• Journalist, Union Leader and Green Party Candidate

On January 13, we lost a good friend in Northwest Indiana and our country lost a valued leader for peace and justice today. Susan Brown made history in 2019 when she became the first-ever Green Party candidate for Valparaiso City Council. In 2016, she was a co-founder and the first chairperson of the Northwest Indiana chapter of the Green Party, the first local chapter in the state to be fully affiliated with the reconstituted Indiana Green Party. Sue went on to serve as chairperson of the Indiana Green Party.

But decades before that, she led her union, Local 14 of the Gary Newspaper Guild, representing 75 editorial and janitorial workers at the Post-Tribune newspaper, as only its second woman president. Sue spearheaded a union effort for gender equality by forcing the newspaper leadership — and changes in the Guild labor contract — to permit editorial assistants to bid up into the ranks of reporters (with higher pay). She would go on to win a coveted Lisagor Award for outstanding journalism from the Chicago Headline Club after taking her talents to the Times of Northwest Indiana.

Indiana Green Party
February 5, 2022