For most of her remarkable one hundred years, Grace Lee Boggs saw herself as a revolutionary, and her adopted home town of Detroit as the Midwestern front of that revolution. Despite the frustrations of living in a counterrevolutionary time, and in a city that suffered a lot of setbacks and precious few victories, she never lost her optimism about the possibility of change, even as she began to drop the “r” from revolution.
Born in 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island, Grace Lee grew up in New York, where her father, an immigrant from Guangdong, was known as “the king of the restaurant businessmen among the Chinese.” That meant a lower-middle-class life in one of the world’s richest cities. Brilliant and bookish, Grace enrolled at Barnard when she was sixteen, and earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1940 at Bryn Mawr, steeping herself in the work of Kant and Hegel, and writing a dissertation on the influential pragmatist George Herbert Mead. But for all of her talent, Grace found that no university at the time would hire a Chinese-American woman to teach ethics or political thought.
Like many intellectuals who came of age during the Great Depression, enraged at the injustices of the economy and fired up by the mass movements that rose to challenge it, Grace gravitated toward socialism. The nineteen-thirties were the heyday of leftism in the United States; the Communist Party was at its peak, with a welter of socialist competitors, all engaged in almost theological debates about Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, the Soviet Union and Labour parties, and whether the New Deal was radical or conservative. Grace found her way from the Workers Party to the Socialist Workers Party to a sect called the Johnson-Forest Tendency, named for the pseudonyms of its founders, the Trinidadian theorist and essayist C. L. R. James (J. R. Johnson) and Trotsky’s former secretary Raya Dunayevskaya (Freddie Forest).
The Johnsonites worked in factories by day and debated theory at night. Grace translated Karl Marx’s early letters and wrote philosophical treatises, popular pamphlets, and articles for the Johnsonite publication Correspondence, named for the Committees of Correspondence during the American Revolution. The Johnsonites were most distinct from other groups in their belief in workers’ “self-activity,” in which people organize and emancipate themselves. Even after she jettisoned her socialism, Grace never abandoned its fundamental tenet: change would come from a well-organized, well-read, and disciplined working class.
Detroit was the hub of Johnsonite organizing, and in 1953 Grace Lee moved there, finding herself in a circle of autoworkers and intellectuals. That year, she married a fellow-Johnsonite, James (Jimmy) Boggs, a black migrant from rural Alabama who worked on the Chrysler assembly line and used his spare time to tinker with cars and read Marxist theory. No place seemed a likelier incubator of revolution than the massive auto factories of Detroit, and no group seemed more ready for self-activity than black workers, who marched against discrimination and pushed for full employment in a mass movement, mostly forgotten, that began decades before Martin Luther King, Jr., marched in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. Grace was particularly inspired by the March on Washington Movement, an all-black challenge to discrimination in the defense industry led by the labor leader A. Philip Randolph during the early years of the Second World War.
Grace once joked that the F.B.I. must have classified her as “Afro-Chinese,” since her husband and closest friends were black, she lived in mostly African-American neighborhoods, and she made the struggle for black freedom her life’s work. Grace was passionate but seldom dogmatic, and unlike many of her comrades she was perfectly willing to reconsider her political positions. In her view, revolution was a process, and it required improvisation and a long-term view. In her 1998 memoir, “Living for Change,” Grace wrote that “reality is constantly changing and we must be wary of becoming stuck in ideas that have come out of past experiences and have lost their usefulness in the struggle to create the future.”
In the early nineteen-sixties, the Boggses left their Johnsonite socialism behind. Detroit was falling on hard times, even before the auto industry faced global competition, and the revolutionary potential seemed to be as much on the streets as on the assembly lines. Factories were closing every year, and many of the city’s black residents, especially men, found themselves outside the working class. The question for Grace and Jimmy was how to tap a newfound sense of rage on the streets. “Suddenly it seems that the Negro is mad at everybody,” the Times reported in the summer of 1963. In the fall, NBC broadcasted a three-hour documentary, “American Revolution of ’63,” focussed on black protests in both the North and South.
That summer, Grace joined the Great Walk to Freedom in Detroit, a hundred-thousand-person march headlined by Martin Luther King, Jr., who gave a version of his “I Have a Dream” speech, celebrating the “magnificent new militancy” in the Motor City. Later that year, Grace and Jimmy hosted Malcolm X in Detroit, where he delivered his famous “Message from the Grassroots,” just as he was breaking from the Nation of Islam. The Boggses worked with insurgent groups like the Revolutionary Action Movement, and the F.B.I. regularly visited their little house on Detroit’s East Side.
But Grace was too disciplined a theorist and too pragmatic an activist to be attracted to some of the more militant black-power organizations. She was skeptical of black nationalists and what she called their “illusions about Africa.” And she fretted that, while the Black Panthers connected with a desire for change, they lacked the discipline and ideological rigor to channel their “impatience” into more revolutionary activism. In the nineteen-seventies, Grace and Jimmy attempted to mobilize young black activists into a “revolutionary party.” They failed. The revolution did not come.
Still, Grace Boggs was seldom bitter. She maintained the Johnsonites’ faith in the people, even as Detroit grew bleaker. After the rebellions of the nineteen-sixties, few things concerned Grace more than the crime epidemic, which she and Jimmy experienced directly. Over the years, burglars frequently broke into the their house, stealing the television set, a jazz-record collection, the oak front door, a bunch of canned goods, and their car. When someone grabbed her purse, she and Jimmy chased the robber three blocks before they gave out. Crack ravaged her neighborhood, and Detroit’s murder rate skyrocketed. Grace saw urban crime as the poisonous by-product of advanced capitalism, but also as a moral crisis.
In her seventies, Grace joined a new movement—another type of “self-activity,” but far less revolutionary than before. She began attending meetings of black women who organized Save Our Sons and Daughters (SOSAD), which led marches against violence and developed a conflict-resolution curriculum for Detroit’s public schools. She remained critical of capitalism, but shifted her energies to questions of ethics and individual change. In the mid-nineties, she launched Detroit Summer, a program that brought hundreds of youthful volunteers to plant community gardens and work with schoolchildren. She hoped to turn Detroit’s forty or so square miles of empty land into an archipelago of small, collective farms, a model, she believed, for a sustainable future. In her later years, she collaborated with activists in Detroit to create a new generation of leaders, starting with inner-city kids. A few years ago, with her blessing, they started a charter school.
Grace died in her modest six-room house, in a fairly bleak section of Detroit’s East Side, surrounded by her friends and piles of books. By her last days, she was, in her own words, more “evolutionary” than “revolutionary”: her projects reflected the more limited sense of possibility than the one that fired up a Depression-era socialist. But she never lost her faith in the people of Detroit.
