Epilogue

In 1963, Jimmy and Grace began describing their philosophy as “dialectical humanism.” They crafted this new political theory in response to the four interrelated developments that reshaped their political activity during the early 1960s: their organizational split with C. L. R. James; their ideological break with central Marxist tenets; the conclusions they drew from their analysis of automation and the changes it brought in production; and their immersion in the black freedom movement. Their articulation of dialectical humanism marked a new phase in Grace and Jimmy’s partnership, at once a reflection of the dynamic understanding of the revolutionary process they had developed together since 1953 and a projection of the shared intellectual and political work they would continue over the next three decades.

Grace first used the phrase “dialectical humanism” in a June 1963 Correspondence editorial explaining the paper’s political focus. She insisted that black people stood at the forefront of revolutionary possibility: “We devote a great deal of space to the struggles of the Negroes because they are without question the most revolutionary, the most advanced, and the most human social force in the United States today.” Yet “the revolution which has now begun … is not just a Negro revolution.… What is involved is a totally new and uniquely American revolution, a revolution without historical precedent anywhere in the world, a revolution which essentially will have to bring about a radical change in man’s image of himself and of his rights and responsibilities, to correspond with the revolutionary changes that have been achieved in material production.… The philosophy of this new revolutionary struggle for new human values and new human relations we call Dialectical Humanism.”1

Two months later, Grace urged an audience of liberal intellectuals to recognize the philosophical and political-economic significance of “the remarkable historical coincidence of the Negro revolt and the technological revolution.” Automation would expand the nation’s productive capacity so that it was possible to meet society’s material needs, a point that Jimmy made in his new book, The American Revolution. Grace said that the civil rights movement was not solely a struggle to change the racial order but “represents the beginning of a new revolutionary epoch,… which will center around conscious strivings and struggles to achieve and create the dignity of man.” The epoch of dialectical materialism was now coming to a close. During that period of revolutionary thinking, which was initiated by the French Revolution, “technological problems of material production were still unsolved,” so “revolutionary struggles had to center around goods and goods production.” “Now that these technological problems have essentially been solved in America, we are able to enter the epoch of Dialectical Humanism. Of this epoch the Negro revolt is the beginning, but by no means the end.”2

Jimmy first used the phrase in “The Meaning of the Black Revolt in the U.S.A.,” an essay he wrote toward the end of 1963 and published in the journal Revolution. He said, “Negro freedom fighters have been confining the struggle within the framework of the system, but each time the struggle reaches an explosive pitch, more Negroes are driven to recognize that the things they are fighting for cannot be achieved within the system”; instead, they are “the ingredients for creating another system.” He likened this development to anticolonial struggles around the world, as each newly independent nation “faces the need to create a new economic and political system in order to meet the social needs of the masses of that country.” The black struggle, he concluded, was in essence forging this process in the United States: “The Negro revolt exposes the whole American system as it has operated in regard to every sphere of the relations between human beings. Coming in the United States at a time when there is no longer any problem with material scarcity, the Negro revolt is therefore not just a narrow struggle over material necessities. It does not belong to the period of struggle over goods and for the development of productive forces which we can call the era of ‘Dialectical Materialism.’ Rather, it ushers in the era of ‘Dialectical Humanism,’ when the burning question is how to create the kind of human responsibility in the distribution of material abundance that will allow everyone to enjoy and create the values of humanity.”3

 

THE MARXIST CONCEPTS of dialectical and historical materialism served as Grace and Jimmy’s point of departure for conceptualizing dialectical humanism. According to the philosophy of dialectical materialism, everything in nature and society is subject to the fundamental laws of dialectical development, whereby the internal contradictions of any entity or process drive its evolution and transformation over time. Historical materialism, understood by its adherents as empirical social science and Marxist social theory, views human history in terms of economic development. It postulates that historical change is driven by changes in three interrelated forces: a society’s prevailing mode of production, the resulting division of society into classes, and the struggle between those classes.4 Grace and Jimmy’s analysis obscured the distinction between the dialectical and historical materialism, implicitly combining the two concepts by subsuming historical materialism under dialectical materialism. They also deviated from standard Marxist language by using “dialectical materialism” to identify an epoch or era. This conceptual shift enabled Grace and Jimmy to make the heretical argument that Marxism’s philosophy and theory of society could no longer guide revolutionary thinking. While they did not break completely with the Marxist intellectual tradition, they were clearly turning away from central ideas and ways of thinking that had previously guided their politics.

