Grace Lee Boggs
| Grace Lee Boggs | |
|---|---|
Boggs at her home in Detroit in 2012
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| Born |
Grace Chin Lee June 27, 1915 Providence, Rhode Island |
| Died |
October 5, 2015 (aged 100) Detroit, Michigan |
| Residence | Detroit, Michigan |
| Alma mater |
Barnard College (B.A., 1935) Bryn Mawr College (Ph.D., 1940) |
| Occupation | Writer, social activist, philosopher, and feminist |
| Spouse(s) | James Boggs (1953–93, his death) |
| Parent(s) | Chin Lee (father; b.1870; d.1965) Yin Lan Lee (mother; b. 1890; d. 1978) |
| Relatives | Katherine (sister) Edward (brother; b. 1920) Philip (brother) Robert (brother) Harry (brother; b. 1918) |
 Grace Lee Boggs interviewed on Democracy Now!, January 20, 2008 |
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Grace Lee Boggs interviewed by Bill Moyers, June 15, 2007 |
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Boggs on the Financial Meltdown and Social Change – video report by Democracy Now!
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"The Only Way to Survive is By Taking Care of One Another" – video report by Democracy Now!
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Grace Lee Boggs (June 27, 1915 – October 5, 2015) was an American author, social activist, philosopher and feminist. She is known for her years of political collaboration with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s. She eventually went off in her own political direction in the 1960s with her husband of some forty years, James Boggs, until he died in 1993. By 1998, she had written four books, including an autobiography. In 2011, still active at the age of 95, she wrote a fifth book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, with Scott Kurashige and published by the University of California Press.
Boggs was born on June 27, 1915, in Providence, Rhode Island, above her father's restaurant. Her Chinese given name was Yu Ping (玉平), meaning "Jade Peace." She was the daughter of Chin Lee (1870–1965), originally from Toishan in China, and Yin Lan, his second wife, who would become an early feminist role model for Boggs. Lee’s first wife was unable to give birth to sons and so he left her for a younger woman. Yin Lan was born into the Ng family who were so poor that her uncle sold Yin into slavery, but she escaped. That same uncle arranged the marriage of Boggs’s parents.
Her father migrated to the United States with his second wife, landing in Seattle, Washington, in 1911. On a scholarship, Boggs went on to study at Barnard College, where she was influenced by Kant and Hegel. She graduated in 1935 and in 1940 received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College, where she wrote her dissertation.
Facing significant barriers in the academic world in the 1940s, she took a job at low wages at the University of Chicago Philosophy Library. As a result of their activism on tenants' rights, she joined the far-left Workers Party, known for its Third Camp position regarding the Soviet Union, which it saw as bureaucratic collectivist. At this point, she began the trajectory that she would follow for the rest of her life: a focus on struggles in the African-American community.
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