ACORN 8: Race, Power & Politics Memoirs of an ACORN Whistleblower by Michael McCray

For several decades, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) ran campaigns across the nation seeking fair, affordable, safe housing and other desirable social justice goals for the dispossessed. The group’s style tended toward the confrontational, making demands of powerful corporations and government agencies until change occurred, city by city, state by state. Michael McCray, a certified public accountant and lawyer, became deeply involved as an ACORN national board member. What he saw and heard shocked him, so he became a whistleblower, a role he had previously assumed as U.S. Department of Agriculture employee. His whistleblowing there had cost him his job, but had not dulled his desire to set wrongs right. While ACORN 8: Race, Power & Politics—Memoirs of an ACORN Whistleblower as told by Marcel Reid features Reid’s whistleblowing prominently, the book is primarily McCray’s story, not Reid’s. Marcel Reid is an African American woman who became an ACORN national board member before McCray and fought what she saw as Caucasian paid-staff domination at the top, with the members viewed as dispensable and interchangeable. The book’s villain is Wade Rathke, a brilliant Caucasian community organizer with roots in Little Rock and New Orleans. McCray, Reid and other ACORN members allege that Rathke and his inner circle, including family members, ran the organization as a dictatorship, for power and monetary enrichment. The book also addresses the subject of the massive Service Employees International Union (SEIU), with McCray alleging that union leadership took advantage of ACORN members through an arrangement with Rathke. While McCray covers the rise and fall of a fascinating organization, yet another strand involves the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign, as McCray and other ACORN members work on behalf of Hillary Clinton against Barack Obama.