Specifically, Jimmy and Grace were relinquishing the idea of class struggle as the motive force of history and the Marxist scenario of revolution centered on the working class, replacing this materialist conception of history and revolutionary struggle with one emphasizing broader human relationships. As they wrote years later with their comrades Freddy and Lyman Paine, “We concluded that, whether we liked it or not, the epoch had come to an end when it was progressive to think of the history of humanity as the history of class struggle.… Instead of seeing history as class struggle, we must see it as a continuing struggle to create human social relationships.” This vigorous dissent from fundamental Marxist precepts did not represent either a form of anti-Marxism or a dampening of Jimmy and Grace’s commitment to revolutionary thought; rather, it represented a deepening of that commitment, born of deep theoretical reflection. “The process of questioning our previous thoughts has been painful,” they wrote, “but it has also been joyous because we have been searching for another way to view the history of humanity which could inspire as much commitment from ourselves and others as Marx’s ideas have done.”5 Indeed, it reflected their commitment to the practice of dialectical thinking: as revolutionaries they must recognize that reality is constantly changing and that ideas that were once progressive may become outmoded; social movements must develop new ideas in response to societal change.

Dialectical humanism, then, was the Boggses’ attempt to develop a philosophical framework that could both explain the new social and political realities that they saw emerging in the early 1960s and guide revolutionary struggle. They had spent a decade working with, learning from, and growing with each other. Their conceptualization of dialectical humanism marked a new stage in their shared revolutionary politics, which was characterized by their intensified effort to theorize and advance the revolutionary capacity of the black freedom movement.6

Black Power

In the mid-1960s, Grace and Jimmy concentrated their writing and activism on theorizing black political power, launching multiple organizing efforts based on this theoretical work, and intervening in the escalating debates within the movement about the broader concept of black power. They called for a coordinated mobilization of independent black political power, concentrated in cities and focused on exercising municipal control, as a base for an eventual revolutionary reorganization of society.

Jimmy and Grace became recognized as Black Power leaders in Detroit as well as nationally. They continued to work with the impressive community of local black activists that had solidified at the beginning of the 1960s, including Rev. Albert Cleage, with whom Grace developed a strong association. Jimmy emerged as an important and influential theorist of the movement. He published essays in some of the most prominent Black Power–era publications, as well as a range of more mainstream magazines and newspapers.7 In their writings, as in their activism, Jimmy and Grace sought to develop a theoretical and practical framework that would push Black Power in a revolutionary direction.

Through the late 1960s, Grace and Jimmy critically assessed the growing Black Power movement, its multiple articulations, and its diverse strategies for political action. Jimmy regularly engaged in the ideological debates within the movement. For example, his 1967 essay “Black Power—A Scientific Concept Whose Time Has Come” argues that the concept had “nothing to do with any special moral virtue in being black” but rather grew out of black people’s place in American society and the evolution of their struggle beyond civil rights. The essay criticizes “those writing for and against Black Power” who “would rather keep the concept vague than grapple with the systematic analysis of American capitalism out of which the concept of Black Power has developed.”8 His essay “Culture and Black Power” looks critically at the ways in which segments of the movement deployed notions of culture, African heritage, and black unity. It warns against allowing identification with Africa or celebrations of black cultural heritage to serve as an evasion or mystification of the struggle at hand. “Of what profit is our history and our culture,” it asks, “unless it is used in a vision of our future?”9 Jimmy urged activists to understand the movement in relation to the struggle for civil rights and in the historical development of the country as a whole. In a New York Times op-ed written in the early 1970s, he wrote, “Most of those who call themselves black power advocates are trying to find a solution for blacks separate from a solution for the contradictions of the entire United States. Actually, this is impossible. Therefore, many black nationalists are going off into all kinds of fantasies and dreams about what black power means—like heading for Africa, or isolating themselves in a few states, or whites just vanishing into thin air and leaving this country to blacks.”10

Just as Black Power was coalescing as a national movement, the 1967 Detroit rebellion propelled Grace and Jimmy to a new theoretical consideration. During the last week of July, black residents of Detroit took to the streets, confronting the police and issuing a massive challenge to civil authority that resulted in forty-three deaths (thirty-three black people and ten whites), most at the hands of the police and the National Guard. It was by some measures the largest and most consequential uprising of the period’s “long hot summers,” the term used to describe successive years when black people in cities across the country burned and looted businesses in the ghetto and fought back against the police. City officials and most commentators labeled them riots, but Jimmy and Grace were among the many activists and well-informed observers who called them rebellions. They recognized that these uprisings were collective and spontaneous eruptions of social protest; more than simple lawlessness, they were acts of rebellion against the symbols and substance of white authority, particularly that wielded by the police, who functioned as an occupying force in black communities. In the urgency, anger, and outrage expressed in the urban rebellions, Jimmy and Grace found an impetus to revise their understanding of the revolutionary process, focusing particularly on the role of urban black youth in spontaneous uprisings. As Grace recalled, the rebellion “forced us to rethink a lot of philosophical questions” and moved them “to draw a clear distinction between rebellion … and revolution.”11

