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Get hit by one acorn and you barely feel it. Get hit by several dozen at one time and it’s “Ouch!”

Mark Stewart was feeling the pain in 1979. A crowd of protesters from Carolina Action, a community-organizing group in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods, trapped Stewart in his office in the old courthouse, where he was Guilford County register of deeds.

Carolina Action accused Stewart of using his office to acquire rental properties for himself in low-income areas.

Since Stewart’s election in 1964, the group contended, he had acquired 46 of the 47 properties he owned, valued at $850,000. Carolina Action claimed Stewart failed to maintain his properties, including four vacant lots.

Stewart denied he had done anything wrong. He said some properties were inherited. The group’s raid on his office got plenty of press and TV coverage.

From the mid-1970s to about 1982, Carolina Action seemed everywhere in Greensboro. It held press conferences and rallies to demand an elected school board and a district system for electing City Council. It held voter-registration drives. It fought proposed electricity rate and bus fare increases by Duke Power, which operated the bus system then. It took busloads of members to Raleigh to protest the state placing motorists in an assigned risk pool that meant higher premiums.

Most in Greensboro assumed Carolina Action was part of a statewide group formed in Durham in 1974, with chapters there and in Greensboro, Raleigh and Charlotte.

It did indeed start as a statewide group, but little known to the public, it became affiliated in 1978 with a national group, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, founded in 1970. The national ACORN office is now under federal investigation for alleged voter fraud, misuse of federal funds and corruption.

Carolina Action introduced to Greensboro in-your-face protesting, such as overrunning Stewart’s office. It sent City Council member Lois McManus a snake. “I hate snakes,” McManus says now. The group said the snake was caught on a vacant lot the city had failed to maintain.

John Forbis, then a council member and later mayor, got a wake-up call from Carolina Action one morning.

“My wife had the flu and about 6 o’clock, a group from Carolina Action was on my lawn singing protest songs,’’ he says. “I went down and told them my wife was sick and would they please not make any noise.”

They quit singing but continued to protest, silently.

Carolina Action claimed about 340 Greensboro households organized in neighborhoods such as White Oak, Glenwood and Pomona.

The membership was aided by two meagerly paid young idealists just out of college. They worked long hours from a small office on North Elm Street.

At election time, the group sponsored candidate forums, the likes of which had never been seen here before or since. Members infuriated candidates by demanding yes or no answers. If a candidate tried to sneak in a nuance, a Carolina Action member at a blackboard chalked “runaround.”

By 1981, Carolina Action’s paid staff was gone and neighborhood groups became inactive. One of the young organizers said America’s youth had grown conservative and apathetic, and Carolina Action was having trouble finding recruits willing to work hard for low wages.

By then, some members were ready to say good riddance. A Glenwood group was formed to counter the group. The opposition claimed Carolina Action hurt Glenwood’s image by constantly portraying it as rundown and undesirable.

Ann Nicholson, who headed Carolina Action’s Pomona chapter resigned. She said in 1982 the group was “a fantastic organization” that accomplished much, “but I tend to be an old country girl who believes in the old adage, 'You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.’ Carolina Action tended to go for the jugular. It was too confrontational for me.”

City leaders complained the group took credit for the many reforms that were really the work of others, such as having an elected school board and a district system for the City Council, that others had been working on those issues before the group arrived.

Carolina Action is back in North Carolina in a sense, under the ACORN name, led by a former Carolina Action organizer, Pat McCoy, who started with an office in Raleigh in 2005 and now has them in Durham and Charlotte.

News stories list Greensboro as having an office, too; McCoy says he plans to open one here.

“I began my career in community organizing with Carolina Action in 1977,” McCoy says. “It was a very effective group.’’

Money may be a problem. ACORN recently laid off all eight of its North Carolina organizers, although some now work for free.

McCoy says the North Carolina operation has been clean from the start, but suffers from national ACORN problems. The scandals have hurt fund-raising and caused a cut-off of federal money.

As for Mark Stewart, he was ousted in the 1980 election after 16 years in office.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net