Green Party Organizing Committee – Boston, 1991

The Green Party Organizing Committee (GPOC) met in Boston in February 1991. Convinced that the growing fervor for a Green political party necessitated organizational structures that embraced it, they sought a new national structure balancing electoral and non-electoral movement work and strategies. This meant altering the power structure of the Green Committees of Correspondence, by providing direct representation for the new and growing number of state Green Parties.
During 1990, over 100 Greens around the county affiliated as individuals with the GPOC. Ken Gjemere of Dallas took on the task of Recording Secretary. Sadly, he suffered a stroke in August 1990. Phil Rose of Long Island, New York, took up the position and shouldered its tasks, including the publication of a newsletter for GPOC. The first issue of Green Paper was published in January 1991.
Earlier, on November 7, 1990, Phil Rose had sent a letter of invitation to all the individual Greens who had affiliated with the GPOC. The letter asked them to confer with other affiliated members of GPOC in their region to choose a person to go to the Boston meeting in February. The aim was to have a small group of about 15 to 20 people meet for two days to set up the bare bones of a national electorally active national Green Party and to propose a direction for the future. A limit was put of two attendees per state, though California, being the largest state and more electorally active than other states, except Maine, was granted four. The attendees included Mindy Lorenz, Debra Magnuson, Ross Mirkarimi, and Martha Fellows (CA); Barbara Rodgers-Hendricks (FL); Betty Zisk (MA); Dee Berry and Ben Kjelshus (MO); Sulaiman Mahdi, (Atlanta); Native Americans Medicine Story and Quiet Spirit; John Goeke, (PA); Phil Rose, (NY); Greg Gerritt and John Rensenbrink (ME); Blair Bobier (OR); Tony Affigne, (RI); Janette Taylor (Colorado); Charles Betz (MN) and Ron Natoli (NH).
The two-day meeting began with a brainstorming session on GPOC needs and possibilities. The group formed an Organizing Committee with a mandate to contact all the local and state Green groups and all local GPOCs, develop an inventory, and begin the circulation of mutual-aid ideas and materials. The group also formed a Steering Committee composed of Barbara Ann Rodgers-Hendricks (FL), Sulaiman Mahdi (GA), Phil Rose (NY), John Rensenbrink (ME), Ben Kjelshus (MO), Mindy Lorenz (CA), and Blair Bobier (OR). On Saturday, representatives from states and locals reported on their experience of Green candidates and party organizing. Later in the afternoon, the group created a Liaison Committee to make contact with Ron Daniels, an African American who would be running for President of the United States in 1992 as an Independent, backed by several state Green Parties. At the final session, the group set up a Committee on Program and Publicity, coordinated by Janette Taylor(CO) and Tony Affigne (RI).
The GPOC meeting did not include Howie Hawkins (NY) or Boston Green Mitch Channelis, though they pushed to attend in the days just before the meeting. Hawkins, together with Guy Chichester (NH), presented themselves at the doorway, demanding to be seated. They were turned back. They were not affiliated with the GPOC and in that sense were not eligible to attend: the rules of invitation had been set in November 1990, limiting participants to those who were affiliated with GPOC. In fact, 11 Greens
who were affiliated had not been able to attend because of limits of space and accommodations. Further to the organizers’ point was that Hawkins had often publicly stated his criticism of and rejection of the work and actions of the GPOC. The organizers assumed, with good reason, that Hawkins would immerse the meeting in the already painfully divisive “party versus movement” debate – and that Channelis would insist on including life-style and New Age issues of people who had only a marginal interest, or no interest at all, in Green electoral politics. These exclusions predictably produced swift opposition from the Left Green Network, as well as from others who were more interested in movement building than with electoral politics — an opposition which reverberated six months later as blowback at Greens Gathering ’91.
Yet the Green Party Organizing Committee achieved its primary aim: to continue to build momentum for an electorally engaged new national Green Party composed of state Green Parties. Toward this end, the GPOC produced a newsletter highlighting Greens running for office and Green state ballot-access drives. They were beginning to feel as if they had reached a new level, a clear grounding for a new and bona fide political party, a Green one.

 

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