A series of international conversations they had in 1968 helped to crystallize this distinction. In June the Boggses traveled to Paris, where they observed the tail end of the May revolt, and from there they went to Italy, where Jimmy had been invited to undertake a multicity speaking tour. Next they flew to Conakry, Guinea, to meet with Kwame Nkrumah, who had been living there in exile since being deposed as president of Ghana in a 1966 military coup. Nkrumah hosted them for a week, during which the three old friends discussed the political situations both in Africa and in the United States and exchanged ideas about future political projects.12 Upon their return to the country at the end of the summer, Grace and Jimmy initiated what became an annual practice of vacationing on Sutton Island, Maine, with their longtime comrades Freddy and Lyman Paine. During their stay on Sutton Island, which usually lasted weeks, the two couples engaged in wide-ranging political and philosophical discussions that became known affectionately among the foursome (and the other friends who attended in later years) as the “conversations in Maine” or simply the “conversations.”13 Grace described their powerful impact on her philosophical, political, and personal growth in her autobiography: “As we talked into the night, I felt a liberation comparable to that which I had first experienced back at Bryn Mawr when the study of Hegel had helped me to see my own struggles as an integral part of the evolution of the human race. Inside my heart and mind the materialist concept of revolution as chiefly a redistribution of goods, property, and power was being enriched by a moral and spiritual dimension.”14

As the Boggses and the Paines reflected on their day-to-day lives and political practice, they decided that Jimmy should immediately resign from his job at Chrysler so that he could devote his full time and energy to political activity. As Grace recounted it, “The more we talked in 1968, the clearer it was that even deciding what questions need to be asked, let alone discovering the answers, would take years, extending far beyond our lifetimes. One of our favorite sayings was ‘Things take time!’ But in view of the spreading chaos it was also urgent that we get started on finding ways and means to develop these ideas further by putting them into practice. It was ridiculous to think that Jimmy could do this and at the same time work eight hours a day at Chrysler, spending his evenings writing, speaking, and going to meetings and then getting up at 5 A.M. to go to work.”15

At the age of forty-nine, Jimmy was leaving Chrysler after working there for twenty-eight years, just short of the thirty years required for retirement on pension. To offset the forgone income, Lyman Paine agreed to provide Jimmy and Grace with a modest quarterly stipend from a trust fund that Lyman had recently inherited. Materially and symbolically, this joint decision launched Jimmy and Grace into a new phase of their partnership and deepened their self-identification as revolutionary theorists and activists. When they returned to Detroit that fall, Grace and Jimmy intensified their political activities within and beyond the escalating Black Power movement.

Grace resumed her ubiquitous presence in Detroit’s black nationalist circles. During hearings on the Detroit rebellion, a Detroit Police Department lieutenant testified that Grace was one of “our militants in Detroit” and offered his belief that “she is of Chinese and African descent.”16 It is likely that he was not alone in making this mistake. Grace regularly participated in otherwise all-black organizations, was welcomed into explicitly black spaces, and received invitations to speak about the black movement. Her November 1968 speech “The Black Revolution in America” was published two years later in the now-classic book The Black Woman, edited by Toni Cade Bambara. Education was an important site of Grace’s activism. Throughout the 1960s, she addressed the growing crisis in the school system, the need to redefine education, and struggles over education in black communities and became a central figure in the movement for community control of the public schools in Detroit.

In 1970, Grace cofounded the Asian Political Alliance (APA), a small study group and political organization composed of Asian and Asian American activists in Detroit. Grace remembered this fondly as “the first and only period in my life that I was meeting regularly with political people who shared my background as an Asian American.”17 The APA conducted workshops on Asian identity in the United States, participated in protests against the war in Vietnam, and screened and discussed films from China and Japan.18

Jimmy’s departure from Chrysler enabled him to participate more actively in the ideological debates and activist spaces of the Black Power movement. His Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook (1970), a collection of his recent essays and speeches, included “The Myth and Irrationality of Black Capitalism,” which he delivered to the National Black Economic Development Conference, a major gathering of Black Power activists held in Detroit in April 1969. At the conference, Jimmy and Grace distributed copies of their recently published pamphlet, Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party, which argued “that Black liberation cannot be achieved except through a Black Revolution” that took power “for the purpose of bringing about a fundamental change in the social, economic, and political institutions of the society.”19

Revolution and Evolution

The manifesto served as an ideological statement and an organizing tool in building a new cadre organization called the Committee for Political Development (CPD). A central idea animating the group’s ideology was the view that the United States was the “technologically most advanced and the politically and socially most counter-revolutionary” country in the world.20 Dan Aldridge, a seasoned activist well known in Detroit’s Black Power networks, joined the Boggses in leading the group. It developed a small core membership of young black radicals, exemplified by Kenneth Snodgrass, who joined as a teenager and developed an especially close relationship with Jimmy over two decades. The CPD and the revolutionary study groups it conducted generated a series of successive organizations through which Grace and Jimmy worked with other young Detroit radicals, black and white, and some of them established enduring relationships with the Boggses. Sharon “Shea” Howell, Richard Feldman, and Larry Sparks all met the Boggses in the early 1970s, worked closely with Jimmy and Grace and each other for decades, and continued to apply the ideas about revolutionary change they developed together.

