The Routes Less Traveled: The Great Transformation of James Boggs

Abstract

This essay considers James Boggs's intellectual work and radical maturation from the 1920s to the 1950s, focusing specifically on the ways travel—ideological and actual—affected his activism and perspective. I argue that to grasp more firmly his “roots” in Detroit's working-class black communities, it is necessary to consider the “routes” that brought him to Detroit and his ideological journeys both inside and outside auto plants. By analyzing Boggs through the analytics of both mobility and rootedness, I anchor his early radical evolution in a variety of “in-between” spaces and moments and within narratives of displacement, migration, and community building.

Keywords:

• black intellectualism
• black Marxism
• black radicalism
• diaspora

Notes

James and Grace Lee Boggs Collection. Box 1: Folder 18, “Monthly Review Correspondence.” Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor & Urban Affairs, Wayne State University Archives, Detroit, Michigan (hereafter Boggs Collection).

L. Todd Duncan and Katheryne V. Lindberg, “The Continuity of Living for Change: An Interview with Grace Lee Boggs,” Social Text 67, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 53.

Ibid., 58.

Ibid., 64.

Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 99.

Kelley reminds us: “We must begin to dig beneath the surface … deep into the daily lives, cultures, and communities which make the working classes so much more than people who work. We have to step into the complicated maze of experience that renders ‘ordinary’ folks so extraordinarily multifaceted, diverse, and complicated.” In Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 3–4.

Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 197.

Charles Mitchell, “The Development of Cotton from the Old World to Alabama: Chronological Highlights in Alabama Cotton Production,” Agronomy and Soils Departmental Series No. 286, Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, Auburn University, March 2008. See also C. S. Davis, The Cotton Kingdom in Alabama (Montgomery: Alabama State Department of Archives and History, 1939).

“Book Review of But What About the Workers,” Life and Work: Detroit Industrial Mission, Winter 1972.

Xavier Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution: Conversations with James Boggs (Atlanta: Institute of the Black World, 1976), 3.

Boggs Collection, Box 1: Folder 7.

Interview with James Boggs, “Oral History of the American Left. Radical Histories. Oral histories, 1970–1980,” New York University Bobst Tamiment Library.

Boggs recalled, “In those days you didn't read, so one had to have a lot of imagination. You see kids they don't have imagination today because they see everything, they hear it, see it visually.” Ibid.

Glenn Feldman, “Lynching in Alabama, 1889–1921,” Alabama Review 48 (April 1995): 114–141, at 147.

Jan Voogd, Race Riots and Resistance: The Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).

Boggs, “Oral History of the American Left.”

Ibid.

Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 1.

Boggs, “Oral History of the American Left.”

Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 2.

For more on the Great Depression's impact on African American life and work, see Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, To Ask for an Equal Chance: African Americans in the Great Depression (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).

Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 1.

John N. Webb, The Transient Unemployed, WPA Research Monograph, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1935), 101, 105.

Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 1.

Franklin Rosemont, “The Legacy of the Hoboes: What Rebel Workers Today Can Learn from the Footloose Wobblies of Yesteryear,” WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society 8 (September 2005), 593–610, at 606.

Kenneth L. Kusmer, Down and Out, on the Road: The Homeless in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: Norton, 2008), 3–5.

Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 1.

Stuart Hall, “Minimal Selves,” in Identity: The Real Me, ICA Document 6, 1988, 144.

Boggs, “Oral History of the American Left.”

See Boggs, Living for Change, 38–39; Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1973 (New York: Praeger, 1974); Herbert Garfinkel, When Negroes March: The March on Washington Movement in the Organizational Politics for FEP (New York: Atheneum, 1969); Calvin Craig Miller, A. Philip Randolph and the African American Labor Movement (Greensboro, N.C.: Morgan Reynolds, 2005), 63; Melinda Chateauvert, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Women in American History (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Paula Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1990).

Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 12.

Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 6.

Boggs, “Oral History of the American Left.”

Ibid.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1992), 700–701.

Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 4–5.

Vivian M. Baulch and Patricia Zacharias, “The 1943 Detroit Race Riots,” The Detroit News, detnews.com.

Abayomi Azikiwe, “The Global Struggle's Connection to Detroit's 1967 Upheaval: Part 1: Background to Conditions in Motor City,” Worker's World, August 2, 2007.

Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 10.

Thompson, Whose Detroit? 8.

James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook (New York: Monthly Review, 1963), 17.

Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 2.

Ibid., 5.

Boggs, The American Revolution, 21.

Boggs, “Oral History of the American Left.”

Boggs, The American Revolution, 22.

James Boggs FBI File FOIA. Section #1, 10.

Boggs Collection, “Beyond Nationalism: Speech at Forum Sponsored by the Ethiopian Students Union, Teachers College, Columbia University, May 18, 1973,” p. 8. Box 6, Folder 11.

Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 4.

Boggs, The American Revolution, 28–29.

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 18.

Boggs, The American Revolution, 28.

James Boggs FBI File FOIA. Section #1, 10 and 188.

Boggs, “Oral History of the American Left.”

Boggs FBI File FOIA. Section #1, 10 and 188.

Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 4.

Stephen Michael Ward, ‘Ours Too Was a Struggle for a Better World’: Activist Intellectuals and the Radical Promise of the Black Power Movement, 1962–1972” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2002), 43.

Boggs, Living for Change, 77.

See Loren Goldner, “Introduction to the Johnson-Forest Tendency and the Background to ‘Facing Reality,’” in the German translation of Facing Reality by C. L. R. James, Grace Lee, and Cornelius Castoriadis (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2006). The convention's name, “Third Layer,” was taken from Lenin's position that workers and peasants represented a “third layer” force that could prevent the possibility of the first layer of Bolsheviks and second layer of trade unionists from reverting from socialism to state capitalism.

Boggs FBI File FOIA. Section 1, 10.

Boggs, Living for Change, 77.

James Boggs, Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party (Philadelphia: Pacesetters, 1969), vii.

Boggs, Living for Change, 85.

Boggs Collection, “April 26, 1975 Diary/Notes Entry.” Box 6, Folder 12.

Boggs, “Oral History of the American Left.”

Boggs Collection, “April 26, 1975 Diary/Notes Entry.” Box 6, Folder 12.

See Boggs, Living for Change; Ward, “Ours Too Was a Struggle for a Better World”; Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Robeson Taj Frazier, “The Assault of the Monkey King on the Hosts of Heaven: The Black Freedom Struggle and China—The New Center of Revolution,” in African Americans in Global Affairs, ed. Michael Clemons (Lyme, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2010), 313–344; Stephen Michael Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical's Notebook: A James Boggs Reader (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011).

Mao Zedong, “On Practice,” in Five Essays on Philosophy (New York: China Books & Periodicals, 1977), 7–8.