For anyone who has ever wanted to work for social change, this life story by a wise and vital woman is a guidebook. As the book's cover tells us, "Grace Lee Boggs is a first-generation Chinese American who has been a speaker, writer, and movement activist in the African- American community for fifty-five years." After earning her Ph.D. in philosophy at Bryn Mawr in June of 1940, Grace wanted to become an activist. She moved to Chicago in the fall of 1940 and began working with the South Side Tenants Organization--a group that had been set up by the Workers Party.
When distinguished "labor leader A. Phillip Randolph issued a call for blacks all over the country to march on Washington to demand jobs in the defense plants," more and more people began attending the Workers Party discussions in Chicago's Washington Park. Grace had been invited to participate in those discussions. She said, "The more I went out in the community and met people, the more inadequate I was beginning to feel." When Randolph's leadership of the March on Washington movement was successful and President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, Grace realized "the power that the black community has within itself to change this country when it begins to move. As a result, I decided that what I wanted to do with the rest of my life was to become a movement activist in the black community." To Grace, "Joining the Workers Party seemed a good way to start," and that's what she did, in order to get the political education she felt she needed.
In the 1950s, Grace moved to Detroit where she worked on the Socialist Workers Party newsletter and met Jimmy Boggs, "A rank-and-file black Chrysler-Jefferson worker and community activist." Grace liked living in Detroit because it "felt like a 'Movement' city where radical history had been made and could be made again." She also liked working with Jimmy. Having worked closely with C. L. R. James, the intellectually powerful Socialist philosopher, Grace felt that her life had been "exciting but also extremely intellectual." She reasoned that she "needed to return to the concrete." Grace and Jimmy married in 1953 and began a life together that was rooted in the concrete reality of a major 20th-century industrialized city that had been abandoned by the large corporations that built it and by much of its white population.
As Ossie Davis says in his foreword to Grace's book, "Through these pages walk causes, gatherings, confrontations, movements, and the men and women who made them: workers and students and committees of the People...." Studs Terkel has called Grace's book "More than a deeply moving memoir...." He said, "...this is a book of revelation."
It is just that, for with passion and reason, Grace invites us to join her and Jimmy. She shows how they made "Detroit Summer" and "Gardening Angels" part of a new urban economic system, and she shows us how to interact multiculturally and multi-generationally. She doesn't merely talk about it--she does it and reports on its results. Grace Boggs educates us in her book and helps us see the possibilities of what we can do in our own cities.
