"We were all revolutionaries," Lewis said of her coming-of-age in the late 1960s. "I thought that's how you did the revolution: you did musicals."

She graduated from high school in 1968, and went to Hanover College, in Hanover, Ind., for two years before returning to Philadelphia where she got a job at the phone company and gave birth to a son. (She's now a grandmother of two).

In the early 1970s, she decided to move to New York to pursue her theater interests. Lewis transferred to the New York branch of the phone company, and began volunteering at a 72-seat theater in midtown Manhattan called Theater Off Park.

Lewis did whatever needed to be done, including selling candy and ushering. When the theater's owner passed away, Lewis took over, quitting her phone company job to produce plays.

Urban Homesteader

Around the same time, a colleague told Lewis about a rundown apartment building in the South Bronx, being rented to "urban homesteaders," who paid low rent in exchange for working to fix up the apartments themselves.

It was the early 1980s, and the South Bronx was rife with crime and littered with empty buildings. This particular building lacked basics like heat and plumbing, and had become a kind of artist's cooperative, with creative neighbors bartering skills to help each other with their apartments.

Lewis moved in and learned to install plumbing and sweat pipe. "We were insane, but we were very earnest," she said.

The group soon found out that the "landlord" who had leased them the apartments, and to whom they had been paying rent, didn't own the building. The group formed their own tenants' association and entered a program to buy the apartment from the city.

Community Organizer

The Bronx tenants' group had almost completed the process in 1986, when Lewis got a phone call at the theater from her neighbor saying there were men at the apartment building with guns.

"I left the theater and literally never went back," Lewis said.

The men were speculators, who had purchased the building from the city, assuming it was abandoned. "They never bothered to come in, they didn't know," Lewis said. "They pulled up with guns, and said 'That's it, get out.'"

The tenants stayed.

It was the beginning of a seven-year battle that turned Lewis into a community organizer.

Lewis quit the theater to lead the fight against the developers, living off $5,000 she'd received in an inheritance.

She visited community groups, asking for help, and finally found it with an organizer named Nelson Rodriguez at Banana Kelly, a South Bronx community group that advocates home ownership and education. Even though the group was technically outside of Banana Kelly's geographic area, "Nelson would sneak over and give us advice," Lewis said. "He began to organize us."

Lewis enlisted the help of Legal Aid lawyers to stave off evictions. When the group lost a particular court battle, members would barricade themselves inside the building, relying on a nearby church to deliver food.

By the late 1980s, repeated losses had hit the group hard, and as their struggle wound down, Lewis had to look for a job. Rodriguez asked her if she was interested in becoming a community organizer.

"What's that?" she queried.

Lewis went to work for Banana Kelly. But after her personal struggle over her home, Lewis found working with youth groups and on anti-drug campaigns too tame.

Lewis decided to move to Greensboro, N.C., to be close to her sister. She worked part time and went to community college, thinking she might go to law school.

ACORN

After a year and a half in Greensboro, a friend told her a group called ACORN was hiring community organizers in Brooklyn. When Lewis arrived at ACORN's offices and saw organizers working phone banks and planning marches and protests, she thought, "This is where I need to be."

Lewis joined ACORN in 1992 as a counselor to first-time home buyers. In 1995, she became the head of its housing-development unit.

Lewis worked with banks to determine if those interested in buying homes could truly afford loans, and offered advice to those who were rejected. Lewis "helped to negotiate landmark agreements with major banks under the Community Reinvestment Act," Politico reported.

In 1996, Lewis became the head organizer for ACORN in Brooklyn, and in late 1997, she became the group's executive director for New York state.

ACORN Embezzlement Scandal

On Memorial Day weekend 2008, a letter from a whistle-blower forced ACORN founder Wade Rathke to announce to ACORN's national staff that, eight years earlier, his brother Dale had embezzled $948,657.50 from the organization.

Rathke had decided to keep the issue a "family matter," Lewis said, and had only told a handful of top-level ACORN officials about the breach. Dale Rathke paid the money back and stayed at the organization as his brother's assistant.

"This dropped like a bomb. That room exploded," remembered Lewis, who said she had been unaware of the embezzlement.

Dale Rathke was fired; Wade Rathke was forced to step down from day-to-day operations. Lewis became head of a committee formed to run ACORN's daily operations while the board found a replacement.

Lewis said the group was preparing a media announcement when the New York Times broke the story in July 2008.

Shortly afterwards, Lewis was appointed the interim leader of ACORN. "I was clean, and I was competent," she said of why she was chosen. "I was as outraged as any member was."

In October 2008, the board named Lewis as ACORN's chief organizer and expanded the position to include a CEO title. Lewis was charged with investigating the scandal and restructuring the organization to ensure it could not happen again. She tried to continue daily operations as the scandal caused funders to flee.

"We were under the microscope like you wouldn't believe," she said. "But we were still doing the work."

Voter Fraud Accusations and Obama Connections

Fall 2008 offered little relief from the scrutiny. Conservatives tied the beleaguered organization to then-Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, who is a former community organizer.

As a young organizer in Chicago, Obama had spoken to an ACORN group, and as a young lawyer he had worked on a case defending a group of community advocacy organizations, ACORN among them.

Lewis called the connections tangential, and blames her organization for being nave. "We didn't catch that the theme of the [2008 GOP nominee John] McCain campaign and the Republicans was anti-community organizer," she said.

In the wake of the embezzlement scandal, Obama's rivals brought up old and new charges of voter fraud. "You just combine those two together, you've got a very toxic soup," Lewis said.

ACORN admitted that some of its volunteers had submitted fake or duplicate voter registrations to state boards in Colorado, Indiana, Nevada and North Carolina, but said they represented a tiny fraction of the 1.3 million new voters the group had registered in the 2008 election cycle.

Lewis pointed out that ACORN did not organize any specific get-out-the vote efforts for Obama and has not been a key player in his administration. "You don't see us running in and out of the White House," she said.

But the GOP's attack on ACORN had the upshot of increasing the organization's profile. "In a way being recognized as a worthy target by the right validated what we've been doing for years and years," she said, noting that the organization's name is now recognized, for better or for worse, in 80 percent of American households.

2009 Hidden Camera Scandal

ACORN found itself in political trouble once again in September 2009. A young couple with a hidden camera entered ACORN offices in three cities posing as a pimp and prostitute who wanted to get a mortgage for a house to be used as a brothel. Many of the ACORN employees advised them on getting a mortgage or even hiding their illegal activites, though most later said they were simply playing along, not fooled by the pair's "ridiculous" costumes.

When the videos were released, at least four ACORN employees in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., were fired, and Lewis announced an internal probe and ordered all staff to receive more training.

But ACORN seemed to have lost a layer of political protection. Even Obama spokeman Robert Gibbs fired at ACORN, saying, "the conduct that you see on those tapes is completely unacceptable."

President Obama and Republicans called for an official Justice Department investigation of ACORN. Lewis herself said the group would nominate an independent authority to investigate the activities; she also said that ACORN wouldn't accept new people into its low-income housing program until an outside review is complete.

The Senate blocked any grants to the organization from the Housing and Urban Development Department, and the Census Bureau, which had recruited ACORN to help with the 2010 head count, severed all ties with the group.

On Sept. 17, 2009, the House voted, 345 to 75, to bar all federal funds from going to ACORN.

Though courts would later rule that vote unconstitutional, it proved to be a death-blow for the organization. ACORN announced it would disband in March 2010.

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