KRISTYAN KOURI Is an Artist and Lecturer in Sociology and Women's

KRISTYANKOURI is an artist and lecturer in sociology and women's studies at 1 8 California State University, Northridge. Arnerosia Journal 25:2 (1999): 18-40 At the Margins of the Asian American Polit i cal Experience: The Life of Grace Lee Boggs Jenniferlung Hee Choi In the introduction to her autobiography, Living for Change, Grace Lee Boggs states: I consider myself blessed to have been born a Chinese American female. 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.’ From this statement, one could easily anticipate the autobiography to recount 1) the significance of the author’s racial experiences as a Chinese in America to fueling her lifelong commitment to revo- lutionary change, 2) and consequently, the impact of the Chinese/ Asian American struggle on her political life and activities. How- ever, Boggs’ actual autobiography reveals quite the opposite. In reality, the Asian American experience has never been central to Boggs’ political or ideological development. Although her experiences as a Chinese American may be im- portant to understanding Boggs’ personal development, they play a relatively insubstantial role in her political career that spans more than fifty years. In fact, the struggles of Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans received marginal political attention JENNIFER JUNG HEECHOI is an activist in the San Francisco Bay area and a first-year doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. 19 - ; from Boggs, particularly compared with African Americans who $ remained her primary focus. 7 ._0 Since the death of West Indian Marxist C.L.R. James in 1989 and Russian Marxist Raya Dunayevskaya in 1987 with whom Boggs had a combined thirty-year plus intellectual and political association, a number of articles, anthologies, and manuscripts have surfaced on the former two, but little has developed around Boggs was an international figure in both the Trotskyist movement and the Black Liberation struggle in addition to having worked with renowned international radicals, such as Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X, Cornelius Castoriadis, George Padmore and other^.^ However, Boggs prevails as the ”invisible” Asian American. She has received virtually little or no attention from Asian American scholars and activists. As Robert G. Lee summarized in his brief Asian immigrant radical historiography, “still less is known about leftists outside the [Communist Party] such as the novelist H.T. Tsian, the progressive journalist Y.K. Chu or Grace Lee Boggs who became active in the Trotskyist m~vement.”~ This current study serves as a corrective-an attempt to make Boggs a more ”visible” figure in left, African American, and Asian American histories. This essay aims to (re)introduce Boggs to current Asian American activists and scholars by raising questions and suggestions about her relevancy to the Asian American Movement. I argue, as the struggles of Asian Americans have been marginal to Boggs’ political life, she has been at the margins of the Asian American political experience. Because of her political involvement principally with the African American movement and her ideological worldview, Boggs has been isolated from the Asian American experience most of her life. As an historical study, this work is based on primary and sec- ondary research. I rely heavily on her recently published autobiography, a recent interview, published works and other resources. I give primary attention to Boggs’ political life and practice which is examined in two periods, 1941-1962 and 1962-1987. The two periods reflect Boggs’ heaviest and most intense stages of political activity and development. The first period examines Boggs’ political work within the Johnson-Forest Tendency and the second focuses on her political activity after her split with C.L.R. James and her intellectual and political partnership with her husband, James Boggs. I also briefly examine some of Boggs’ ideological forma- tions. The article concludes with some questions about what ”les- sons” she may have to offer Asian American scholars and activists. 20 The Johnson-ForestTendency and Grace Lee Boggs, 1941-1962 The Evolution of a Socialist Activist In 1915, Grace Chin Lee was born in Rhode Island to Chinese immigrant parents. While Boggs was born nine years before the immigration law that would officially close the doors to Asian immigration for decades to follow, her parents arrived in Califor- nia at the height of Asian exclusion. Boggs, however, grew up in the New England area and New York City, where her father owned a large Chinese restaurant. She was the fifth child among seven. At sixteen, Boggs attended Barnard College on a scholarship, ultimately majoring in philosophy. Boggs then attended Bryn Mawr where she graduated in 1940. After receiving her doctor- ate, Boggs said she was at a loss for what to do with her life. The opportunity to teach philosophy at a predominantly white university was closed to her due to racism. Despite her passion for philosophy, Boggs decided she would become involved with political struggles rather than engage in the practice of professional philosophy. She concluded that political struggle would give life to her philosophical reflection^.