Activist (1915–2015)

Detroit is the space and place to begin anew. Detroit is a city of hope. Revolutions are about creating new societies in the places and spaces left vacant by the disintegration of the old. These words and visions, told by Grace Lee Boggs, underpinned the way she saw Detroit and how it would shape the world to come. It is fitting to end our conversations about Detroit with a woman who believed that change and revolution came from creating new economies, relationships, and ways of thinking from the ground up, not by seizing power. In her later years, the concept of revolution changed to one of (r)evolution, meaning that revolution happened over time, through people changing their relationships with themselves, each other, and the world around them. For Grace, evolution and revolution stand in a dialectic relationship with each other. I had the privilege to meet with Grace several times, and to bring groups of students from the Netherlands into her home. One of my final conversations with Grace took place in April 2014 and is featured in the following text. Grace lived to be 100, and passed away in October 2015. For most of her life, she was a revolutionary. Some of her early work was with the Marxist C.L.R. James in the 1940s and 1950s. She moved to Detroit in 1953, with her husband James Boggs, a fellow activist and African-American from the South who migrated to Detroit to work in the auto factories. Grace and Jimmy would later have an intellectual break with C.L.R. James and with Marxism. In Detroit, they worked together on issues of civil rights and the black power movement. Living in Detroit influenced the Boggs’ thinking on the role of automation (which was making much of Detroit's labor force redundant), capital flight, and racism. Jimmy passed away in 1993. For Grace, revolution and transformation are not “magical process[es] but hard work that required taking responsibility for ourselves and our communities” (Kelley, 2015). The creation of self-governance structures and the rethinking of work through local production were central to hers and Jimmy's ideas of revolution. This is why the role of urban agriculture and community gardens (see Feedom Freedom, Chapter Twenty-two), and place-based education (see Boggs School, Chapter Twenty-three), among others, were essential to her ideas and struggles.

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