counter-intelligence unit for the U.S. Army's Manhattan Project during World War II. He became politically active at the age of 12, when he saw how the multiracial Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was denied recognition at the 1964 Democratic Convention. After high school, Hawkins attended Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He was never granted a degree because he did not complete the foreign language requirement. While at Dartmouth, he founded the Dartmouth Radical Union which opposed Dartmouth's investment in corporations that supported, among other causes, apartheid in South Africa and the Vietnam War. Despite his anti-war activism, he joined the Marine Corps after being drafted in 1972. He was never ordered back to active duty after completing boot camp. That same year Hawkins campaigned for Bernie Sanders, then the Liberty Union Party candidate for senate and governor of Vermont. In 1973, Hawkins joined Socialist Party USA, a membership which has continued to the present day. In 1976, Hawkins was one of the co-founders of the Clamshell Alliance which was an anti-nuclear power organization aimed at stopping its use in New England. Green Party In the 1980s Hawkins joined the green movement. In 1988, he and Murray Bookchin founded the Left Green Network "as a radical alternative to U.S. Green liberals", based around the principles of social ecology and libertarian municipalism. In the early 1990s a press conference was held in Washington, D.C., that featured Charles Betz, Joni Whitmore, Hilda Mason, and Howie Hawkins to announce the formation of the Greens/Green Party USA. Later in December 1999, Mike Feinstein and Hawkins wrote the Plan for a Single National Green Party which was the plan to organize the ASGP and GPUSA into a single Green Party. A perennial candidate, Hawkins ran in multiple New York Senate and House races. In 2010 he surpassed the 50,000 vote requirement to stay on the ballot in the gubernatorial election and four years later he received enough to move the Green Party line to Row D as he had taken one-third more than the Working Families Party and twice as much as the Independence Party. However, in 2018 he lost 80,000 votes, but retained ballot access and was only lowered one row down to Row E. In 2012 Hawkins was approached over the possibility of running for the Green Party nomination, but declined due to his employment commitments at UPS forcing him to campaign for offices in