Grace Lee Boggs' Lifelong Call for Change
Revolutionary political philosopher, writer and activist Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015) dedicated her life to creating social change, often in collaboration with her husband James Boggs. Through their work such as the book Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century, the National Organization for an American Revolution and Detroit Summer, they advocated for each person to make an internal political evolution that could be amplified to the community and the world. The title of Grace Lee Boggs's 1984 newsletter "America — Love it Enough to Change it" came from a James Boggs quote that exemplified their shared commitment to social change: "I love this country not only because my ancestors' blood is in the soil but because I see the potential of what it can become."
"America — Love It Enough to Change It," 1984. Grace Lee Boggs's pamphlet focused on the 1984 election and reactions to the Reagan administration. / THF722642
Grace Lee Boggs's early life experiences with anti-Asian discrimination shaped her political identity. When her parents immigrated to the United States from China’s Guangdong province in 1911, it was during a period of heightened anti-Asian sentiment in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Between 1882 and 1943, the U.S. government implemented restrictive legislation against Asian immigration, while racist rhetoric about Asian immigrants was common in American life and popular culture. Lee Boggs's father was known as "the king of restaurant businessmen among the Chinese" because he owned and operated two successful Chinese restaurants in Manhattan's Theater District. This success did not insulate Grace Lee Boggs or her family from bigotry. Even though the family could afford a three-story house in Jackson Heights, Queens, restrictive covenants barred any non-white person from owning property in the area; their white contractor's name was on the title of their home. When Grace Lee Boggs was in her twenties, multiple potential employers told her that they would not hire a Chinese American woman even though she had a PhD in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College and was a trained stenographer. In 1940, she was hired as a librarian at the University of Chicago.
Children in Chinatown, San Francisco, California, 1899. Many Chinese Americans faced discriminatory laws around housing, immigration, and jobs following the passage of the first Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Many were forced to live in specific neighborhoods where they could rent a home and set up their own businesses. / THF119079
This job connected her to local activists who were protesting the untenable living conditions in Chicago's predominately Black South Side neighborhoods. In joining them, Lee Boggs learned about organizing action, leftist political thought, and the ways that discrimination affected Black Americans. Lee Boggs wanted to continue working for social change, so she joined the Workers Party and participated in the March on Washington Movement (MOWM).
MOWM began in 1941 when A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin organized Black Americans to march on Washington, D.C. to demand equal employment opportunities for manufacturing jobs. This mobilization caused President Franklin Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 to establish the first Fair Employment Practices Committee. As the movement persisted throughout the war years, MOWM organized non-violent demonstrations to force manufacturers to follow through with the government's mandate. Grace Lee Boggs championed MOWM and similar people-led movements in her work for the rest of her life.
Picketers in Support of Hiring Negro Workers for Ford Motor Company, 1942. MOWM inspired this Detroit-based protest to demand Ford hire Black Women in their plants. / THF132237
Between 1942 and 1962, Lee Boggs worked with leftist philosophers C.L.R. James, and Raya Dunayevskaya. The three of them created a Marxist collective called the Johnson-Forest Tendency — later known as the Correspondence Publishing Committee — in response to the Workers Party's lack of political and social action. Members of Johnson-Forest Tendency — known as “Johnsonites” — wrote and published pamphlets that called for racial equality, economic justice, and labor organizing. Through this work Grace Lee Boggs met her fellow Johnsonite and her future writing partner and husband, James Boggs.
But What About the Workers?, 1973. James Boggs was a prolific political writer in his own right. In works like But What About the Workers? Boggs wrote based on his experiences as a Black American auto worker. / THF266642
James Boggs (1919-1993) was born in a small community near Selma, Alabama, where he attended high school and which would become a strategic part of the coming Civil Rights Movements. James left the South in 1937 to search for work during the Great Depression. He settled in Detroit when Executive Order 8802 opened manufacturing jobs to Black men; from 1942 to 1970, James Boggs was a Chrysler employee. During that time, he became increasingly politically involved both in labor and protest movements. Boggs joined the Socialist Workers Party, wrote critically about concessions the unions made with auto companies, and participated in anti-segregation sit-ins in downtown Detroit's bars and restaurants. When Raya Dunayevskaya moved the Johnsonites' headquarters to Detroit in 1952, James and Grace Lee Boggs became further acquainted and married the following year.
James Boggs was a self-educated political philosopher who used his experiences to inform his writing; he encouraged others to see themselves as potential forces for change no matter their background. Although Grace Lee Boggs had degrees from two Seven Sisters colleges, she also believed that everyday lived experiences — rather than academic credentials — were valuable teachers to affect change in the world.
The Johnson-Forest Tendency was focused on international movements and having an academic and philosophical pedigree. After James and Grace Lee Boggs split from the Johnsonites in 1962, they emphasized local political action in Detroit. For Grace Lee Boggs, the city of Detroit was a place where political action and human connection were a part of everyday life. As she wrote in her autobiography, "It was a city of neighborhoods and beautiful trees. It also felt like a 'Movement' city where radical history had been made and could be made again." The Boggses lived in a predominantly Black and working-class neighborhood on the East side of Detroit. Grace Lee Boggs also co-organized the Detroit Walk to Freedom in 1963, which was a mass march in solidarity with the Southern civil rights struggle that also highlighted issues of inequality in the North.
"Walk to Freedom" March in Detroit, Michigan, June 23, 1963. Over 100,000 participants marched down Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit during the Walk to Freedom, making it one of the largest civil rights demonstrations to date. / THF705511
Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the Boggses were at forefront of radical Black American activism and consciousness raising in the city of Detroit and across the country. Their work combined the personal with the philosophical, and political; it encompassed everything from helping neighborhood teenagers find jobs to holding audiences with leaders like Malcolm X, Lyman Paine, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee. After James Boggs's 1993 death, Grace Lee Boggs dedicated the remainder of her life to championing a need for a revolution that focused on evolution, one where over time people could reimagine themselves, their communities, and the world.
Grace Lee Boggs via Wikimedia Commons
Kayla Chenault is an Associate Curator at The Henry Ford.
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