New Orleans       Just plain luck found me in a series of meetings in California’s East Bay in Oakland and Berkeley at the same time there was a special one-night showing of American Agitator about Fred Ross and to some degree his son, Fred Ross, Jr. I was excited to go and convinced Charles Koppelman, a documentarian who had done Squatters:  The Philadelphia Story about ACORN’s housing campaign years ago and contributed to The Organizer more recently, to join me there.  I only met Ross senior one time briefly in the late 60’s and knew Ross junior better as our paths crossed when he ran Neighbor-to-Neighbor and elsewhere.  I knew making this documentary had been a major project for junior before he passed away, so I was pleased to know, as hard as it is to get our work front and center, that they had been able to get this done.

In the ACORN lexicon of people who influenced the development of our organizing model, Fred Ross is near the top of the long list.  Although many always assume Saul Alinksy might have mattered more, that’s not the case, far from it.  Ross and his work with the Community Service Organization in California and the development of the United Farm Workers Union were very important to us.  His dependence on “house meetings”, as a fundamental building block for community and labor organizations, was the model for the organizing committee meetings which have always been at the heart of our work.  The fact that he worked in the development of membership-based formations, and especially the ability that Ross and Cesear Chavez placed on member’s willingness to pay dues, regardless of income, because of their commitment to the organization, gave support for the crazy idea that we could build a membership organization in ACORN.

All of which totally disqualifies me as an objective reviewer of the movie. Being too much a charter member of the Fred Ross fan club, my expectations and hopes for a movie about his work were bound to be too high and disappointed.  I wanted the story of the many visits he made looking for Cesar Chavez before he got him on board to building CSO.  The CSO role in electing Roybal as the first Mexican-American in the Los Angeles city council, and how he weaponized voter registration to make that happen was touched on, but I wanted much, much more.  Alinksy’s chief organizer, Nicholas von Hoffman famously said after a huge voter registration campaign for a Chicago election something on the order of, “is this all there is,” moving him to leave organizing. How was Ross’ experience different and so essential? His experience helped ACORN decide to embrace politics as our members demanded. I wanted to see something about his role in organizing the grape boycott. I wanted more about his role as advisor and frequent firefighter on call as an organizer for Chavez and the UFW. I wanted more on the divide between him, Alinsky, and the IAF.  I even wanted an answer to the deep mystery about what ever happened to the book about organizing that Ross promised he was writing, but no one has ever seen?  Was it a mirage?  The axioms are interesting, and an updated version was given out as people walked into the Rialto to see the movie, but that just wets the whistle – was there more, or was this on a list left undone?  Even when it came to Fred, Jr, I wanted to understand more about how door to door canvassing that was at the heart of the N2N operation.  How did it work for building organization as opposed to mobilization and fundraising?  Did junior figure that out?

So, that would have been my Ross movie, a deep excavation of his work as a seminal organizer in our craft, rather than as an agitator, so I had set myself up for a fall, which is unfair to the documentary.  It’s worth seeing just for so many who know nothing about Ross.  The footage on Japanese interment camps and the dust bowl migrant camps is historically moving and important, although just passages on the way to Ross and his real work.  I know people who have already seen it multiple times, and that’s a hearty endorsement in our time of limited attention spans and worth following and putting you in the ticket line, if you have any chance to see it at all. The showing in Berkely was meant to prime the pump for theatrical releases around the country.  Let’s all hope it succeeds!