^ Boggs’ evolution as a political activist is closely tied to the embryonic African American mass movement of the 1940s and the international socialist movement, particularly the Trotskyist movement. In the fall of 1940, she moved from New York to Chicago. Before long, she became involved with the South Side Tenants Or- ganization-a tenants association affiliated with the Workers Party, a Trotskyist organization, led by Martin Abern, C.L.R. James, Max Shachtman and A.J. Muste. Her involvement introduced her to ”people in the Black community,” and gave her a “sense of what segregation and discrimination meant in people’s lives,” and she learned how “to organize protest demonstrations and meetings. Up to that point [she] had practically no contact with Black people.”6 On the basis of her experiences with the South Side Tenants Organization and the proposed March on Washington in 1941 called by African American labor and civil rights leader, A. Phillip Randolph, Boggs became greatly excited by embryonic signs of an African American mass movement. Her revolution- ary spirit was fueled by the burning issues of racism and national oppression which she saw as adversely impacting the lives of Af- rican Americans. As a result, she decided “that what I wanted to do with the rest of my life was to become a movement activist in the Black comrn~nity.”~Despite the fact that she was an Asian Grace Lee Boggs, Detroit, September 1997. Photograph by Jennifer lung Hee Choi. American, Boggs committed her life to the Black liberation struggle. In 1941, Boggs joined the Workers Party. She initially saw the Workers Party as assisting in her efforts to organize in the Black community. As she explained in her autobiography: Joining the Workers Party seemed a good way to start since it was through the party that I had made contact with the black community. I assumed that the party would provide me with the political education that I needed to overcome my ignorance.8 Her membership in the Workers Party offered her an opportunity to do day-to-day organizing in the African American community. Her membership in the Workers Party was also impor- tant because it marked her introduction to Marxism. Although Boggs claimed that she was never ideologically committed to Trotskyism, her understanding of Marxism was greatly influenced by political issues and ideological debates specific to the Trotskyist m~vement.~ Boggs soon concluded that the Chicago local chapter of the Workers Party worked in isolation from the African American 22 community. The organization's lack of political work in the Black community in addition to sectarianism caused Boggs to become increasingly dissatisfied with the Workers Party.lo Although she contemplated leaving the party, she decided to stay because she met West Indian Marxist Cyril Lionel Robert (C.L.R.) James. James, who had recently arrived in the United States in 1938, was a well-known activist, orator and theoretician in the international Trotskyist movement. In 1938, James was one of two Brit- ish delegates who participated in the founding of the Fourth In- ternational, serving on the executive committee from 1938 to 1940. Not only was James involved with the international socialist movement, but he also had participated in the Pan-African movement, specifically the England-based group, the Interna- tional African Service Bureau, and its newspaper, International African Opinion. Since his arrival in the United States, James was involved in organizing Black sharecroppers in southeast Mis- souri and also actively recruiting more African Americans into the Trotskyist movement. Boggs and James shared an enthusiasm for the African American mass movement. Part of the reason that she gravitated toward James was because both shared the view that "the poten- tial for an American revolution [was] inherent in the emergence of the labor movement and the escalating militancy of blacks."" Soon after meeting James, Boggs discovered they both also had a passion for the nineteenth-century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. As Boggs recounted: When together with another comrade I met [C.L.R. James] at the train station, he was carrying two thick books, volume 1 of Marx's Capital and Hegel's Science of Logic, both heavily under- lined. 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.I2 This initial meeting between Boggs and James marked the beginning of their twenty-year political and theoretical collabo- ration which ended when they split politically in 1962.

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