Grace Lee Boggs

Activism

Facing significant barriers in the academic world in the 1940s, she took a low-paying job at the University of Chicago Philosophy Library. As a result of their activism on tenants' rights, she joined the revolutionary left Workers Party, known for its Third Camp position regarding the Soviet Union, which it saw as bureaucratic collectivist. At this point, she began the trajectory that she would follow for the rest of her life: a focus on struggles in the African-American community.

She met C. L. R. James during a speaking engagement in Chicago and moved to New York. She met many activists and cultural figures such as author Richard Wright and dancer Katharine Dunham. She also translated into English many of the essays in Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 for the first time. She soon joined the Johnson–Forest Tendency led by James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Lee. They focused more centrally on marginalized groups such as women, people of color and youth as well as breaking with the notion of the vanguard party. She wrote for the Johnson–Forest Tendency under the party pseudonym Ria Stone. While originally operating as a tendency of the Workers Party, they briefly rejoined the Socialist Workers Party before leaving the Trotskyist left entirely, forming the Correspondence Publishing Committee in 1951. She married African-American auto worker and political activist James Boggs in 1953.

That same year she and James moved to Detroit, where they continued to focus on Civil Rights and Black Power Movement activism. As scholar Brian Doucet articulates in his interview conducted with Boggs in 2014: "Living in Detroit influenced the Boggs' thinking on the role of automation, capital flight, and racism." Boggs helped found the Detroit Asian Political Alliance in 1970.

When C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya split in the mid-1950s into Correspondence Publishing Committee led by James and News and Letters led by Dunayevskaya, Grace and James supported Correspondence Publishing Committee that James tried to advise while in exile in Britain. In 1962, the Boggses broke with James and continued Correspondence Publishing Committee along with Lyman Paine and Freddy Paine, while James' supporters, such as Martin Glaberman, continued on as a new if short-lived organization, Facing Reality. The ideas that formed the basis for the 1962 split can be seen as reflected in James Boggs's book, The American Revolution: Pages from a Black Worker's Notebook. Grace unsuccessfully attempted to convince Malcolm X to run for the United States Senate in 1964. In these years, Boggs wrote a number of books, including Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century with her husband and focused on community activism in Detroit where she became a widely known activist.

In 1979, Grace Lee Boggs and husband James Boggs contributed to the founding of National Organization for an American Revolution (NOAR).

In the introduction to an extensive interview, scholar Karín Aguilar-San Juan describes one aspect of Boggs' activism: "Although she believes that racial and gender inequality will always demand struggle, Grace remains adamant that civil- rights- based activism will not lead to the farreaching changes in society that a higher state of human evolution requires." She goes on to explain that Boggs' "political path" has been "guided by her study of global and historical change, hand- in- hand with daily participation in and observation of the struggles of people at the grassroots level." In this interview Boggs discusses her relationship to her Asian American heritage, her experience with the Black Power movement, and many other topics.

She founded Detroit Summer, a multicultural intergenerational youth program, in 1992, and was the recipient of numerous awards. Additionally, Boggs' home in Detroit also serves as headquarters for the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. The Boggs Center was founded in the early 1990s by friends of Grace Lee and James Boggs and continues to be a hub for community-based projects, grassroots organizing, and social activism both locally and nationally.

Death

Grace Lee Boggs died on October 5, 2015, at 100 years old. An obituary in The New York Times reported that Boggs "waged a war of inspiration for civil rights, labor, feminism, the environment and other causes for seven decades with an unflagging faith that revolutionary justice was just around the corner."

President Barack Obama issued a statement on Boggs' death, praising her work for Detroit and for "her leadership in the civil rights movement, to her ideas that challenged us all to lead meaningful lives." He added that Boggs "understood the power of community organizing at its core".

Legacy

Honors

• In 1999, Boggs was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame
• In 2013, The James and Grace Lee Boggs School was opened in Detroit, Michigan. The Boggs School teaches students from kindergarten to eighth grade, and among its core values are critical thinking, collaboration, and self-determination.
• In 2014, The Social Justice Hub at The New School's newly opened University Center was named the Baldwin Rivera Boggs Center after activists Boggs, James Baldwin, and Sylvia Rivera.
• In 2014, Boggs was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame.

• Boggs has received honorary doctorates from the University of Michigan, Wooster College, Kalamazoo College and Wayne State University.

In media

• American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, a 2013 biographical documentary on Lee Boggs life, activism and philosophy, directed by Grace Lee.
• Boggs was portrayed by Marion Kodama Yue in Barry (2016), a drama film about Barack Obama's years at Columbia University.
• In Love And Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs by Stephen M. Ward (The University of North Carolina Press, 2016)
• We Are Here: 30 Inspiring Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Who Have Shaped the United States (by Naomi Hirahana) (Philadelphia: Running Press Kids, 2022