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grace lee boggs
The Day After
Donald Trump's victory left a lot of us numb and speechless on the day after the election. His rise to the presidency was always inconceivable and yet throughout the 18-month campaign, he defied all logic, polls and scandals and made it to the top.
Nov 13, 2016
Donald Trump's victory left a lot of us numb and speechless on the day after the election. His rise to the presidency was always inconceivable and yet throughout the 18-month campaign, he defied all logic, polls and scandals and made it to the top.
At first I couldn't figure out what to do with this news, but I was certain I didn't want to be angry for the next four years. That attitude, in fact, elected Trump and I didn't want to feed it. Instead, I decided to handle this disaster in a spiritual way. So I spent the day in prayer and consultation with octogenarian nuns who have seen it all and later attended an inter-faith prayer service at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Kalamazoo. Throughout the day I seemed to encounter people who helped me formulate a plan of action for dealing with this unforeseen and potentially destructive next four years. I pass it on to you, the fruit of my prayer and meditation, as a sincere offering of hope and action.
* Regard this time as a special time in our country that calls us to act with love, compassion, peace and joy to all the people we encounter instead of acting rashly out of hatred, violence or disgust.
* Focus on the local community and make it a good place to live for everyone. Take care of others by empathetic listening.
* Support and protect people who are from minority groups, different faiths, the LGBT community, pregnant women, women vulnerable to rape and sexual harassment, international visitors, immigrants, refugees, study abroad students and anyone who may be a target for bullying, ridicule or violence.
* Cry if you must. Be sad if you are sad. But pick yourself up again and be with people. Don't dwell on negative feelings. Instead, hold another's pain, fear, anger and disappointment in your hand for a while so they can re-orient themselves to take the necessary time they need to find a level of comfort and solitude that will enable them to deal with their difficulties.
* Pray for those who voted for Trump because they felt disenfranchised and angry. They were hurting but we failed to hear them. They felt alone, betrayed and scared about their future, but we failed to go to them. Sometimes, we even mocked them. Remember that they are our fellow Americans, and some of them are from our families. We need to be there with them and with each other much like we did after the 9/11 attacks.
* Watch less TV news and avoid too much social media. Rely less on polls and pundits--both conservative and liberal. Read more serious magazines and newspapers and watch more thoughtful media that analyze the issues and provide the facts. Then, look at the people around you and see where they are, hear what they say. Look into your own heart and use your own eyes and ears to understand what is going on. Spend more time in solitude because it grounds you, calms you, helps you see more clearly and be more receptive to the needs of others. This is an experiment in "otherness" rather then "me-ness."
A Trump victory was definitely not what I wanted, but now that it is here, let's regard it an opportunity for us to change ourselves, especially in the absence of genuine leadership from government--which will now include Trump. As Detroit philosopher and activist Grace Lee Boggs said: "We are the leaders we have been waiting for." Let's move ourselves in that direction. A Trump victory is an opportunity for us to make our communities good, safe and vital places to live. It is an opportunity for creativity. It is an opportunity to make a difference in our own lives and in the lives of others if we can commit ourselves to love, gentleness, peace and joy.
Money Media Cover Change Makers Most When They're Dead
It's amazing how money media cover activists, when they die. When radical philosopher and organizer Grace Lee Boggs passed away on October 5, she received long, respectful obituaries in just about every paper. "Activist and revolutionary", "trail blazer", "human rights advocate". Boggs, it was noted, lived to 100 years old. But it shouldn't take a century for the media to notice Bogg's ilk - the activists in their hometowns.
Nov 11, 2015
It's amazing how money media cover activists, when they die. When radical philosopher and organizer Grace Lee Boggs passed away on October 5, she received long, respectful obituaries in just about every paper. "Activist and revolutionary", "trail blazer", "human rights advocate". Boggs, it was noted, lived to 100 years old. But it shouldn't take a century for the media to notice Bogg's ilk - the activists in their hometowns.
"People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative," wrote Boggs. "We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values."
In money media that vision is sorely lacking. When they cover community organizing at all, profit driven media tend to focus only on the troublemakers - the sit-ins, shutdowns and picket lines. But while activism is often used to extract concessions from government, organizers like Boggs don't just make trouble - they make change.
At The Laura Flanders Show, we have the great privilege of meeting up close the people and organizations that are developing sophisticated ways, not just to stand up to power, but to build and use power, and use it differently.
