Grace Lee Boggs — Living for Change

In the landscape of Asian American activism, Grace Lee Boggs is a giant, a legend, an icon.

Recently I've been re-reading her 1998 autobiography, Living for Change. As I see it, this is must-read anti-racist history.

Born in 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island, Grace Lee Chin was the Chinese American daughter of middle-class restaurant owners. Grace spent the Great Depression studying philosophy, undergrad at Barnard College and doctoral at Bwyn Mawr College. After which, she dove into radical politics with a full head of steam, joining the Socialist Workers Party, where she took on the pen name of Ria Stone.

In 1939, the Socialist Workers Party split in half over the question of whether or not to continue to be loyal to the Soviet Union (following the invasion of Finland and the Stalin-Hitler pact). A majority followed Trotsky in maintaining the need to support the Soviet Union despite its degenerate state ("bureaucratic collectivism"). A minority broke away and formed the Workers Party, led by Max Schachtman, Marty Abern, and C.L.R. James. Grace fell in with this latter crowd. She writes of this period:

Despite my growing suspicions that my new comrades represented the past rather than the future, the Workers Party's decision to oppose World War II reassured me that I was in the right organization. My main reason for remaining in the party, however, was that I had met C.L.R. James when he stopped in Chicago to talk to the comrades on his way back from organizing sharecroppers in southeast Missouri. Tall, black, and strikingly handsome, C.L.R. was everything that the Chicago branch was not. He was bursting with enthusiasm about the potential for an American revolution inherent in the emergence of the labor movement and the escalating militancy of blacks. When together with another comrade I met him at the train station, he was carrying two thick books, volume 1 of Marx's Capital and Hegel's Science of Logic, both heavily underlined. When he discovered that I had studied Hegel and knew German, we withdrew to my basement room where we spent hours sitting on my old red couch comparing passages in Marx and Hegel, checking the English against the original German. It was the beginning of a theoretical and practical collaberation that lasted twenty years, until we went our separate ways in 1962. [...]

To study Marx and Lenin and to work with C.L.R. I moved back to New York after the Workers Party convention. For a while I lived in my mother's house in Jackson Heights. Later, when she began renting out rooms, I rented apartments in different parts of the city. In the 1940s you could live in New York for very little money.  [ Pictured, from left: Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R. James, and Grace, in the 1940s.]

Living in New York and working with the Johnson-Forest Tendency inside the Workers Party opened me up to a whole new world of people, ideas, and activity.  I visited the Schomburg Collection in Harlem and read Amy Garvey's compilation of her husband's philosophy and opinions. It was exciting to discover that Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement had been inspired in part by the Russian Revolution. Lenin, said Garvey, had seized the opportunity of the crisis of the Western powers caused by World War I to make the October Revolution. People of African descent scattered all over the world, he thought, should follow Lenin's example and exploit the postwar crisis to recover Africa for themselves. The Workers Party had organized Interracial Club with an office on 125th Street in Harlem where we held regular forums. They were chaired by Lyman Paine, who took the name of Tom Brown. After meetings we would go to the Apollo Theater, the Savoy (where I heard Count Basie one night), or Small's Paradise. Connie Williams, a West Indian friend of CLR's, owned a calypso restaurant in the Village where James Baldwin and Richard Wright hung out. [...] Katharine Dunham, one of the founders of the ethnic dance movement, invited me to give a class in philosophy to her dance company. But my own ideas where changing so rapidly in my new milieu that I couldn't imagine myself teaching anybody anything.

Grace's work with C.L.R. brought her many interesting opportunities. In 1954 she collaborated with Mbiyu Koinange on a booklet entitled The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves. She worked with Kwame Nkrumah, author of Towards Colonial Freedom, who eventually made a triumphant return to the Gold Coast. Through her activism, she also met Jimmy Boggs, a factory worker from Detroit whom she eventually married and worked alongside until his death in 1992.

As should be obvious by now, Living for Change captures a series of personal and political snapshots of leftist political development from a unique front-row perspective. From World War II on the home front, through the Civil Rights era and the Black Power movement, through the 80s and her "return" to China to come to terms with her own roots, all the way up to her latest philosophical reflections as she looks back on all her years in politics, Grace Lee Boggs has given us something invaluable: a genuine piece of herself, a piece of her beating heart and soul, a high-minded clear-eyed telling of a revolutionary tale.

Grace is still at it, too. As recently as 2003, Grace was the keynote speaker for the MLK Day Symposium at the University of Michigan. See also this excellent 2005 interview.

I'll leave you with this passage from the introduction of Living for Change:

I consider myself blessed to have been born a Chinese American female with two first names: Grace and Jade Peace. [...] Had I not been born female and Chinese American, I would not have realized from early on that fundamental changes were necessary in our society. Had I not been born female and Chinese American, I might have ended up teaching philosophy at a university, an observer rather than an active participant in the humanity-stretching movements that have defined the last half of the twentieth century. [ Pictured: Grace at 18.]

I never thought I'd be writing my autobiography. As late as the spring of 1994, when Shirley Cloyes of Lawrence Hill Books suggested it, my response was that I would rather continue my movement-building activities.

