Grace Lee Boggs, the child of Chinese immigrants who spent her life actively supporting causes ranging from civil rights and labor to the Black Power and feminist movements, died October 5.
“Grace died as she lived surrounded by books, politics, people, and ideas,” Alice Jennings and Shea Howell, two of Boggs’ trustees, said in a statement.
President Barack Obama—who himself was a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s—said he and the first lady were “saddened” to hear of Boggs’ death.
“Grace dedicated her life to serving and advocating for the rights of others—from her community activism in Detroit, to her leadership in the civil rights movement, to her ideas that challenged us all to lead meaningful lives,” Obama said in a statement.
Howell, who has known Boggs for more than 40 years and co-founded the Boggs Center, said the centenarian activist spent the entirety of her life pushing people to challenge the status quo. Howell told The Huffington Post that Grace said she knew from the beginning that the world needed to change.” Boggs was born Grace Chin Lee in Providence, Rhode Island and grew up in New York City. She attended Barnard College and graduated in 1935; she later earned a doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College.
In the 1930s, Boggs began her political activism, notably working with activist A. Philip Randolph, who proposed the first March on Washington in 1941, and later in Chicago organizing communities against slum housing. Boggs was so integral to the Black Power movement and other African- American issues that she was described in some of her FBI files as “probably Afro-Chinese.”
Boggs met her husband, Detroit autoworker and community activist James Boggs, in 1953. The pair went on a seemingly disastrous first date in which James refused to eat the meal Grace had made and insulted her taste in music, according to a 2014 profile in Hour Detroit. They were engaged by the end of the evening, with Grace Lee Boggs telling the magazine, “He was more rooted and more secure in his identity as a human being than any man I had ever met.”
Boggs and her husband would continue their activism efforts and in their own city, they organized the Detroit civic organization Save Our Sons And Daughters (SOSAD), Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, Gardening Angels and Detroit Summer, a “multi-racial, inter-generational collective” focused on building youth leadership. She hoped to turn Detroit’s 40 or so square miles of empty land into an archipelago of small, collective farms, a model, she believed, for a sustainable future. In her later years, she collaborated with activists in Detroit to create a new generation of leaders, starting with inner-city kids. A few years ago, with her blessing, they started a charter school.
Grace died in her modest six-room house, in a fairly bleak section of Detroit’s East Side, surrounded by her friends and piles of books. By her last days, she was, in her own words, more “evolutionary” than “revolutionary.” Her projects reflected the more limited sense of possibility than the one that fired up a Depression-era socialist. But she never lost her faith in the people of Detroit.
Z
By various contributors, including Kim Bellware from the Huffington Post.