Grace Lee Boggs

Activist and writer

• Born: June 27, 1915
• Birthplace: Providence, Rhode Island
• Died: October 5, 2015
• Place of death: Detroit, Michigan

Grace Lee Boggs was a Chinese American social theorist and community activist best known for her role in the American Marxist movement and the Black power movement of the 1960s. Along with Marxist theorist C. L. R. James, she helped create the Johnson-Forest Tendency, and with her husband, labor leader and writer James Boggs, she played a pivotal role in the Detroit workers’ and civil rights movements.

Full name: Grace Lee Boggs

Birth name: Grace Chin Lee

Areas of achievement: Activism, women’s rights, social issues

Early Life

Grace Lee Boggs was born Grace Chin Lee on June 27, 1915, in Providence, Rhode Island. Both of her parents were undocumented immigrants from Guangdong province in southern China. Her father became a successful restaurateur, opening a series of Chinese American restaurants in Massachusetts and Rhode Island before settling in New York, where he opened a popular restaurant near Times Square.

Lee earned a Regents Scholarship that paid part of her tuition to Barnard College, where she graduated in 1935 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Lee then pursued graduate studies in philosophy at Bryn Mawr College, earning a doctorate in 1940 and writing her thesis on social psychologist and philosopher George Herbert Mead. In her autobiography, Living for Change (1998), she also remembers being inspired by the writings of other social philosophers, including John Dewey, who informed much of her criticisms of the American education system.

Lee moved to Chicago after graduation but encountered overt racism in her attempts to find a teaching position. She was forced to move into a low-rent community, where she joined the South Side Tenant’s Organization and gained her first exposure to the struggles of the African American community. Lee worked with and was inspired by African American labor leader A. Phillip Randolph, who helped convince President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to ban discrimination in the defense industry during World War II. She recalled later that it was Randolph’s example that convinced her to pursue organizational activism.

Life’s Work

In Chicago, Lee met the West Indian Marxist theorist Cyril Lionel Robert (C. L. R.) James, who had worked as an organizer in the Socialist Workers’ Party in England and had come to the United States in 1938 to work with the newly formed Workers’ Party. Lee returned to New York in 1942 to work with him and to delve further into her studies of Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx. Lee soon became deeply involved in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a branch of the Workers’ Party she helped cofound with James and Russian political activist Raya Dunayevskaya.

In 1952, Lee and activist James Boggs met at the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s Third Layer School, an institution intended to bring representatives of the worker class (the third layer of society) to help train union leaders (second layer) and organizational intellectuals (first layer). James Boggs was a former agricultural laborer and a Detroit autoworker who had developed an interest in social activism.

In 1953, Lee and James Boggs married. She describes her marriage to James Boggs as a critical stage in her evolution as a social activist. By blending his firsthand experience of the African American and workers’ struggle with her background in social theory, the Boggses became a major force in local politics.

In 1963, James Boggs published his first book, The American Revolution: Notes from a Negro Worker’s Notebook, in which he argued that traditional Marxist theories were not applicable to the realities of modern society. The following year, as Grace Lee Boggs severed her ties to C. L. R. James, she became an organizer in the Michigan Freedom Now Party. She and her husband began focusing on what they saw as the primary issue facing the African American community: the loss of manufacturing jobs. Boggs argued that this left African Americans without the potential to support families and thereby brought about struggle between the classes. The Boggses were at the center of the Detroit activist community and associated with many of the most prominent social activists in the nation, even hosting Black nationalist Malcolm X at their home. In the fall of 1964, Boggs unsuccessfully tried to convince Malcolm X to run for the US Senate, representing the Michigan Freedom Now Party. He declined, stating that he might pursue that option in the future, but he was assassinated before he could do so.

In the summer of 1967, a police crackdown on after-hours drinking establishments in the Black communities of Detroit led to five days of rioting in and around the Boggses’ neighborhood. The FBI placed the Boggses under surveillance, suspecting them of having played a role in inciting or organizing the riots. From then on, Boggs shifted her focus as an activist, becoming more interested in the philosophy of nonviolence as espoused by Martin Luther King Jr. She saw the Detroit riots as a rebellion, which she defined as the process by which the current systems of society are broken down, whereas a revolution is the generative phase of a social movement in which new systems are erected. The Boggses extrapolated on this idea in their book Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (1974).

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Boggses focused primarily on local community organization. In 1992, they cofounded Detroit Summer, an organization that helps to bring older and younger generations of Detroit citizens together to participate in grassroots community-improvement projects. After her husband’s death in 1993, Boggs continued working with Detroit Summer and participating in local community projects.

In 2011, Boggs published The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century. This collection of many of her speeches and essays contains updated content and observations on how the history of social struggle in the United States should inform future generations of activists. In 2014 she was the subject of a documentary, American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, which aired on PBS.

Significance

Grace Lee Boggs was involved in most of the major US social movements of the twentieth century, including the women’s rights, civil rights, labor, and Black power movements. While fueled by her personal experiences of racism and sexism, she chose to focus on the struggles of the African American community and became a symbol of interracial involvement in the civil rights movement.

While not as well known as some other major figures of either the civil rights or the Black power movements, Boggs was among the most important figures behind these seminal periods in American history. Over decades of activism, her intellectual prowess allowed her to elucidate the evolution of the activist philosophy, bridging the gap between intellectual and grassroots activism and between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Bibliography

Boggs, Grace Lee. Living for Change: An Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998.

Boggs, James, and Grace Lee Boggs. Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review, 1974.

McFadden, Robert D. "Grace Lee Boggs, Human Rights Advocate for 7 Decades, Dies at 100." The New York Times, 5 October 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/grace-lee-boggs-detroit-activist-dies-at-100.html. Accessed 12 Sept. 2022.

Moyers, Bill D., and Michael Winship. Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues. New York: Perseus, 2011.

Smith, Kaitlin. "Remembering Grace Lee Boggs." Facing Today, 16 May 2022, facingtoday.facinghistory.org/remembering-grace-lee-boggs. Accessed 12 Sept. 2022.