Pubdate: Wed, 14 Oct 2015
Source: Metro Times (Detroit, MI)
Copyright: 2015 C.E.G.W./Times-Shamrock
Contact:  http://www.metrotimes.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1381
Author: Larry Gabriel
Column: Higher Ground

FULL OF GRACE

"I don't have that much longer to live so I have to think about what 
it is I have to do before I go gently into that dark night. And what 
I'd like to do, I think, is help people understand that ideas and 
thinking historically and philosophically is as important to 
rebuilding a country and a community and making a revolution as 
activism. Most people think of revolution as taking power from 
somebody else. And I think of revolution as transformation of ourselves."

- -Grace Lee Boggs 1915-2015

Grace Lee Boggs said this during an interview when she was 96 years 
old. Anyone who knew Grace or was in any of the activist circles 
orbiting around the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership knew 
that Grace would die soon. She was in hospice the past year and did 
not make it to her 100th birthday celebration in June.

To converse with Grace Lee Boggs was to tap into the pulse of the 
world and the perspective of a century lived to make sense of it. 
Grace embodied great humanism, great intellect, and great compassion.

Activist-philosopher Grace Lee Boggs went into that long night last 
week at the age of 100. It is sad that she is no longer among us; 
it's a personal loss for friends and a symbolic loss for activists 
locally and around the world, but there is no loss to the ideas and 
causes that wove into her life.

That's because a consequence of Boggs' living as long as she did and 
still having all her "marbles," as she would say, was that she had 
time to firmly establish her method for examining problems and coming 
up with solutions with numerous activists who are addressing their 
own issues and creating projects to build a more humane and sustainable world.

Grace was a revolutionary in nearly every sense of the word. Born in 
Rhode Island in 1915 to Chinese immigrant parents, Grace Lee earned a 
doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College. Racial issues in the 
1940s academic world led to a low-wage job at the University of 
Chicago Philosophy Library. Her experience there as a tenants' rights 
activist led to her engagement with leftist philosophies and the 
African-American community. She became friends with the communist CLR 
James and others. In 1953 she moved to Detroit and married 
African-American autoworker James Boggs.

James and Grace were at the forefront of numerous progressive 
activities over the years. They were friends with Malcolm X and 
published a number of pamphlets, newspapers, articles, and books in 
support of labor and civil rights. In the early 1960s they broke with 
the conventional left and began to focus more on community-based 
issues and organizing in Detroit.

Grace became immersed in the African-American community. She 
continued and intensified that immersion after James' death in 1993. 
With the Boggs Center established (in their home) about the time 
James passed, Grace used it as a hub for meetings, discussions, and 
to support efforts at fixing a seriously broken Detroit. At its core, 
Grace's approach was to do what you can with what you have. More than 
espousing any particular political philosophy, Grace evolved from 
revolutionary to solutionary in seeking solutions to problems in 
neighborhoods. Solutions based on a deep humanitarianism and 
well-thought-out and heavily discussed strategies.

Detroit Summer, a project to engage youth of all stripes in gardening 
and media projects, was an early Boggs Center activity. Grace gave 
support to an embryonic urban agriculture movement. Many of the 
city's urban farms are worked by people who were influenced directly 
or indirectly by Grace. The Allied Media Project and the Boggs 
Educational Center were founded by people who came through Detroit Summer.

The Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality, the Hope District, 
and Feedom Freedom Growers are part of Grace's orbit. Yusef Shakur 
and the Putting the Neighbor Back in the Hood project have a Boggs 
connection, as well as the East Michigan Environmental Action 
Council. Progressive activists across the board seem to have at least 
touched base with the Boggs Center.

Nationally, Grace helped create the Beloved Communities Initiative. 
Until recent years, when she slowed down physically, Grace was a 
featured speaker at national and international progressive 
conferences. Still she managed to write an autobiography, Living for 
Change (1988), and coauthored The Next American Revolution: 
Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century (2012), with Scott Kurashige.

In recent years she pushed people to really think about what they're 
doing and was involved in conferences to reimagine work and reimagine 
Detroit. "We have to change ourselves in order to change the world," 
she would say.

In the 2013 documentary film American Revolutionary, the Evolution of 
Grace Lee Boggs, there is a scene in which Grace makes her way 
slowly, with a walker, along a street of vacant lots in the shadow of 
the abandoned and crumbling Packard Plant.

"I feel so sorry for people who are not living in Detroit," she said 
at that moment.

It seemed a ridiculous statement, but it was deeply related to her 
analysis of the world. Detroit was at the forefront of the industrial 
revolution and now stands to lead in figuring out what happens after 
industry. Boggs surmised that Detroit is at the forefront of what's 
next - and that makes activism around key issues even more important 
in terms of influencing the outcomes in Detroit and elsewhere.

Friends close to Grace say that she didn't want her passing to be 
about her, that she wanted us to keep the focus on the issues. That's 
as it should be. Still, for someone who dedicated most of her century 
to fighting for us, let's just take a moment to make it about Grace.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom