Ed Clark
Template:TOCnestleft Ed Clark has served as the Executive Vice President of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. Most of his life has been spent working in the United States and European Labor movements. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s he was an organizer and business agent for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.[1]
Activism
As a student activist in the 1960’s, Clark worked in the South in the struggle to integrate racially segregated public facilities.
In 2001 Ed Clark served as the Executive Vice President of the Union of Needletrade Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE!). A former president of the Student Peace Union, a staffer for Europe’s largest white collar union, an Irish American with an Oxford degree, a unionist with a passionate and informed commitment to democratic development, Ed exemplifies the best of the socialist tradition in the American labor movement.
Ed Clark was an early leader in student protests against the war in Vietnam and was a national trade union leader in the struggle against US intervention in Central America in the 1980s.[2]
YPSL
Ed Clark was in the Young Peoples Socialist League (Gail Paradise Tendency) [3]
Debs-Thomas-Bernstein Award
On June 12, 2001 Boston Democratic Socialists of America presented its annual award to "leaders who fight for democracy, here at home and around the world". Ed Clark and Dessima Williams received the Debs- Thomas-Bernstein Award; John Maher Leaders for Social Democracy at Home and Abroad: Ed Clark, Dessima Williams, John Maher received the Michael Harrington Lifetime Achievement Award. The reception took place at the home of Marcia Peters and David Karaus in Jamaica Plain.[4]
Ed Clark looked back with some humor on his experiences in the socialist youth movement of the early 1960s, when as president of the Student Peace Union he worked with Norman Thomas. Eventually Julius Bernstein helped get Ed his first organizing job in Boston with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, telling him, “You’re a Socialist — don’t embarrass us!”[5]
DSA
Ed Clark is an Honorary Vice Chair of Democratic Socialists of America.
He is also is a member of the Boston Democratic Socialists of America Speakers Bureau.[6]
Move to Vermont
In 2004 Boston DSA held a goodbye party for Ed Clark, the retired executive vice president of UNITE and a DSA vice chair,who is moving to Vermont. Congressman Bernie Sanders "sent a good-natured letter welcoming Clark to his state."[7]