Grace Lee Boggs

Grace Lee Boggs

Boggs at her home in Detroit in 2012
Born Grace Chin Lee [1][2]
(1915-06-27)June 27, 1915
Providence, Rhode Island
Died October 5, 2015(2015-10-05) (aged 100)
Detroit, Michigan
Residence Detroit, Michigan
Alma mater Barnard College (B.A., 1935)
Bryn Mawr College (Ph.D., 1940)
Occupation Writer, social activist, philosopher, and feminist
Spouse(s) James Boggs (1953–93, his death) [1]
Parent(s) Chin Lee (father; b.1870; d.1965)
Yin Lan Lee (mother; b. 1890; d. 1978) [3][4]
Relatives Katherine (sister)
Edward (brother; b. 1920)
Philip (brother)
Robert (brother)
Harry (brother; b. 1918) [4]

Grace Lee Boggs (June 27, 1915 – October 5, 2015) was an American author, social activist, philosopher and feminist.[5] She is known for her years of political collaboration with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s.[6] She eventually went off in her own political direction in the 1960s with her husband of some forty years, James Boggs, until he died in 1993.[7] By 1998, she had written four books, including an autobiography. In 2011, still active at the age of 95, she wrote a fifth book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, with Scott Kurashige and published by the University of California Press.

Early life and education

Boggs was born on June 27, 1915, in Providence, Rhode Island, above her father's restaurant. Her Chinese given name was Yue Ping (玉平), meaning "Jade Peace." She was the daughter of Chin Lee (1870–1965), originally from Toishan in China,[4] and Yin Lan, his second wife, who would become an early feminist role model for Boggs. Lee’s first wife was unable to give birth to sons and so he left her for a younger woman.[8] Yin Lan was born into the Ng family who were so poor that her uncle sold Yin into slavery, but she escaped. That same uncle arranged the marriage of Boggs’s parents.

Her father migrated to the United States with his second wife, landing in Seattle, Washington, in 1911.[9] On a scholarship, Boggs went on to study at Barnard College, where she was influenced by Kant and Hegel. She graduated in 1935 and in 1940 received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College, where she wrote her dissertation.

Career

Facing significant barriers in the academic world in the 1940s, she took a job at low wages at the University of Chicago Philosophy Library. As a result of their activism on tenants' rights, she joined the far-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.[10]

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. While originally operating as a tendency of the Workers Party, they briefly rejoined the Socialist Workers Party before leaving the Trotskyist left entirely. The Johnson-Forest tendency also characterized the USSR as State Capitalist. She wrote for the Johnson-Forest tendency under the party pseudonym Ria Stone. She married African-American auto worker and political activist James Boggs in 1953 and that same year moved to Detroit, where they continued to focus on Civil Rights and Black Power Movement activism.

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' 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.

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.[11]

Her autobiography, Living for Change, was published in 1998. As late as 2005, she continued to write a column for the Michigan Citizen newspaper, and her book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century was published in 2011. Her life is the subject of the documentary film American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs (2013), produced and directed by the American filmmaker Grace Lee.[12] In 2014, The Social Justice Hub at The New School's newly opened University Center was named the Baldwin Rivera Boggs Center after activists James Baldwin, Sylvia Rivera, and Grace Lee Boggs.

She turned 100 in June 2015.[13] She died on October 5, 2015.[14]

The dual biography In Love And Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs, by Stephen M. Ward, was published in 2016.[15]

Bibliography

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Ward, Stephen M. (editor), Pages from a Black Radical's Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, Wayne State University Press, 2011.
  2. ↑ Cf. Library of Congress catalog entry for Lee, Grace Chin. George Herbert Mead, New York, King's crown press, 1945.
  3. ↑ Cooper, Desiree, "Activist Boggs learned from mom's regrets", Detroit Free Press, March 9, 2006.
  4. 1 2 3 Boggs, Grace Lee, Living for Change: An Autobiography, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota, 1998, ISBN 0-8166-2954-4.
  5. ↑ Michael Jackman (October 5, 2015). "Grace Lee Boggs dead at 100". Metro Times. Retrieved October 5, 2015.
  6. ↑ Aguirre Jr., Adalberto; Lio, Shoon (2008). "Spaces of Mobilization: The Asian American/Pacific Islander Struggle for Social Justice". Social Justice. Asian American & Pacific Islander Population Struggles for Social Justice. 35 (2): 5. JSTOR 29768485.
  7. ↑ Elaine Latzman Moon,"Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes: An Oral History of Detroit's African American Community 1918–1967", Wayne State University Press, p. 156. Retrieved July 1, 2014.
  8. ↑ Boggs (1998). Living for Change. p. 3.
  9. ↑ Boggs (1998). Living for Change. p. 1.
  10. ↑ Gay, Kathlyn, ed. (2013). American Dissidents: An Encyclopedia of Activists, Subversives, and Prisoners of Conscience, Volume 1. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. pp. 71–73. ISBN 9781598847642.
  11. ↑ "Grace Lee Boggs – A Century in the World". On Being with Krista Tippett. Retrieved September 3, 2015.
  12. ↑ American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs website.
  13. ↑ Chow, Kat (June 27, 2015). "Grace Lee Boggs, Activist And American Revolutionary, Turns 100". NPR. Retrieved June 29, 2015.
  14. ↑ Hodges, Michael H. (October 5, 2015). "Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs dies at 100". The Detroit News.
  15. ↑ Ibram X. Kendi, "In Love And Struggle: A New Book On James And Grace Lee Boggs", AAIHA, November 15, 2016.

Further reading

External video
Grace Lee Boggs interviewed on Democracy Now!, January 20, 2008
Grace Lee Boggs interviewed by Bill Moyers, June 15, 2007
Boggs on the Financial Meltdown and Social Change – video report by Democracy Now!
"The Only Way to Survive is By Taking Care of One Another" – video report by Democracy Now!
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Grace Lee Boggs.
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