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Living for Change
An Autobiography
Boggs, Grace Lee Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Year Published: 1998
Pages: 328pp ISBN: 978-0-8166-2955-8
Library of Congress Number: F574.D49C53 1998
Resource Type: Book
This fascinating autobiography traces the story of a woman who transcended class and racial boundaries to pursue her passionate belief in a better society.
Abstract: Living for Change is a sweeping account of the life of an untraditional radical from the end of the thirties, through the cold war, the civil rights era, and the rise of Black Power, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panthers to the present efforts to rebuild our crumbling urban communities.
Grace Lee Boggs was raised in New York City during a time when her father was not allowed to buy land for their home because he was Chinese. Educated at Barnard and Bryn Mawr, Boggs was in her twenties when radical politics beckoned, and she was inspired to become a revolutionary focusing on the black community.
During her early years as an activist in New York, Boggs began a twenty-year friendship and collaboration with C. L. R. James, the brilliant and influential West Indian Marxist to whom she devotes a revelatory chapter of this book. In 1953, she moved to Detroit where, she writes, “radical history had been made and could be made again.” It was also the home of James Boggs, an African American auto worker (and later author and revolutionary theoretician) who would become one of the movement’s freshest and most persuasive voices, as well as Grace’s husband. Beginning with their work together on the newsletter Correspondence, Grace and James formed the core of a network that over the years would include Malcolm X, Lyman Paine, Ping Ferry, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Kwame Nkrumah, Stokely Carmichael, and inner-city youth.
Rich in the personalities and anecdotes of twentieth-century progressive activism, Living for Change is an involving and inspiring look at a remarkable woman who continues to dedicate her life to social justice.
Table of Contents
Foreword-Ossie Davis
Introduction
East Is East—Or Is It?
From Philosophy to Politics
C. L. R. James
Jimmy
"The City Is the Black Man's Land"
Beyond Rebellion
"Going Back" to China
New Dreams for the Twenty-First Century
On My Own
Notes
Index
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