Grace Lee Boggs
A revolution that is based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind.
Here’s a trailer for the award-winning documentary film about the life and work of activist Grace Lee Boggs–who recently entered hospice care. On her Facebook page in September, she posted: “I am coming to the end of a long journey — a journey that began over 70 years ago at the beginning of World War II.” Below is a summary of the documentary…
Grace Lee Boggs is a 98-year-old Chinese American woman in Detroit whose vision of revolution will surprise you. A writer, activist, and philosopher rooted for more than 70 years in the African American movement, she has devoted her life to an evolving revolution that encompasses the contradictions of America’s past and its potentially radical future. The documentary film, American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, plunges us into Boggs’s lifetime of vital thinking and action, traversing the major U.S. social movements of the last century; from labor to civil rights, to Black Power, feminism, the Asian American and environmental justice movements and beyond. Angela Davis, Bill Moyers, Bill Ayers, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Danny Glover, Boggs’s late husband James and a host of Detroit comrades across three generations help shape this uniquely American story. As she wrestles with a Detroit in ongoing transition, contradictions of violence and non-violence, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the 1967 rebellions, and non-linear notions of time and history, Boggs emerges with an approach that is radical in its simplicity and clarity: revolution is not an act of aggression or merely a protest. Revolution, Boggs says, is about something deeper within the human experience — the ability to transform oneself to transform the world.
Grace Lee Boggs