Take Boggs in Detroit, the most radical thing she ever did, she said, was to stay, and create programs that build a sense of pride and ownership among local people through planting gardens and painting murals. In Buffalo, New York, the group PUSH Buffalo combines political campaigning with capacity building so local residents can renovate abandoned houses to the latest standards once they win control. In the Rockaways and Central Brooklyn, New York, we've reported on The Working World's co-op academy, which teaches working people the basics of businesses planning and raising capital. And as we've reported here, residents all over New York are learning a thing or two about priority setting, as they participate in local budgeting.
November 9-15 is New Economy Week, five days of events and publications focused on transforming society. They'll be lifting up visions, but also concrete models. It wouldn't require so much imagination if only the media looked around.
You can watch my interview with Matthew Stinchcomb,and Donna Schaper about the craftsmarket Etsy's latest venture, this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at LauraFlanders.com. To tell me what you think, write to Laura@LauraFlanders.com.
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Grace Lee Boggs: A Century of Grass-Roots Organizing
Grace Lee Boggs died this week at the age of 100. "She left this life as she lived it: surrounded by books, politics, people and ideas," said her friends and caretakers, Shea Howell and Alice Jennings. Grace Lee Boggs was not only a grass-roots organizer, but a philosopher, a teacher and a revolutionary. She devoted her life to empowering the poor, the working class and communities of color, and was deeply involved with a constellation of movements, from civil rights and black power to labor, environmental justice and feminism.
Oct 08, 2015
Grace Lee Boggs died this week at the age of 100. "She left this life as she lived it: surrounded by books, politics, people and ideas," said her friends and caretakers, Shea Howell and Alice Jennings. Grace Lee Boggs was not only a grass-roots organizer, but a philosopher, a teacher and a revolutionary. She devoted her life to empowering the poor, the working class and communities of color, and was deeply involved with a constellation of movements, from civil rights and black power to labor, environmental justice and feminism. She lived for more than 60 years in Detroit, and witnessed that city transform from the world capital of the automobile industry, through social protest and unrest in the 1960s, to the post-industrial era, where, behind the crumbling facade of empty factories, myriad experiments in urban renewal and local self-reliance are incubating.
"You don't choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you want to be, and you do choose how you want to think," she told a group of undergraduates in the film about her life, "American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs." This remarkable woman lived that credo for a full century.
Grace Lee Boggs was born in 1915, the child of Chinese immigrants, above the family's restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island. By 16, she was at Barnard College, and by the age of 25 had her Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr. I asked her how she became an activist:
"In those days, even department stores would come out and say, 'We don't hire Orientals,'" she told me. With her doctorate in hand, she moved to Chicago, where, she said, "I got a job in the philosophy library for $10 a week ... it wasn't enough to get a place to live, other than [a] basement, rent-free. I had to face down a barricade of rats in order to get to the basement. That made me rat-conscious, made me join a tenants' committee against rat-infested housing, which brought me into contact with the black community for the first time in my life, and enabled me to become part of the March on Washington movement organized by A. Philip Randolph."
We should thank those Chicago rats for spurring her to action. The "March on Washington" she mentioned was not the well-known march from 1963, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, but rather the 1941 March on Washington. The renowned labor leader A. Philip Randolph, along with the gay, black pacifist Bayard Rustin, both of whom would later lead the famous 1963 march, organized a similar march two decades earlier. In 1940, they saw that domestic war production was lifting hundreds of thousands of white workers out of the prolonged poverty of the Great Depression, but, as most production plants were segregated, was leaving black workers behind. The movement they built forced President Franklin Roosevelt to integrate the plants involved in building the arms for World War II. This helped spur the great migration of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South to the industrial cities of the North.
Grace Lee Boggs married, but not the first man who proposed to her. He was Kwame Nkrumah, who met Grace in 1945, while studying in the United States. He would return to Africa and become the founding president of Ghana. Grace would say of his proposal, "I was completely taken by surprise ... I declined because I couldn't imagine myself being politically active in a country where I was totally ignorant of the history, geography and culture." Nkrumah said later, "If Grace had married me, we would have changed all Africa."
Instead, she changed America. Ultimately, Grace would marry autoworker Jimmy Boggs, and they formed an intellectual and organizing team that became legendary in Detroit. "Jimmy came out of the Deep South," she told me. "He had a sense of the agricultural epoch. Then he came and worked in the plant and had a sense of the industrial epoch.
"Detroit, which was once the symbol of miracles of industrialization and then became the symbol of the devastation of deindustrialization," Grace Lee Boggs explained, "is now the symbol of a new kind of society, of people who grow their own food, of people who try and help each other, to how we begin to think, not so much of getting jobs and advancing our own fortunes, but how we depend on each other. I mean, it's another world that we're creating here in Detroit."
