How Many Roads?

About the Author

Radicalized in 1959 by the Cuban revolution and inspired by college courses in history, social science, and philosophy, Howard Sodja organized a chapter of the Young Peoples Socialist League (YPSL) at the University of Miami. Besides excelling in academic studies, the author actively protested racial discrimination and nuclear testing. In 1962, Sodja graduated with a B.A. in psychology and moved to Chicago, where he became an activist in the antiwar movement and worked in conjunction with the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA). He also dedicated himself to the civil rights movement by working with the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

After being employed as a social worker for one year, Sodja felt he could do more for the oppressed by becoming a full-time organizer for the YSA. While a student at Roosevelt University (RU), he organized a successful RU YSA chapter, and wrote provocative articles on local civil rights protests and welfare legislation. His articles were printed in the Militant, a national weekly socialist newspaper, and in the Roosevelt Torch, the campus newspaper.

In 1964, Sodja’s grass-roots organizing with the YSA and SNCC earned him an invitation to move to New York and organize a new YSA chapter in Uptown Manhattan and another at Columbia University. Having accomplished these assignments, the author next moved to Los Angeles and resumed his social-work career. After two years, he escaped the empty materialism of LA by moving to Northern California, where he attempted to create an alternative society that embodied his ideals in the area’s burgeoning hippie communes. During this period, he participated in the headline-grabbing 1969 Berkeley demonstrations in which martial law was declared and the National Guard occupied the neighborhood adjacent to the University of California, Berkeley, campus.

Disillusioned but wiser from his experiences living in communes, Sodja returned to his social-work career and became active in his social workers’ union (SEIU Local 535) until he retired 30 years later. He was stirred back to political activism in 1980 by the horrors of the civil war in El Salvador. To help end the war and bring justice to Central America, he founded and chaired the Contra Costa Coalition Against US Intervention in El Salvador, and later organized the Contra Costa Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). During this time, he carried out public-speaking engagements and wrote articles for CISPES newsletters, press releases, informational leaflets, and pamphlets on Central American events and Bay Area campaigns.

The breadth of Sodja’s personality extends beyond his dual careers in social work and political activism. Sodja is also a private pilot, an Experimental Aircraft Association member, and holds the highest-level FCC licenses, the Amateur Radio Extra Class and the First Class Radio Telephone Operator Licenses. In addition, Sodja gained recognition through a series of amateur-radio articles that were published in two international publications, AMSAT Journal (USA) and OSCAR News (England), and he has been a guest speaker at amateur-radio events. The Mid Atlantic Air Museum has published his multimedia CDs on historical aircraft. He is the past president of the California Writers Club's Berkeley Branch. Currently, he is active in the Richmond Greens local of the Contra Costa Green Party, and the El Sobrante Greens.

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How Many Roads? Copyright © by Howard Sodja 2002