Decades before Ed Boyd became the Green Party candidate for governor, he washed dishes at a restaurant in Miami.

Boyd, then a high school senior, remembers that all of his fellow dishwashers were black or Hispanic. The waiters, who were all white, would pelt the dishwashers with insults and racial slurs, says Boyd, who is an African American.

So 17-year-old Boyd, the youngest employee, organized the dishwashers and led a strike.

“I said, ‘We’re not going to take this anymore,'” Boyd says. “We refused to work until we got the respect we deserved.”

After meeting with Boyd, the restaurant’s owner made the waiters apologize to the dishwashers and promoted the young strike-leader, giving him full responsibility for the salad bar.

That was in 1978. Now, the 45-year-old says it is the same ethic – a desire to stand up for society’s underdogs – that has driven him into Maryland’s governor’s race.

He’s an underdog himself – and he’s accustomed to it. Between growing up poor, losing his job, struggling with drug and alcohol addictions and becoming homeless, Boyd is no stranger to obstacles. But now, after finding a job in Baltimore and establishing some stability in life, he’s decided he wants to become governor.

It’s a long shot. Boyd’s campaign has raised less than $5,000, mostly from individual donors. According to a poll released Wednesday by The Baltimore Sun, Boyd has the support of only 2 percent of likely voters.

Like all third party candidates, he’s dogged by the perpetual question – why run when it’s almost impossible to win?

For Boyd, winning isn’t the point.

“Why not run?” he says. “Someone has to speak for the people that are not being spoken for – the working poor, people who are illegally arrested, the kids who can’t get a decent education. Someone has to speak for them.”

Boyd says neither of the two major party candidates – Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich or Democrat Martin O’Malley, the mayor of Baltimore – are looking out for the poor. They are tied to corporate interests, he says.

“I run because I am angry at the two-party system,” he says. “I see them as a two-headed monster. They say two different things, but they eat from the same trough – big business and special interest groups. It’s disgusting.”

Boyd says his ideas of fighting for “the little guy” come from his childhood. While he was growing up in Liberty City, a low-income neighborhood in Miami. Boyd says his father was fired from a job cleaning cars for a rental car company after he tried to organize the other workers into a union.

Boyd was a shy child who mostly kept to himself, says his mother, Josephine Jenkins Boyd Brown, a retired nurse aid. But when a bully picked on his younger step-brother, Boyd stepped in and fought the older boy off himself.

“He was always like that, trying to help other people,” said Brown, 68.

After high school, Boyd enlisted in the Navy and was demoted because, he says, he got into a fight with a supervisor who shouted a racial slur at him while drunk. After leaving the service in 1987, he moved to Washington and began selling construction equipment.

Boyd then began abusing drugs and alcohol in an effort to “fight personal demons,” he says.

“I had to have