Grace Lee Boggs was a dedicated advocate for civil and worker’s rights, in particular focusing on the African American community. She was an avid community organizer and along with her husband, James Boggs, started a number of grass-roots community groups in Detroit.
She was born Grace Yu Ping Lee on June 27, 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island above her father’s Chinese restaurant. Her father and mother were Chinese immigrants. In 1924 the family moved to New York City where her father opened Chin Lee restaurant on Broadway, a successful endeavor that was well-known in its day. The family lived in Jackson Heights where Boggs and her siblings had a middle-class upbringing. Boggs enrolled at Barnard College at age 16 and from there went to Byrn Mawr College where she got a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1940. She was particularly interested in the philosophies of Karl Marx and Friedrich Hegel.
Discrimination against Asian Americans meant Boggs had no chance of obtaining a teaching position in philosophy, or even working in a department store. Having corresponded with a professor at the University of Chicago she moved there where he helped her get work in a University library. Unable to find living quarters, she was given free space in a rat-infested basement by a sympathetic Jewish woman; it proved to be an impetus for her long career in fighting for others.
Her first foray into activism was joining other tenants in her Chicago neighborhood to protest their rat-infested living conditions. In 1941 she met A. Philip Randolph who was organizing a march on Washington to protest discrimination in government defense hiring. The threat of a march worked and Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order prohibiting discrimination in defense work. Impressed by the power of activism, Boggs decided this would be her life’s work.
Experimenting with different radical ideas, she was a member at times of the Workers Party, the Socialist Workers Party and the Trotskyite movement. She was strongly influenced by C.L.R. James and became a leader of his group, formed along with Raya Dunayevskaya, that evolved into the Correspondence Publishing Committee, which supported the burgeoning Black Nationalist movement among other causes.
She moved to Detroit in 1953 to write for Correspondence, the newsletter of the Committee. She had met James Boggs, an African American Chrysler worker also involved in the Committee, before moving to Detroit, and realized he put into practice philosophical principles she had studied. They married in 1954. Together they lived a life of radical activism, at one time hosting Malcolm X in their home, and were instrumental in the planning of the 1963 march in Detroit with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In addition to authoring a number of books, the two founded Detroit Summer in 1992, a program that involved young people in their community with the goal of developing leaders. Following James’ death in 1993 Boggs went on to open the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership in 1995, and the James and Grace Lee Boggs School, a public charter school, in 2013.
Still active into her 100th year, Grace Lee Boggs died on October 5, 2015.