RIP Grace Lee Boggs (June 27, 1915 – October 5, 2015)
Boggs, who had turned 100 earlier this year, was the daughter of Chinese immigrants and a lifelong political and social activist. The specific contours of her political beliefs evolved over the course of her work - she began her activism as a member of various Trotskyist parties - but she is perhaps best known for her leadership and activism, beginning in the 1950s, in Detroit’s black community and black power movement - her thick FBI file mistakenly identified her as “probably Afro-Chinese.” In 1953, Boggs married auto worker and activist James Boggs (pictured above), whom she met in Detroit, and the two remained married and, together, politically active until his death in 1993. Their work spanned a wide range of race, environmental justice, feminist, and labor movements.
But we’ve had revolutions, and we’ve seen how the states which they have created have turned out to be like replicas of the states which they opposed. You have to bring those two words together and recognize that we are responsible for the evolution of the human species. It’s a question of two-sided transformation and not just the oppressed versus the oppressor. We have to change ourselves in order to change the world.
PBS: American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs
Grace Lee Boggs on the influence of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr.
NPR: Grace Lee Boggs, Activist And American Revolutionary, Turns 100
UC Berkeley, 2012: Grace Lee Boggs in conversation with Angela Davis