Grace Lee Boggs was an American author, social activist, philosopher and feminist. She fought relentlessly for civil rights, feminism and labor for seven decades and was hugely influential in bringing about social change in Detroit.
Boggs (born Grace Chin Lee or Yuk Ping (玉平) to use her Chinese name) was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1915. Her parents had migrated to the United States following the British defeat of China in the First Opium War of 1839–1842. Boggs grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City. Her father owned Times Square restaurant Chin Lee’s. Her mother, Yin Lan Lee became a feminist role model for her during her childhood. At 16 Boggs enrolled at Barnard College for women, graduating with a BA in Philosophy in the midst of the Great Depression 1935. In 1940 she received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr college.
Boggs was unable to teach due to discrimination against Asians and she moved to Chicago where she took a low paid job at the University of Chicago Philosophy Library. She became involved in a tenant’s organisation protesting living conditions in apartment in black communities, beginning her foray into political action. She organised demonstrations and meetings and began to understand what segregation and discrimination meant through talking to members of the black community. She witnessed the 1941 March on Washington Monument which brought awareness to the fact that black workers were turned away from places of work who desperately needed workers simply because of the colour of their skin. The March led to President Franklin D. Roosevelt bringing about Executive Order 8802 which prohibited racial discrimination in the national defense industry.
Boggs met Trinidadian C.L.R. James during a speaking engagement in Chicago and moved to New York where she spent a decade involved with the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a radical left group led by C. L. R. James (a.ka. J.R. Johnson) and Raya Dunayevskaya (a.k.a Freddie Forest). The tendency were focused on marginalised groups such as women, people of colour and youth as well as breaking with the notion of the vanguard party and Boggs became known as the third founder and under the name Ria Stone she wrote for the Marxist group. She believed that the powers of real change were the workers and one of the worst things a government could do to its people was to silence their voices.
In 1953 Boggs married African American auto worker and political activist James Boggs and moved to Detroit, the place that would be the focus of her activism for the rest of her life. The couple worked together organising grassroots groups and advocating for a range of issues. In the 1960’s Boggs was a supporter of the Black Power movement and Malcolm X. At the time she felt that Martin Luther King’s non-violent approach was ineffective. Boggs and her husband provided Malcolm X with a place to stay when he visited Detroit and were frequently visited by the FBI who inquired about black militants like Robert Williams who spearheaded armed resistance to the KKK in defense of his black community. The FBI closely monitored Boggs and her husbands and kept a hefty file on the both of them.
After a raid on an unlicensed bar in 1967 that ended in 4 days of violence in Detroit, Boggs began to study the work of King and identified with his philosophical and spiritual views on social change and his belief that they should fight against racism, poverty, miliarism and materialism. She became a widely known community activist and along with her husband, helped to organise several coalitions of activists, including Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice and Saves our Sons and Daughters. She also wrote a number of books including Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century.
In 1992 Boggs founded Detroit Summer, a multicultural inter-generational youth program which encouraged young people to work on community projects. The couple also founded the the James and Grace Lee Boggs School and their home served as headquarters for the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership which continues to work on community-based projects, grassroots organizing, and social activism both locally and nationally. One of her legacies was inspiring programs which successfully created models of racial integration, Avalon Bakery was one of the businesses which was created through Bogg’s work, being made possible by crowdfunding which supported her vision for community-supported services.
Boggs’ life is the subject of the documentary film American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs (2013). 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. Boggs died in October 2015 at the age of 100, she dedicated her life to fighting for social change and advocating for the rights of others through her community activism and work within the civil rights movement. She received numerous awards including the Chinese American Pioneers Award from the Organisation of Chinese Americans in 2000 and the Women’s Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the Anti-Defamation League in 2001.