Fred Brooks
Fred Brooks began as an ACORN canvasser in Georgia in 1979 and advanced through a series of canvass management positions, including National Canvass Co-Director, before leaving ACORN in 1990. In this interview, Fred talks about his own first days of learning how to canvass and the importance of canvassers conducting door-to-door fundraising operations in suburban neighborhoods and how that was linked to active and powerful ACORN neighborhood and city-wide operations. What cinched Fred´s own commitment to ACORN was a national action against Moon Landrieu, then Secretary of HUD under President Carter, at an event featuring Coretta Scott King. He goes into detail about the groundwork required to ¨scout turf¨ for 1500 ACORN members´ door-to-door voter registration at ACORN´s 1984 tent city in Dallas, Texas, a precursor of ACORN´s later nation-wide voter registration operations. Leaving ACORN, Fred studied for advanced degrees, serving as an Associate Professor of Social Work and continuing to relate to ACORN throughout his academic writings.