Grace Lee Boggs, Detroit activist, dies at age 100

She was just Grace.

That’s how longtime friend Ron Scott describes Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs, who died Monday morning at home in Detroit. She was 100. Her death was confirmed to the Free Press by Rich Feldman, a Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership board member, as well as longtime friend Sharon Howell. This summer, hundreds celebrated Boggs' birthday at a party held at Detroit's Charles H. Wright African-American Museum. Boggs was unable to attend.

Boggs died as she had lived, Howell said Monday — “surrounded by books, ideas, politics and people, thinking about the future” — and as she had hoped, peacefully, in her sleep.

Howell said Boggs is to be cremated. A memorial will be held later this month.

Activist, civil rights pioneer, public intellectual and prolific writer, Boggs’ work spanned an era, touching literally thousands of lives.

For decades, she was a prominent public face of a particularly Detroit brand of activism: A one-time Marxist, the Chinese-American Boggs’ ideological evolution led her to black revolution, black power, neighborhood organization and educational reform. She was an unrelenting critic of the cultural and economic conditions that contributed to Detroit’s decline, with a keen focus on the struggles of the city’s economic underclass. Her fierce intellect was uncompromising, demanding a constant evaluation of ideas and assumptions. Her guidance nurtured generations of activists who continue to play a role in the struggle to define and shape the city Boggs made her home.

Yet Boggs leaves a complicated legacy. A self-described revolutionary, her life’s work centered on creating a different kind of revolution, one that required not violence, but an expansion of creativity and a constant broadening of the definition of humanity.

The democracy she sometimes found fault with still stands. The structure of the city she embraced continues to fray. Racial inequality remains a potent force. The poor have stayed poor; the rich have grown richer.

But Boggs’ closest friends and students say her contributions live on in the minds of those drawn into her orbit, in the space she created within her community for conversations about change, in the capacity for thought she instilled in those who worked alongside her.

“She is a reasoned and rational iconoclast and visionary who is engaged in transformation,” said Scott, who met Boggs and her late husband, Jimmy Boggs, in 1968. “Not just the old-style revolutionary who says what she’s against, she has always said we had to have a vision that’s deeply American in terms of ... its foundation for revolution, looking at who we are as America, what is our future and the continuing revolution that is America.”

Just, as he says, Grace.

Joining the movement

Boggs was born in 1915 in Providence, R.I., the child of Chinese immigrants, but grew up in New York City, where her father owned a Chinese restaurant on Broadway. She won a scholarship to Barnard College for undergraduate studies, and received a PhD from Bryn Mawr College in 1940.

Barred from many jobs because of her race and sex, Boggs found work at the University of Chicago’s Philosophy Library, she told filmmaker Grace Lee (no relation to Boggs) in the 2013 documentary “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs.”

Her pay was $10 a week, but Boggs made do because she’d been offered free rent in a rat-infested basement apartment, a condition that brought her into the struggle for tenants’ rights — and into contact with the black community for the first time, she told Bill Moyers in 2007. That experience, combined with the efforts of activists to bar discrimination in defense plants — resulting in a 1941 order signed by then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt — instilled in Boggs a desire to join the movement.

A longtime Marxist, Boggs moved to New York City to work with socialist thinker C.L.R. James, with whom she and others helped to create and define an offshoot of the Socialist Workers Party that focused on race and poverty.

Boggs came to Detroit in the early 1950s to write for the Correspondence, a socialist newspaper.

“Detroit is where the workers are — that’s where you need to be,” she told Lee in the documentary. At the Correspondence, Grace Lee met James Boggs, the African-American man who would become her husband and lifelong collaborator.

“James and Grace were very different people,” Scott said. “He was an African-American man from the rural south with a decidedly Alabama twist to his English, and Grace was the child of Chinese Americans who graduated from an Ivy League school in 1938.”

Love, passion, courage

James Boggs and Grace Lee married in 1953, at a time when members of an interracial relationship risked violence or death, 15 years before the U.S. Supreme Court decision that stopped states from banning interracial marriage.

“An interracial relationship in the 1950s and 1960s took an incredible combination of love and passion and courage,” said Sheila Cockrel, a former member of the Detroit City Council, an adjunct professor at Wayne State University and president of Crossroads Inc. “There were naysayers from every side of the racial divide.”

James Boggs, called Jimmy, was “militant and articulate,” Boggs told filmmaker Grace Lee. The pair shared an intellectual passion for revolution and organization, co-authoring texts on both topics and holding study groups for other Detroit activists and progressives. The couple helped to organize Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 march in Detroit; Grace Boggs tried to convince Malcolm X to run for the U.S. Senate. Both Grace and Jimmy were the subject of substantial FBI files during the McCarthy era.

“In the heyday, she and her husband were on the forefront of linking the issues of workers in factories with the issues of racism and the fact that black workers were treated in a profoundly different manner,” Cockrel said. “The two of them were major intellectuals that literally helped shape a generation of progressive leadership in the city of Detroit.”

The power of listening

After the civil unrest of 1967 — called “riots” by many, and “rebellions” by Boggs and others — everything changed, Boggs told Lee. The violence that rocked the community was the manifestation of long-brewing social pressures, and its repercussions were felt in every aspect of city life. Hastening white flight, undermining the integrity of once-strong black neighborhoods, the violent eruptions caused the nature of Boggs’ work to change, focusing more intently on building, or re-building, connections in Detroit’s neighborhoods. That work would occupy the rest of her life.

In 1992, the couple founded Detroit Summer, a nonprofit aimed at giving young Detroiters not just somewhere to go, but a sense of pride and ownership in their communities. The group plants community gardens, paints murals, and is affiliated with a no- or low-cost bicycle shop that provides Detroit Summer kids transportation to and from the program.

“Experiencing how her mind works, how she interacts with young people — the way she’s able to expand a simple conversation,” filmaker Lee said. “She’ll take what you’ve said and repeat it back in a way that makes it seem amazing. You realize, ‘This great brain thinks what I think is important? Maybe it is.’”

A reverence for Boggs’ ability to listen, and challenge her listeners in turn, is echoed time and time again by her friends and associates.

“I have countless scenes of her listening intently to what young people would say,” said longtime friend Shea Howell, a journalism professor at Oakland University. “If there’s any image of her that’s lasting, it’s not of her talking, it’s of her listening to people."

She had “an extraordinary body of work, a number of books, countless articles, speeches and pamphlets, all probing this idea of how do we develop our humanity. She has touched thousands and thousands of people from all generations,” Howell said.

“I think Grace has stood for the belief that our central question is how to become more human human beings, and the understanding that that happens as we work together on trying to create a world that is sustainable, that’s loving, that’s productive. That’s what she’s done with her life,” Howell said. “I think she’s understood that humanity is called out particularly at this time from people who have been left out of much of modern life.”

What did she do? It’s a question Boggs herself might have found irrelevant. Progressives, she told Lee, have “overestimated the role of activism and underestimated the role of reflection.”

One Detroit Summer alumnae is Julia Putnam. Now, Putnam is the principal of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Academy, a charter school on the city’s east side.

It’s the kind of connection Boggs gloried in, Grace Lee said.

Boggs’ view was of time, history and evolution, Lee said, not events and milestones: “It’s about creating those characters who have the capacity to keep moving forward.”

That, her friends and students say, is Boggs’ enduring legacy.

Contact Nancy Kaffer: nkaffer@freepress.com or 313-222-6585. Follow her on Twitter @nancykaffer.