She founded Detroit Summer in 1992, to bring young people together to work on innovative urban renewal. The fruits of her labor continue to grow around the city, with urban farms, microenterprises and a focus on the local economy.
Grace Lee Boggs lived a life that spanned a century, from World War I through the digital age. Young people flocked to meet her at her home, now the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, following in her footsteps, learning, as she said, that "the only way to survive is by taking care of one another."
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Remembering Grace Lee Boggs and the Revolution She Inspired in Me
This week, I returned to Detroit as I have every few years. On Thursday, I visited the James and Grace Lee Boggs School and heard of the influence Grace had in founding a school that is deeply rooted in community. On Friday, I visited the Boggs Center and talked to board members about their perceptions of displacement, water shut-offs, and community power in Detroit.
And I had a chance to sit with Grace, hold her hand, and bring our greetings from YES!
"I'm tired," she told me.
Oct 07, 2015
This week, I returned to Detroit as I have every few years. On Thursday, I visited the James and Grace Lee Boggs School and heard of the influence Grace had in founding a school that is deeply rooted in community. On Friday, I visited the Boggs Center and talked to board members about their perceptions of displacement, water shut-offs, and community power in Detroit.
And I had a chance to sit with Grace, hold her hand, and bring our greetings from YES!
"I'm tired," she told me.
I first encountered Grace and James Boggs when I was about 20 years old. The two were speaking in Portland, Oregon about their book "Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century." I was just starting out as an activist, trying to understand both how to build local empowerment in the face of the growing power of corporations and how to change my own community. Grace and Jimmy, deeply immersed in the Black Power movement in Detroit, brought a message that resonated. Rebelling against wrongdoings and oppression is a first step, but rebellion ultimately relies too much on asking those in power to make change. The real work of creating a different world is to take responsibility upon ourselves to lead that change to create the sort of world we want.
This idea resonated as deeply with me then as it does today.
Some years later, in the mid-1990s, at "The Other Economic Summit," a counter summit to the G8 Summit, I invited both David Korten and Grace Lee Boggs to participate in a panel entitled, the Post-Corporate World. Dave brought his global perspectives after having written "When Corporations Rule the World." Grace brought her grassroots perspectives from a lifetime of organizing and study with the people of Detroit.
Grace became closer to YES! in subsequent years. She was a regular participant in our twice-yearly "State of the Possible" retreats, offering us a wise and deeply empowering perspective on the work of transformational change. During one of those retreats, Grace and the Boggs Center hosted visitors from around the country, and showed them the blossoming food culture, local cooperatives, and cultural events that signaled a re-spiriting of Detroit, as well as some of the decay and abandonment. Since then, when I meet someone from Detroit or from other Midwestern cities who are extraordinary leaders, it often turns out that they were deeply inspired by their encounters with James and Grace Lee Boggs.
Rest well, dear friend. Millions of us have been enlivened and empowered by your wisdom and spirit. We'll keep on asking "What time is it on the clock of the world?" and we'll keep on working to create a world where "growing our souls," rather than the economy, is our aim.
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Living for Change: If Not Now, When?
From the archive...
Oct 05, 2015
[Editor's note: The following essay by Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015) was first published by Common Dreams on August 23, 2010. With the passing of Boggs announced on Monday, we share in the mourning of those who knew her best and the untold number of people who were influenced and inspired by her life dedicated tosocial justice and a better world. Read more of Boggs' writings for CD here and visit the Boggs Center for more information about her extraordinary life and work.]
I won't be marching with Jesse Jackson in the March called by the UAW and the NAACP to commemorate the August 28, 1963 March on Washington.
That's not only because at 95 my marching days are over.
As early as 1963, Malcolm X called the "I Have a Dream" March a "Farce on Washington" because John Lewis had been forced to delete from his speech any references to Revolution and Power by the MOW's "Big 6" organizers: A. Philip Randolph, Dr. King/SCLC, Roy Wilkins/ NAACP, James Farmer/CORE, Whitney Young/Urban League, and John Lewis/SNCC.
Marchers were also instructed to carry only official signs and allowed to sing only one song 'We shall overcome.'
Malcolm never put lipstick on a pig. Malcolm thought outside the box. If he were alive NOW, he would be telling us that we should no longer be marching. We should no longer be protesting. We should no longer be dreaming. We should no longer be encouraging democratic illusions.
