Howie Hawkins - Early Political Activism

Early Political Activism

Hawkins knew he wanted a third party to support by age 11 in 1964, decrying both major parties as racist; the Republicans, with Ronald Reagan as their spokesman, campaigned to repeal California’s Rumsford fair housing law, while the Democratic National Convention seated as voting delegates the segregationist Dixiecrats from Mississippi instead of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

The Democrats’ Lyndon Johnson won as the "peace candidate" in 1964, but then escalated the war in Vietnam. Though federal civil rights and voting rights acts passed in 1964 and 1965, Hawkins felt Johnson’s "Great Society" policies were sacrificed to the war. So when the Peace and Freedom Party was formed in late 1967 to end US intervention in Vietnam and fight poverty and racism, Hawkins supported the registration drive to put it on the ballot; Ironically, Hawkins himself, then 15, wouldn’t be able to vote for another six years because the law then stated one had to be 21 in order to vote.

Hawkins also participated in the peace, justice, and environmental movements and demonstrations in the Bay Area in his high school years, including Stop the Draft Week in October 1967, the San Francisco State Strike in 1968-69, People’s Park in Berkeley in 1969, the first Earth Day and the nationwide anti-war student strike in 1970, and Black Panther Party proposal for community control of the police in Berkeley, California in 1971.

During his first year at Dartmouth, college draft deferments were eliminated, and his draft number was called in July 1972. He immediately enlisted in an off-campus Marine officer-training program before the Army’s draft letter reached him so he could continue his studies. But after a summer of officer training at Quantico in 1974, Hawkins informed the Marines that he did not have the funds for his last two years of college. Since he could not meet the college degree requirement needed to take an officer‘s commission upon graduation, he told the Marines he was ready to serve as a regular enlistee for the two years of active duty that he was obligated to serve under his enlistment contract. The Marines never ordered him back to active duty, however.

While waiting for orders to report to active duty, Hawkins remained active in the anti-war movement, and became active in the anti-nuclear and the anti-apartheid movements as well. He helped form the People’s Energy Project New Hampshire in 1974 to fight the proposed Seabrook nuclear power plant, and then the New England-wide Clamshell Alliance in 1976 to organize occupations of the Seabrook nuclear plant site.

After the Soweto riots in South Africa in 1976, he co-founded the Upper Valley Committee for a Free Southern Africa, helped to form the Northeast Coalition for the Liberation of Southern Africa in 1978, and represented New England on the national anti-apartheid Call to Conscience coordinating committee in the early 1980s.

Hawkins led several campaigns to link corporate exploitation in South Africa and the US, including domestic redlining by banks lending to South Africa and labor abuse by Phelps Dodge in Namibia and Arizona.

In 1978, Hawkins co-founded a construction workers cooperative that specialized in energy efficiency and solar and wind installations. He also worked with students at Dartmouth to form a New Hampshire Public Interest Research Group in 1975. In 1976-77, Hawkins returned to Dartmouth for his last year of studies, where he completed all the requirements for graduation except learning a foreign language. He speaks the Polynesian language of Tonga, where he lived for three months in 1973, but it was not recognized by Dartmouth.

In 1984, Hawkins organized fellow carpenters to put up a pre-fabricated shanty town in minutes on the College Green at Dartmouth despite promised resistance from security. Students then occupied the shanty-town, instigating a nationwide wave of similar protests that led to many college portfolio divestments of Apartheid-linked securities.