Grace Lee Boggs
“Why is nonviolence such an important--not just a tactic, not just a strategy--but an important philosophy? Because it respects the capacity of humans to grow. It gives them the opportunity to grow their souls, and we owe that to each other.” - Grace Lee Boggs
"I don't know what the next American revolution is going to be like, but we might be able to imagine it if your imagination were rich enough." - Grace Lee Boggs
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Grace Lee Boggs was born on Jun 27th, 1915 in Rhode Island to two Chinese immigrants. She went to Barnard College on a scholarship and eventually a PhD at Bryn Mawr College in 1940. During her studies, Boggs mentioned how philosophers Hegel and Kant were big influences in her life. Even during the height of WWII, Boggs was able to continue with her education.
Despite her academic studies, overt racial and gender barriers made it impossible for Boggs to find any jobs. She eventually went to work at a low-wage job at the University of Chicago Philosophy Library. It was there that she interacted with the Black community for the first time, when she witnessed a protest about horrible housing conditions. From there, her career in activism took off, joining the left-wing Workers Party. She eventually married James Boggs in 1952 and moved to Detroit to focus on civil rights and Black Power movements there. She was a staunch supporter of socialism amid McCarthyism and the Cold War while focusing on issues such as racism and misogyny.
A major part of Boggs’s work focused on activism and revolutions. She co-authored a book with her husband titled The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook. It focused on James Boggs’s struggle in the labor market and argued that the solution was for a revolution, which, in the context of the then Black Power movement, had already begun. Grace Lee Boggs continued to work on grass-roots initiatives in Detroit for the Black community, fighting for Black representation in government positions.
For many in the Detroit and Black communities, her original background as a Chinese American led to certain barriers. Her early interviews drew strong boundaries of her not being Black or of the community. However, as her activism outreach grew, she began using the word “we” when describing the Black community. Boggs was so synonymous with Detroit’s Black Power movement that when the FBI investigated Boggs on civil unrest cases, they assumingly described her as “probably Afro Chinese.” One Black activist once said that “folks didn’t really think of Grace as a Chinese American. She was Grace...she was one of us.”
When her husband died in 1998, Boggs turned her focus to community-based activism as well as being an example for the Asian American community. Through media requests and her autobiography, she began to share her story through speaking events across the US, but she always brought back her stories to Detroit. She founded The James & Grace Lee Boggs School in Detroit and continued her activism in the form of deep conversations with individuals. Boggs died in 2015, a few months after her 100th birthday.
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