Activist, Civil Rights Icon Grace Lee Boggs Dies at 100

Grace Lee Boggs, 100, died Monday after a lifetime fighting for social justice and equality. (Photo via NationOfChange.org)

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Longtime Detroit human rights activist and centenarian Grace Lee Boggs died peacefully in her sleep Monday at her home on the city’s east side after being in hospice care for the last several months.

Boggs, 100, was remembered as a unflagging vanguard of social change, a fierce public intellectual and prolific writer whose work touched thousands of lives across America.

A Chinese-American born to immigrant parents and a one-time Marxist, Boggs’ odyssey of activism took her to the streets of Chicago as a tenant organizer in the 1940s to the civil rights, Black Power, labor, environmental justice and feminist movements over the past seven decades.

Her longtime friend and caretaker, Shay Howell, told the Detroit Free Press Boggs “left this life as she lived it: surrounded by books, politics, people and ideas.”

She was outspoken about the cultural and economic conditions that led to Detroit’s decline, a fierce champion for the city’s economic underclass and a mentor for generations of activists.

But she was a different brand of activist whose criticism of systemic problems came with intellectual solutions, said her longtime friend, Ron Scott, who met Boggs in 1968.

He told the Free Press Boggs was “a reasoned and rational iconoclast and visionary.”

“Not just the old-style revolutionary who says what she’s against, she has always said we had to have a vision that’s deeply American in terms of … its foundation for revolution, looking at who we are as America, what is our future and the continuing revolution that is America,” Scott said.

In a PBS interview with Bill Moyers in 2007, Boggs said too much emphasis in the struggle for equality has been placed on confrontation without recognizing “how much spiritual and moral force is involved in the people who are struggling.”

“We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently,” she said.

Boggs, who moved to Detroit in 1953 to write for a socialist newspaper, spent her life fighting for that change alongside her husband, James, an autoworker who died in 1993.

Tributes have poured in for Boggs.

President Obama aid in a statement:

“Grace dedicated her life to serving and advocating for the rights of others — from her community activism in Detroit, to her leadership in the civil rights movement, to her ideas that challenged us all to lead meaningful lives. As the child of Chinese immigrants and as a woman, Grace learned early on that the world needed changing, and she overcame barriers to do just that. She understood the power of community organizing at its core — the importance of bringing about change and getting people involved to shape their own destiny. Grace’s passion for helping others, and her work to rejuvenate communities that had fallen on hard times spanned her remarkable 100 years of life, and will continue to inspire generations to come. Our thoughts and prayers are with Grace’s family and friends, and all those who loved her dearly.”

At home in Detroit, Peter J. Hammer, director of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University, told The Detroit News Boggs was “smart, funny, motivated and driven, always challenging people to think differently and think better,”

“Grace Lee Boggs was a force for promoting social change, and we were lucky she chose to call Detroit her home,” Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said in a statement.

Also in a statement, Congresswoman Debbie Dingell, D-Dearborn, called Boggs a “true champion for change.”

Boggs was profiled in the PBS documentary, “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs,” which aired in 2014. Filmmaker Grace Lee said talking with Boggs “was like having a conversation with history, but in an incredibly down-to-Earth way,” The Detroit News said.

Boggs’ legacy includes the Detroit Summer youth program, which she and James co-founded in 1992 to help rebuild the city’s collapsed neighborhoods, and their Save Our Sons and Daughters organization. After her husband died, Boggs established the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership.

Boggs, who was born in 1915 in Providence, RI, and grew up in an apartment above her father’s Chinese restaurant in new York, studied at Barnard College on a scholarship and earned her doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1940.

She published her first book, “George Herbert Mead: Philosopher of the Social Individual” in 1945. Other books included “Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century,” co-authored with her husband in 1974; “Women and the Movement to Build a New America” in 1977; “Living for Change: An Autobiography” in 1998; and finally, in 2011, “The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century,” co-written with Scott Kurashige.

In that book, she aligned her philosophies of Thoreau, Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“We are not subversives,” she wrote. “We are struggling to change this country because we love it.”

A memorial service is planned next month.