The revolutionary and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs passed away in her Detroit home on October 5, 2015 at the age of 100. As a comrade to many, as well as a daughter, sister, aunt, and stepmother, Grace directly touched hundreds of lives and influenced many more. She devoted most of her long and full life to making an American revolution. She believed deeply in the power of ideas, and throughout her 75 years of activism, theorizing, writing, and organizing, she consistently challenged herself and others to accept the task of developing ideas, which she saw as essential for revolutionary change.
She was born Grace Chin Lee on June 27, 1915 in Providence, RI to Chinese immigrant parents, and raised in New York with her six siblings. Books and reading played a central role in Grace’s childhood, and she was a talented student, graduating from high school at the age of 15. She won a scholarship to attend Barnard College, and in 1940, at the age of 25, earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at Bryn Mawr College, where her studies of the Hegelian dialectic helped set the foundation of Grace’s concept of dialectical thinking that she made central to her intellectual and political work for the rest of her life.
She soon committed herself to radical politics and the black freedom struggle. Living briefly in Chicago during World War II, she was radicalized by the March on Washington Movement and revolutionary Marxism, joining a grouping within the Workers Party (and later the Socialist Workers Party) known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency, led by C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya. Moving back to New York, where the group was centered, she emerged as its third leader, and then in 1953 she moved to Detroit, where she would live the rest of her life. There she developed a remarkable partnership as a married couple, political comrades, and intellectual collaborators with autoworker, labor organizer, and radical activist James (Jimmy) Boggs, whom she married in 1954. By the 1960s, Grace and Jimmy operated within vibrant networks of black radicals in Detroit and beyond, and they were recognized as important figures in the Black Power movement.
While she avoided the spotlight, Grace played a pivotal role in major developments and organizing efforts of the period, such as the Northern Negro Grassroots Leadership Conference in 1963 (where Malcolm X delivered his famous “Message to the Grassroots” speech) and the Michigan Freedom Now Party in 1964. Her efforts and influence were reflected in dozens of organizations and publications of the period, including the Organization for Black Power and her essay “The Black Revolution in America” in the groundbreaking anthology The Black Woman (1970). In this period Grace and Jimmy’s understanding of revolutionary change moved beyond Marxist conceptualizations of class struggle, working class insurgency, and the seizing of state power. The 1967 Detroit rebellion, in particular, pushed her to rethink and clarify their concept of revolution. As Grace recalled, the rebellion “forced us to rethink a lot of philosophical questions,” leading them “to draw a clear distinction between rebellion and revolution.” This led as well to her placing increasing emphasis on reflection, creating the time and space to carefully consider and learn from past struggles and ideas, which is reflected in the book she and Jimmy wrote with their long-time friends and comrades Freddy and Lyman Paine, Conversations in Maine: Exploring Our Nation’s Future (1978).
Grace and Jimmy put forward their new evolutionary concept of revolution that they developed during the 1960s and early 1970s in their co-authored book, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, published in 1974, and through the activist group they formed in 1978, the National Organization for an American Revolution (NOAR). “A revolution is not just for the purpose of correcting past injustices,” they wrote in Revolution and Evolution. “The only justification for a revolution is that it advances the evolution of man/woman.” This concept informed NOAR’s political work, which they framed as “two-sided transformation”—political transformation linked to personal transformation, or working to change society and change oneself simultaneously.
With the dissolution of NOAR in the mid-1980s, Grace’s activism focused on Detroit and the challenges of post-industrial cities, and she immersed herself in community-building efforts and emphasized the development of grassroots leadership. This was reflected most notably in Detroit Summer, the “intergenerational multicultural youth program/movement to rebuild, redefine, and respirit Detroit from the ground up” she founded with Jimmy and others in 1992 based on a vision of young people as leaders and initiators of community change.
Grace entered yet another phase of her life and activism when Jimmy died of lung cancer in July 1993, ending their four decades of their marital, political, and intellectual partnership. Comrades of Grace and Jimmy formed the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership (BCNCL) two years later, which became Grace’s primary political organization for the last two decades of her life. In 1998, at the age of 83, Grace published her autobiography, Living For Change, and for several years after that, she wrote a weekly column under that title for the independent black Detroit weekly newspaper, Michigan Citizen. Well into her 90 s, Grace continued to attend political meetings, speak to classes and activist gatherings, and hold on-going conversations with the many people—long-time comrades, emerging activists, community leaders, artists, youth—who came to see her.
In 2011, Grace published her last book (written with Scott Kurashige), The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century. It provides the historical and theoretical foundation underlying her call in the last years of her life for activists to practice “visionary organizing”—grassroots political work not focused solely on protesting current injustices, but rather geared toward projecting alternatives and creating new visions for the future.
Grace’s influence continued to grow with the release of the documentary film American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, in June 2013, the month that she turned 98. With the aid of a walker or wheelchair, she participated in screenings of the film, in Detroit and other cities. “I don’t know what the next American revolution is going to be like,” she says at the end of the film, “but you might be able to imagine it, if your imagination were rich enough.” This statement reflects how Grace consistently challenged us to think dialectically, showing us that if we do not allow old ideas to dominate our thinking, we can use our creativity and imagination to envision news ways of relating to each other and the earth, new ways of building our communities, and in the process challenge ourselves to create a new and better world.
On June 27, 2015, Grace celebrated her 100th birthday. She was unable to attend any of the week-long series of events held in her honor, but she received visitors during the week, including friends and former comrades from across the country. Over the next several weeks, Grace continued to have conversations, as her strength and energy allowed, with the close comrades, friends, and caregivers who spent her final days with her at her home, 3061 Field Street, the house where she lived for 53 years. Grace Lee Boggs died in her sleep on October 5, 2015. She is survived by the members of the extended Lee and Boggs families and by the thousands of people whose ideas and lives she touched.