Esquire has an interview with ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis:
I called ACORN to get a response from Bertha Lewis, the group’s CEO. “I don’t think the conservative right will ever be satisfied,” she told me. “They’re not going to stop because they’re raising money on us every day — we’re a nice, simple convenient bogeyman.”
Still, Lewis seemed almost shell-shocked: “We can’t understand this obsession, and the vehemence. They just make up something and keep repeating it over and over — yesterday, I’m cleaning my house and I get a call, someone from my office saying ‘This guy from Breitbart is going crazy saying you were in the White House!’ Apparently some woman named Bertha Lewis visited the White House in September, so automatically they assumed — but it wasn’t me.”
Lewis says the trouble started in 2000, when ACORN began to register massive numbers of voters. “If we had been a nice little community group that maybe registered a couple thousand people, there would not be this furor.” Often, ACORN registered those voters around explicitly progressive issues. “In 2000, we registered almost a million people in Florida around raising the minimum wage,” she notes.
ACORN also became aggressive about fighting voter suppression. “They were doing it very unabashedly,” Lewis told me. “You go to the poll and you’re not on record, your name’s not on the rolls, you didn’t re-register, you didn’t vote in this last election cycle, you used to be a felon. Voter lists were purged and folks were turned away or asked for multiple forms of identification. It was all about suppressing black and brown and poor votes.”
Read the whole article here.
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