At that time Jimmy had been dead for less than a year and I was still trying to figure out what I was going to do on my own or, indeed, whether there was any "my own." That is what often happens when you lose the person with whom you have lived and worked closely for decades. Especially if you are a woman, you need time to re-create yourself, to discover who you are. In my case this need was even more acute because for the most of the forty years that I was married to Jimmy, the black movement was the most important movement in the country. So I borrowed a lot of my identity from him—to such a degree that some FBI records describe me as probably Afro-Chinese. [...]

When we first met in 1952, I was a city girl from a middle-class Chinese American family. Despite the fact that I had already been involved in the radical movement for more than a decade and had even worked in a defense plant during World War II, I was still essentially a product of Ivy League women's colleges, a New York intellectual whose understanding of revolutionary struggle came mainly from books. Jimmy had been born and raised in a small town in Alabama where there were only a couple of stores on the main street. [...] I was a Chinese American, an ethnic minority so small as to be almost invisible. He was an African American who was very conscious that the blood and sweat of his ancestors had made possible the rapid economic development of this country and who had already embarked on the struggle to ensure that his people would be among those deciding its economic and political future. 

Ten years after our marriage Jimmy's first book, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook, was published.  [ Pictured, from left: Jimmy Boggs, Grace Lee Boggs, Ted Griffin, in 1957. ] To our amazement it brought a letter of congratulations from the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, initiating a correspondence during which Jimmy did not hesitate to lecture Russell, who was at the time probably the West's best-known philosopher, respectfully but firmly pointing out his ignorance of the ongoing struggle in the United States. As he wrote in the introduction to The American Revolution, "I am a factory worker but I know more than just factory work. I know the difference between what would sound right if one lived in a society of logical people and what is right when you live in a society of real people with real differences."

I believe that the story of how Jimmy and I, coming from such different backgrounds, were able to enjoy such a productive life together can be instructive to other Americans, especially in light of the rapidly changing ethnic composition of this country. [...] With this situation will inevitably come new stresses and strains. If the new immigrants are viewed as a threat, these tensions can explode as they did in South Central Los Angeles in 1992. On the other hand, if older migrants — and except for Native Americans, we have all migrated to this country, by choice or in chains — can see the new arrivals as people on whose backs we have prospered and whom we now need to make ourselves whole, we can embark together on the struggles necessary to make the United States of America what it was meant to be — a country that all of us, regardless of national or ethnic origin, will be proud to call our own.

Comments

[Professor Zero]

!Fascinante!

[Nanette]

In that weird way that seemingly unrelated things have a tendency to converge, for whatever reason, I just left this post, over at P6's, clicked through to a couple of sites listed and then came here.

I'd never heard of Grace Lee Boggs before, and it's just a tad strange to see her name (and recommendations of her) twice, in the course of 5 minutes or so, lol. Obviously, I am meant to read all about her, even more ;).

And this piece is a great start, by the way - I'll have to see about getting her book, too.

[Sylvia]

And the booklist keeps growing. :-p

It's pretty timely that you write about her because at BFP's, there was a brief discussion about "uncovering" the influences of Asian, Asian-American and Pacific-American feminists and radicals. Thanks for sharing this.

[AradhanaD]

Thank you so much for this - zooey and I were just discussing alliances/solidarity between POC. She wanted to organize a guest-blogger series around this. I've got to get her to read this! She'll be thrilled.

[drydock]

Here's a little more history about the Forest-Johnson milieu.

http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/johnson.html

[brownfemipower]

you can't really say grace lee boggs without mentioning detroit--she's a major organizer there--several of my friends are organizing with her around the school crisis in Detroit--she's the one who came up with idea that kids were "opting out" of school rather than dropping out--that is, they are choosing to do different things because school is so non beneficial to them anymore--be locked up in a militarized dungeon where you have to bring your own toilet paper just to take a pee, oh, and you can only use the bathroom once a day at that OR sell drugs on the street and be in control of your own life, your own destiny--which would you take?
anyway, she's still influencing the hell out of life--she spoke at eastern michigan's MLK day THIS year--she's rocking cool amazing, and it's SO inspiring to see younger generations working along side older generations like that.

[PC]

I am happy to hear such a great review of her book. I will run out and buy it.

I have read about her a few times over the past 5 years or so.

Thanks so very much for sharing your thoughts about such an extraordinary woman with us.

[Sudy]

AWESOME.

She is a shero of mine.

[Chinese-Assimilation]

"I was married to Jimmy, the black movement was the most important movement in the country. So I borrowed a lot of my identity from him—to such a degree that some FBI records describe me as probably Afro-Chinese"

Chinese women are always the first to surrender their own racial identity out of shame and appropriate that of Blacks or Whites. And do it with misguided pride.

That is why Blacks have achieved pet minority status in this country, while Chinese are floundering under relentless Yellow Peril rhetoric and self-hate.

[Kai]

Chinese-Assimilation, you're a laughably clueless racist moron with no grasp of either the past or the present, but I'm gonna let your comment stand as an ugly reminder of how some people of color internalize white racism. Run along now and go play with your pal Kenneth Eng in your pathetic pit of ignorance.