... When millions of Americans do not have meaningful work,
... When as a result of our obsession with economic growth, wildfires in Russia burn dangerously close to nuclear plants and millions drown from floods and mudslides in Pakistan, China and Iowa,
... When Congress decides to cut back food stamps for the poor and hungry in order to provide paychecks for public employees because trillions are being thrown away on unwinnable wars in the Middle East and military bases around the world,
... When our cities are dying because corporations are exporting jobs oversea to make bigger profits,
... When our prison population is the highest in the world because our schools structured in the factory age have become pipelines to prison,It is time to stop dreaming and protesting.
Instead in every community and city we should be discussing how to make the "Radical Revolution of Values" not only against Racism but against Materialism and Militarism that Dr. King called for in his 1967 anti-Vietnam war speech.
King's call for this "Radical Revolution" came only four years after his 1963 "I have a Dream" speech. But in those few years, youth in Watts, California and other cities had risen in Rebellion. In Chicago King and anti-racist marchers had experienced the raw ugliness of Northern racism. The genocidal war in Vietnam had exposed our country as the world's worst purveyor of violence and on the wrong side of the world revolution.
That is why in 1967 King decided that the time had come to warn the American people that unless we make a Radical Revolution in Values, we face spiritual death.
In 2010, 42 years later, we are experiencing massive physical and spiritual death.
Why are we still marching and dreaming?
Why are we not making a "radical revolution in values"?
Why are we still obsessed with economic growth?
Why are we still allowing corporations to deprive us of jobs by replacing human beings on the line with robots and by exporting jobs overseas to make greater profits?
Why are we still accepting the dictatorship of technology and of corporations?
The time has come to
...slow down global warming by building sustainable local economies and by living more simply.
...reject the dictatorship of technology so that it is no longer normal and natural to replace human beings with robots.
...stop corporations from exporting jobs overseas.
...end factory-type schooling and start engaging schoolchildren in local community rebuilding.
Let's start thinking outside the box!
If not now... when?
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Concluding Lifetime of Dedicated Activism, Grace Lee Boggs Dies at Age 100
"I want my life to challenge people to think philosophically," she once said, "I want people to ask themselves and each other what time it is on the clock of the world."
Oct 05, 2015
Longtime activist, educator, and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs passed early Monday at the age of 100.
Friends and caregivers Shay Howell and Alice Jennings said in a statement about her passing that Boggs "left this life as she lived it: surrounded by books, politics, people and ideas." Boggs died peacefully in her sleep in her Detroit home.
Born in Rhode Island in 1915, the daughter of Chinese immigrants studied at Barnard College and Bryn Mawr, where she received Ph.D. in philosophy in 1940. These studies led to a lifetime of activism, starting in Chicago with the movement for tenants' rights and the Workers Party. In the 1960s, Grace moved to Detroit, where she became known for her work, along with her late husband, author and activist James Boggs.
Over the past 70 years, she was involved with the civil rights, Black Power, labor, environmental justice, and feminist movements. In 1992, she co-founded the Detroit Summer youth program, "a multi-racial, inter-generational collective" that serves as a training ground for youth activists. She once stated, "you cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it."
"Grace Lee Boggs embraces a philosophy of constant questioning--not just of who we are as individuals, but of how we relate to those in our community and country, to those in other countries, and to the local and global environment," notes a biography of Boggs, which accompanies of portrait of her painted by artist Robert Shetterly.
Throughout her life, Boggs' speeches and essays frequently made connections between the suffering experienced by poor and marginalized communities with humanity's overall lack of vision, exemplified by the demand for "endless growth."
"We need to find that balance of life that respects each other, that thinks that the most important thing at this time on the clock of the world is not our accumulation of things...the time has come to grow our souls."
During a 2012 talk given in San Francisco, Boggs spoke alternately of the need to "grow our souls."
She said: "We need to find that balance of life that respects each other, that thinks that the most important thing at this time on the clock of the world is not our accumulation of things, is not economic growth which threatens and imperils all life on this planet including ourselves, that the time has come to grow our souls, to grow our relationships with one another, to create families that are loving and communities that are loving, to bring the neighbor back into the hood."
And in an essay written in 2010 explaining why she did not partake in a commemoration of the August 28, 1963 March on Washington, Boggs boldly questioned the value of "encouraging democratic illusions" while there was still such pervasive injustice and inequity in the U.S.. Instead, she reiterated Dr. Martin Luther King's call for a "Radical Revolution of Values," which she said not only disparages racism, but also "Materialism and Militarism."
In her final post on the Boggs Center website, written in August 2014, she wrote, "I want my life to challenge people to think philosophically. I want people to ask themselves and each other what time it is on the clock of the world."
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