There isn’t a better story in Michigan than this, and you’ve probably never heard it. Years ago, a Chinese-American woman with a Ph.D from Bryn Mawr moved to Detroit to publish a newsletter.
She was a follower of an obscure Caribbean leader of a tiny Marxist sect. One night, Grace Lee invited one of the sect’s few other local members for dinner. She barely knew him.
He was a black autoworker from Alabama, with an eighth-grade education and six kids. He showed up two hours late. He told her he didn’t like what she had made for dinner and sneered at her taste in music. And then, he asked her to marry him. And she said yes.
Not only did they stay married for forty years, until Jimmy Boggs died of cancer -- they formed an absolutely unique intellectual partnership -- and for many years, the half-educated autoworker was the senior member. His 1963 book, The American Revolution: Notes From a Negro Worker’s Notebook, was so brilliant it drew a fan letter from Bertrand Russell, then the best-known philosopher living.
Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs were among the first to recognize that machines and automation were making many workers unnecessary -- and that this in turn, made many workers irrelevant.
“The time had come, they preached, for those who would change the world to stop studying the theories of Karl Marx -- and begin trying to do for their time what Marx had done for his.
The time had come to try to figure out how to help people in the post-industrial future. And how to help the city of Detroit, the biggest urban casualty of the industrial past. Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs worked at that together, writing, lecturing, agitating. They were lionized by world figures -- and mostly shunned by the local media. Actor Ossie Davis was a frequent visitor, as was his wife, Ruby Dee.
Since Jimmy’s death in 1993 Grace has carried on alone, trying to revitalize, and as she says, re-civilize her adopted city from an aging old house in a problematical neighborhood on Detroit’s near east side. Her autobiography, Living For Change, drew rave reviews from people like Studs Terkel and Cornell West.
Grace Lee Boggs, who turned 90 last July, still writes a weekly column. She travels and lectures all over the world, though not quite as much. Mostly, she devotes herself to trying, as she puts it, “to rebuild, redefine and re-spirit Detroit from the ground up,” through Detroit Summer, a multi-racial youth organization.
Prophets are, of course, traditionally never honored at home. This is one case, where we really need to make an exception.
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