100 Years of Grace
A repost of a story I posted in June, 2015 in honor of the 100th birthday of my friend and mentor, Grace Lee Boggs. One hundred days later, Grace joined the ancestors.
Tomorrow my dear friend and esteemed mentor, Grace Lee Boggs will celebrate her 100th birthday.
Imagine that.
When Grace was born, Woodrow Wilson was President. The telephone, automobile and airplane were cutting edge technologies. Women did not have the right to vote, and the Chinese Exclusion Act was in full force. Grace often opened her talks by saying, “Because I was born to Chinese immigrant parents and because I was born female, I learned very quickly that the world needed changing.”
Grace dedicated her life to change. Raised in Queens, she graduated from Barnard College in 1935, and received her PhD in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1940. She moved to Chicago where, despite having an advanced degree, she found few job options. She worked as a librarian and lived in a basement apartment where she had to step over the rats to enter. These conditions among others, spurred her to action.
For the next twenty years, Grace collaborated with C.L.R James and Raya Dunayevskaya, founding the Johnson-Forest Tendency. She engaged in the political struggle for the disenfranchised during the McCarthy era and the Cold War, and her FBI file grew thick. Grace declined the marriage proposal of Kwame Nkrumah, who became the first president of Ghana and founded the Organization of African Unity. Mr. Nkrumah reportedly said, “if Grace had married me, we would have changed all Africa.”
In 1953, Grace moved to Detroit and met James (Jimmy) Boggs. While they could not have been more different, Grace, the Chinese-American PhD Marxist from New York, said yes when Jimmy, an African American, high school educated auto worker from Alabama, asked her to marry him — at the end of their disastrous first date! They became partners in work and life for the next 40 years.
The year I was born, Jimmy published his seminal book, The American Revolution: Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook, where he prophetically wrote about the ills we are experiencing today. In 1964, Grace tried to convince Malcolm X to run for US Senate. Grace and Jimmy co-authored a number of articles and books, including Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century. They sustained committed action on behalf of workers, African Americans and young people in Detroit and elsewhere. In 1992, they founded Detroit Summer, an internationally recognized multicultural intergenerational youth program.
The first thing Grace asked me when we met was “where are you from?” Knowing she was asking where my people were from, I answered, “Toisan.” She smiled and replied, “Me too.” Then she took my cheeks in her hands and said, “That means we’re family.”
I have spent many days with Grace, running about town (she loved to drive) to meetings, community celebrations, and her water aerobics class. We’d cook our version of soul food — seaweed and tofu soup, steamed pork with salt fish, Chinese sausage and rice — and talk for hours. It was through these conversations that I learned about dialectical thinking. She taught me to look at everything from many sides, not just my own, and re-imagine what possibilities can emerge.
These conversations were rarely easy. But Grace prepared me for the challenging work ahead — that of healing our communities and growing our souls.
Since she fell last summer, Grace has been quieter. We now sit in silence, allowing our love and friendship to pass through the energy of our joined hands. While she has expressed that she is ready to go, she also wants to sort out her books (she has several thousand), make it to 100 (check), and be around for the next revolution (stay tuned).
Grace closed her letters to me with the salutation — “In Love and Struggle.” She believed then and believes now that if we can confront our struggles in the spirit of love, we can prevail together. Her point became real to me last night when my husband and son engaged in an uncomfortable conversation about race. I imagined Grace sitting next to me, encouraging us to stay in the struggle and hold it with respect and love. It was tough, but like a post-exercise feeling, we concluded breathing easier afterward.
Much has changed in Grace’s lifetime. We have a Black president. We can travel anywhere and access an infinite amount of information with handheld devices. And marriage between same-sex couples is, as of this morning, the law of the land.
What will the next 100 years bring?
Grace says, “the time has come to re-imagine everything.” I’m looking forward to re-imagining community, government, education, work, ecology, family and so on, in love and struggle. But for today, I’ll be content in celebrating 100 years of Grace.
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