A woman carrying a clipboard knocks on a door in Park Heights. Her pitch is direct: "I'm Michelle from ACORN. We're fighting for change in the neighborhood. I wanted to know what you want to see changed."
The owner, who has lived in this well-worn rowhouse on Shirley Avenue for 50 years, lets her inside. Soon, Michelle Moore is talking rapid-fire about trash piles and abandoned properties and how elected officials would never allow this sort of thing to happen in stately Roland Park.
"Do you want to be part of a group that's organizing to do something about this?" Moore asks.
Door-knocking in poor neighborhoods, the signature activity of the grass-roots Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has changed little since the national nonprofit sent one of its professional organizers to Baltimore to start a Maryland chapter.
Ten years later, this "union for working families" has 6,000 dues-paying members and can take credit for helping reshape the Baltimore City Council, pressing city leaders on urban issues and giving a loud voice to people who had never been involved in politics.
"We work with people who most organizations don't want to work with, and we work in neighborhoods that most organizations don't want to work in," said Stuart Katzenberg, the leader of Maryland's chapter.
But nationally and locally, ACORN has always struggled to makes ends meet, and its in-your-face tactics have alienated many lawmakers, even in Democrat-dominated Maryland. Its nationwide voter registration efforts in urban, heavily Democratic areas have made it a target of Republicans, and it has faced criticism for bad bookkeeping and potentially improper relationships among its many affiliates, some of which are required by law to remain nonpartisan.
Against that backdrop, a baby-faced 25-year-old filmmaker dressed as a caricature of a pimp has imperiled the 40-year-old social justice organization.
James O'Keefe, and Hannah Giles, 20, secretly recorded conversations at ACORN offices across the country while posing as a pimp and a scantily clad prostitute. They captured employees casually dispensing advice on how to avoid paying taxes, how to set up a brothel and how to claim underage South American sex workers as dependents. Five videos have come out so far. The first, released Sept. 10, was recorded in Baltimore. The two part-time employees caught on that video, as well as two in Washington, have been fired.
