Susan Ritacca
Susan Ritacca was an ACORN member in Chicago from 2006 2009. In this interview, she talks about being trained as an organizer by Ellyson Carter, a former marine who she describes as having a hard exterior but a soft sweet soul. She discusses going on to be a lead organizer on Chicago’s south and west sides. Susan was raised in Highwood, a north suburb of Chicago with a strong Italian migrant community. Her father was a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps type, influenced by his Roman Catholic upbringing, but his experiences as an immigrant gave him a strong drive to help those less fortunate. He was not necessarily political, but he had a deep humanist streak. As an organizer, she would go door-to-door through Englewood, gathering residents feelings on city-wide and local issues from speed bumps to neighborhood violence. Early on, she was active in the living wage campaign, and 60 hour work weeks were the norm. She was inspired by ACORN’s work of empowering community members, mostly women of color, to become leaders. In her first year, she worked tirelessly to organize a town hall at Kennedy King College with aggressive phone banking to build attendance. Many community leaders were born out of that event, including Toni Foulkes, who went on to be an alderwoman. The town hall also exposed the mortgage lending crisis that was decimating the community. Adjustable rate mortgages were being bought and sold by banks so quickly that loan holders were unable to get lenders on the phones to refinance or handle any other business. People were losing their homes. After Kennedy King, Susan went on to become a lead organizer and became heavily involved in organizing against predatory lenders. She was an integral part of creating a Chicago-based model of an innovative program in Philadelphia that required lenders to make themselves accountable to loan-holders. Later when ACORN would begin its transition to Action Now, Ritacca helped gather votes from members to decide whether to make the change. She said the members were “pretty much” unanimous. She explains, ACORN was never about one person, it was about the organization and what was best for it. She says she got a world class education with ACORN, from people like Mildred Simpson, Ellyson Carter and Madeline Talbott, and that when she later became a lawyer, her experience at ACORN informed her career trajectory as she went on to work in areas of civic justice.