of Allegheny County. We fought those fights, when they were redlining and the city ran people out of the Hill.
"Now parents aren't educating their kids. We've lost two generations and I don't know how we're going to get the next one going."
"Do you vote?" she asked.
"On time, every time," he said.
At her urging for his involvement, Blair said, "I'm 78 and I'm tired."
"Then show me the way to go," she said.
"Today, I don't even know the road."
Back in the car, Johnson repeated some of Mr. Blair's statements and said with grudging admiration, "He kept it real, didn't he?" She chuckled. "'I've done that, it's your turn.'"
She had better luck with Joe Glenn, an old friend she persuaded to join in August.
"It didn't take me long to say yes," he said, "because she is very adamant. ACORN has rekindled a spirit in me that was there when I was a young man in the '60s."
