Living for Change This page intentionally left blank Living for Change An Autobiography Grace Lee Boggs Foreword by Ossie Davis University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London "Reassurance," from Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, by Alice Walker, is reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace and Company; "Sam's Life," words and music by Oscar Brown Jr., originally published by E. B. Marks Music, reprinted by permission of Oscar Brown Jr.; "A White Man's Heaven Is a Black Man's Hell," by Louis X, reprinted by permission of Louis Farrakhan; "Paul Robeson," by Gwendolyn Brooks, reprinted by permission of Broadside Press; "Let Us Stop This Madness," by Trinidad Sanchez Jr., from "Why Am I So Brown?" from the book of the same name by Trinidad Sanchez Jr., copyright 1991, reprinted by permission of March Abrazo Press, Chicago, Illinois; "Calling All Brothers,0" by Gloria House (aka Aneb Kgositsile), originally published by Broadside Press, reprinted by permission of the author; "SOSAD—The War Zone," by Errol A. Henderson, reprinted by permission of the author; "Lessons in Grace," by Gloria House (aka Aneb Kgositsile), reprinted by permission of the author; "On the Anniversary of Grace," by Louis Tsen, reprinted by permission of the author; "For James Boggs — Writer, Activist, Worker," by Ruby Dee, reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright 1998 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press, 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http ://www.upress .umn. edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boggs, Grace Lee. Living for change : an autobiography / Grace Lee Boggs ; foreword by Ossie Davis, p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8166-2954-4 (hc : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8166-2955-2 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Boggs, Grace Lee. 2. Chinese American women — Michigan — Detroit—Biography. 3. Political activists — Michigan — Detroit — Biography. 4. Chinese Americans — Michigan—Detroit—Biography. 5. Detroit (Mich.) — Biography. 6. Boggs, James. I. Title. F574.D49C53 1998 303.48'4'092—dc21 97-27296 [B] Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 Dedicated to Jimmy Boggs 19/9-1993 W. H. (Ping) Ferry 1910-1995 Dorothy Garner 1929-1995 Kathleen Gough 1925-1990 Freddy Paine 1912-1999 Lyman Paine 1901-1978 and Detroit Summer Youth Volunteers "Shaking the World with a New Dream" Books, pamphlets, and newsletters by Grace and Jimmy Boggs and associates. Photo by Rebecca Cook Contents Foreword ix Ossie Davis Introduction xi 1 1 East Is East—Or Is It? 2 21 From Philosophy to Politics 3 45 C. L. R. James 4 75 Jimmy 5 117 "The City Is the Black Man's Land" 6 143 Beyond Rebellion 7 191 "Going Back" to China 8 209 New Dreams for the Twenty-First Century 9 241 On My Own Notes 273 Index 291 Foreword Ossie Davis Life is not easy, and like most who are perpetual students I need help. My logic limps; my conclusions stumble and fall; the truth I seek has been known to bear false witness. So when most in need of clarification, or to get confusions mended, I come to Jim and Grace to sit and listen. The foun- tain is always flowing, the welcome generous. They share their thinking gladly. I never leave without learning something new. This book by Grace is no exception. I read it, my cup runneth over. For here is more than a feast for the hungering heart, or even a picnic—here is a life stating its case in eloquent summation, the journey now in sight of the setting sun. Grace is the voice, but you'll hear Jimmy, too, caught in midflight, never at rest except for ammunition. Time does not stand still, and neither do our two mentors. This book records two lives still up and growing. They search for truth as flowers search for sun- light, as hunters search for game, and whatever they find they bring and put on the table. Through these pages walk causes, gatherings, confrontations, move- ments, and the men and women who made them: workers and students and committees of the People; Christians, Black Muslims, Black Panthers, labor unions; C. L. R. James, Rev. Cleage, Rev. Franklin, Coleman Young, Malcolm and Martin; artists, musicians, poets, actors, strikers, and seekers of revolution; members of both their families; and Jimmy, the flaming sword as much as Grace: his energy, his urgency, his dedication, his hon- esty, his patience, as well as his egregious lack of patience. ix x Foreword And Grace, and Grace, and Grace, constant as steel in all her moods and modes, yet supple and embracing. She takes us into the privacy of her past, filled as it is with family, and books, and study, with struggling, like an outsider, to grasp her "native tongue," and never quite making it. Going home at last to China, but finding her ultimate citizenship in Strug- gle, her proper setting. That's where she belongs, there in the lines of march with all the People. Growing, changing, and developing fast as the daily headlines, yet ever constant—I say it again—and therefore good for goals and for guidance, like Harriet Tubman and the North Star. Journeying into the past in search of the future. This book is the pilot's log. From beginning to end, I could not read the words without hear- ing her voice — or seeing her face before me as she said them, especially when she spoke of Jimmy and his dying. It was almost as if she turned and, finding the reader crying, paused until he or she caught up, and then re- turned to talking—talking and teaching, until the final page. Introduction I consider myself blessed to have been born a Chinese American female with two first names: Grace and Jade Peace, which is -i- -^ in Chinese. Had I not been born female and Chinese American, I would not have re- alized from early on that fundamental changes were necessary in our soci- ety. 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 de- fined the last half of the twentieth century. 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 per- son 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 most of the forty years that I was married to Jimmy, the black movement was the most impor- tant 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. In the three years since Jimmy's death I have been creating my own identity chiefly by my active participation in the ongoing movement to rebuild, redefine, and respirit Detroit from the ground up. As I gradually xi xii Grace Lee Boggs acquired more confidence in my ability to make decisions on my own, I also became more interested in discovering my own history. Through writing this book I have learned things about myself that I find fascinating. For example, I discovered that my tendency toward non- conformity probably comes from my mother from whom I was estranged during the last fifteen years of her life. I also learned that one reason I am so critical of the victim mentality is that it made my mother's life so miser- able and contributed to our estrangement. I decided that the main reason I married Jimmy was that I needed to become whole. When we first met in 1952,1 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. Even though at that time he had lived and worked in Detroit for fifteen years, he was still the kind of person about whom people joke, "You can take him out of the country but you can't take the country out of him." The main thing I like to do with my fingers is move them around on a keyboard. He loved to write and would dash off an article or a letter to the editor in minutes, but most of the time he had his hands in some kind of manual work, under the hood of a car or fixing something around the house.