An unusual suspect: often working behind the scenes, Grace Lee Boggs has intrigued scholars and students with her lifelong mentoring of Black radicals

Diverse Issues in Higher Education, April 19, 2007 by Lydia Lum

Dr. Wang Zheng wastes no words when it comes to discussing the person she most admires, a 91-year-old Chinese-American revolutionary activist whose life's work Wang includes in her University of Michigan courses.

Wang says she knew very little about Dr. Grace Lee Boggs before the latter participated in an oral history project on campus a few years ago. Wang then read Boggs' autobiography, and says she was amazed by Boggs' dealings with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights figures. Wang was also intrigued by the longstanding commitment Boggs and her husband, Jimmy Boggs, had to Detroit's Black community.

"Grace is my idol," Wang says. "I have a deep, profound respect for her. I never expected to encounter an Asian American woman like her. She is extraordinarily courageous for having crossed so many boundaries and departed from all the norms. She is a wonderful role model, not just for Chinese-Americans, but for all the younger generations."

Boggs plays down the adulation and insists she has merely followed her passion. She says such compliments encourage "vertical relationships," rather than the "horizontal relationships of a participatory democracy" that she advocates.

The daughter of immigrants, she was born Grace Lee in 1915 in Providence, R.I. The family soon moved to New York City, where her father ran a huge Chinese restaurant near Times Square. The restaurant, which seated nearly 1,000 people, became nationally famous and a de facto hub of Chinese culture. But it was her mother who served as an early model of feminism. Tired of her husband's patriarchal expectations of female obedience, Boggs' mother threw him out of their house and bad-mouthed him to the restaurant's employees. The public display was rare among Chinese-Americans of that era, and considered a great embarrassment to her father. Yet Boggs would later credit her activism to both of her parents, recalling how her father dreamed of modernizing his village back in China.

She earned her bachelor's degree from Barnard College, followed by a doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1940. The writings of George Herbert Mead inspired her to move to Chicago, where she knew no one but where Mead had developed many of his ideas. Dozens of homeowners and landlords refused to let her rent a room because of her ethnicity. A sympathetic Jewish woman finally let her take a basement apartment, where she says the rats came and went as frequently as she did. Boggs soon landed a $10-a-week job as a University of Chicago librarian. But it was her involvement with a local tenants' rights organization fighting rat-infested housing that taught her about organized protests and, more importantly, about the many social ills in Black communities.

A political collaboration with Marxists C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya took her back to New York, where she supported herself with odd jobs in order to study Marx and Lenin. That association introduced her to many Black writers and political leaders in the 1940s and '50s, including Kwame Nkrumah, who would become the first president of Ghana. Nkrumah, who was finishing college in the United States, was so smitten with the young activist that he proposed marriage. But, in her autobiography, Living for Change, she says she couldn't fathom being politically active in a place "where I was totally ignorant of the history, geography and culture," so she declined.

Ironically, she would accept Jimmy Boggs' marriage proposal in 1953 at the end of their first date, even though she knew little about him. He was two hours late for their dinner and refused to eat the lamb chops she cooked. They met through a newspaper they were helping James and Dunayevskaya publish. Editing and writing articles took the couple to Detroit, where Jimmy was a Chrysler autoworker and activist. Although her mother cut off ties with her for marrying a Black man, Grace Lee became Grace Lee Boggs and committed herself to Detroit, Black liberation and movement activism. Their home became a popular meeting place for grassroots activists, who spent long hours theorizing and strategizing.

"Jimmy and Grace mentored a whole generation of radicals in Detroit," says Dr. Peniel Joseph, an assistant professor of Africana studies at the State University of New York-Story Brook. "Although they worked behind the scenes, they seemed to be everywhere, and they were very influential. My students are particularly fascinated by Grace's story."

Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley, a University of Southern California professor of cultural and historical studies, has described Living for Change as "a jewel" and a "brilliant, crucial memoir." It "might be the most important political memoir of the second half of the twentieth century," he has said. And indeed, the pages of Living for Change are rife with mention of Grace's dealings with Malcolm X, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Bob Moses, the Rev. Albert Cleage and a host of others. The book is a virtual Who's Who of Black history that spans the Cold War, the civil rights era, the rise of Black Power, the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers and today's rebuilding of urban communities.