Grace Lee Boggs

Born in 1915, Grace Lee Boggs is a legendary activist, philosopher, writer, and speaker whose seven decades of visionary thinking and political involvement encompass the major U.S. social movements of the past hundred years. A daughter of Chinese immigrants, Dr. Boggs received her B.A. from Barnard College (1935) and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College (1940). She developed a twenty-year political relationship with social activist C.L.R. James, followed by extensive civil rights activism in Detroit in partnership with her husband, James Boggs.

Dr. Boggs’ published writings include Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (with James Boggs in 1974, reissued with a new introduction by her in 2008), Conversations in Maine: Exploring Our Nation’s Future (with James Boggs, Freddy Paine, and Lyman Paine in 1978), Living for Change: An Autobiography (1998), and The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (with Scott Kurashige in 2011). Her writings and interviews have also been widely disseminated through newspapers, magazines, websites, and academic journals.

In her nineties, Dr. Boggs remains exceptionally active as a community activist and columnist for the Michigan Citizen. In 1995, her friends started the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership to continue James and Grace Lee Boggs’ legacy of revolutionary ideas and visionary organizing. In Fall 2013, the James and Grace Lee Boggs School was launched near Dr. Boggs’ home on the Eastside of Detroit by place-based educators dedicated to the Boggs’ vision. In 2014, the documentary American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, directed by filmmaker Grace Lee, won several major film festival audience awards and premiered on PBS.

Dr. Boggs’ many honors include honorary doctorates from the University of Michigan, Wooster College, Kalamzoo College, and Wayne State University. She also has been given lifetime achievement awards from the Detroit City Council, Organization of Chinese Americans, Anti-Defamation League (Michigan), Michigan Coalition for Human Rights, Museum of Chinese in the Americas, and Association for Asian American Studies. Dr. Boggs has also been named as Detroit News Michiganian of the Year and has a place in both the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame and National Women’s Hall of Fame.