Grace Lee Boggs

Grace Lee Boggs (June 27, 1915 – October 5, 2015) was an American author, social activist, philosopher, and feminist. She is known for her years of political collaboration with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s she and her husband, James Boggs, took their own political direction, turning their focus to civil rights and Black Liberation, Asian American, and other social justice movements. 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, published by the University of California Press. She is regarded as a key figure in the Asian American, Black Power, and Civil Rights movements.

Family and childhood Early life Boggs was born Grace Lee Chin on June 27, 1915, in Providence, Rhode Island, above her father's restaurant. Her Chinese given name was Yu Ping (玉平), meaning Jade Peace. She was the daughter of Chin Lee (1870–1965) and his second wife, Yin Lan Ng. Both her parents were originally from Taishan, Guangdong, in Qing dynasty China. Boggs's siblings include one sister, Katherine, and four brothers: Edward, Philip, Robert, and Harry. Chin Lee and Yin Lan Ng immigrated from China to the United States city of Seattle, Washington in 1911.

Early in her career, Boggs translated Karl Marx's works and was actively involved in several leftist organizations, including the Workers Party, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Trotskyist movement. She later collaborated with revolutionaries like C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in intricate dialectical analyses, describing the Soviet Union in various terms such as a "degenerated workers' state" or a "state capitalist system".

Education On a scholarship, Boggs went on to study at Barnard College of Columbia University, where she was influenced by Darwin's concept of evolution. She graduated in 1935 and then in 1940 received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College, where she studied with Paul Weiss and wrote her dissertation on George Herbert Mead.

Partnership with James Boggs In 1953 Grace Lee Boggs married James Boggs, an American political activist and auto worker. They were married for 40 years until James Boggs' death in 1993. Together they published activist literature, books, and founded the National Organization for an American Revolution (NOAR).

Interviewed by Ibram X. Kendi about his joint biography of them, Stephen M. Ward states that together, Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs "built a durable partnership that was at once marital, intellectual, and political. It was a genuine partnership of equals, remarkable not only for its unique pairing or for its longevity, but also for its capacity to continually generate theoretical reflection and modes of activist engagement."

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).

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. A portrait by Mike Alewitz of Grace Lee Boggs in his "We Follow The Path Less Traveled The City at The Crossroads of History" mural series. 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