Biography
Howie Hawkins has lived on South Side since moving to Syracuse in 1991. He was a supporter of the now much-missed South Side Newsstand. As a board member of the South Side Coalition, he is active in its community grocery store project.
Howie was the Green Party candidate for Mayor of Syracuse in 2005 in a campaign that succeeded in putting the issue of public power – a city-owned power utility – on the city’s agenda.
Howie has been active in movements for peace, justice, the environment, and independent politics since the late 1960s.
A former Marine, he helped organize opposition to the Vietnam War and was a leader in the anti-apartheid movement to end US corporate investment in the system of racist labor exploitation in South Africa.
After attending Dartmouth College in the early 1970s, Howie worked in construction and helped organize a workers cooperative that specialized in energy efficiency and solar and wind installations.
He was a co-founder of the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance in 1976 and the Green Party in the US in 1984.
Howie moved to Syracuse to develop cooperatives for CommonWorks, a federation of cooperatives working for an economy that is cooperatively owned, democratically controlled, and ecologically sustainable.
Howie currently unloads trucks at UPS, where he is a member of Teamsters Local 317 and active in Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the national Teamster rank-and-file reform caucus, as well as US Labor Against the War.
Howie’s articles on politics, economics, and environmental issues have appeared in Against the Current, Green Politics, International Socialist Review, New Politics, Peace and Democracy News, Z Magazine, and other publications. He is the editor of the 2006 book, Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate.
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