In 1974 the Boggses published a major statement of their political philosophy, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century. This jointly authored book showed how their thinking about revolution had developed since 1963. Based in part on a series of lectures they delivered in 1970 at Wayne State University’s Center for Adult Education, the work considers the historical and theoretical lessons to be learned from the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions, “the African Revolution,” the “People’s War in Vietnam,” and “the Black Revolution in the U.S.” Building on their concept of dialectical humanism, their distinction between rebellion and revolution, and their conclusion that the most important contradiction in the contemporary United States was between its economic and technological overdevelopment and its moral, social, and political underdevelopment, Jimmy and Grace articulated their understanding of the revolutionary process and the meaning and purpose of revolutionary change. “A revolution is not just for the purpose of correcting past injustices,” they declared. “A revolution involves projecting the notion of a more human human being, i.e. a human being who is more advanced in the specific qualities which only humans have—creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, a sense of political and social responsibility.”21

Their desire to put into practice the ideas presented in Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, in combination with the growth of the revolutionary study groups and the collapse of the Black Power movement, led the Boggses and their comrades in Detroit to join with activists they had connected with in other parts of the country to found the National Organization for an American Revolution (NOAR) in 1978. NOAR sought to forge a new organizational form and political practice. It held public forums, organized locals across the country, and published pamphlets and short statements on contemporary national issues and local concerns. Manifesto for an American Revolutionary Party, a pamphlet written primarily by Jimmy, articulated NOAR’s vision of a new, self-governing America and a concept of citizenship in which people accept responsibility for making social, economic, and political decisions. It argued that citizens must not think of themselves as passive victims who can only make demands on the system or on those in power; they must claim agency and make demands on themselves as well. NOAR saw political transformation as tied to personal transformation; the oppressed and their leaders must all reject capitalist values and struggle to confront their own individualism and materialism. This concept was expressed as “two-sided transformation,” or working to change oneself and the oppressive structures of society simultaneously.

Grassroots Detroit

As NOAR collapsed under the weight of internal conflicts in the mid-1980s, Jimmy and Grace’s political focus returned to the city of Detroit and the challenges of postindustrial cities. In 1990, Jimmy wrote presciently that “most of our life in the 20th century, as Du Bois said, was occupied with the ‘problem of the color line.’ But, as we approach the 21st century, the issues we face, especially in the United States, are even more complex. The struggle of the 21st century is going to be over what will become of our cities.”22 They identified community building and developing grassroots leadership as crucial elements of the struggle to empower local communities, repair social relationships, and uncover new ways to meet basic economic and human needs. Grace and Jimmy participated in grassroots struggles and helped to found a range of organizations. In the mid-1980s, for example, they helped to organize seniors, most of them women, in Detroiters for Dignity. In 1988 they joined with Dorothy Garner to form We the People Reclaim Our Streets, a citywide network of neighborhood groups that held regular marches against the scourge of crack cocaine. They joined United Detroiters against Gambling, which defeated Mayor Coleman Young’s initial proposal to legalize casino gambling and then evolved into Detroiters Uniting, a multiethnic coalition advocating a vision for Detroit based on neighborhood empowerment and opposition to Young’s corporation- or developer-driven model of development.

The Boggses became deeply involved with Save Our Sons and Daughters (SOSAD), founded in early 1987 by Clementine Barfield, who had recently lost her sixteen-year-old son in a shooting. Grace and Jimmy worked with SOSAD to reduce violence, foster a culture of healing and hope, and create meaningful pathways for young people’s development.23 In SOSAD the Boggses met activist lawyers Alice Jennings and her husband Carl Edwards, who became valuable allies. In November 1991, this loose coalition of activists held a “People’s Festival” to celebrate and advance community-based efforts to meet the challenges facing the city. As explained in the printed program, the festival was conceived as an affirmation of an emergent vision grounded in the principles of social responsibility and self-reliance:

There is a new spirit rising in Detroit. It is found where people are rehabbing abandoned houses, walking streets against crack and crime, planting gardens, reclaiming our neighborhoods as places of safety and peace for ourselves and our children.

It is a spirit born out of the depths of a city crisis. For too long our neighborhoods have been allowed to deteriorate. For too long our scarce tax dollars have gone to subsidize megaprojects with little return to the people. For too long our streets have been places of violence and danger.

It is the spirit born out of people struggling together. The spirit that builds Community, Compassion, Cooperation, Participation and Enterprise as we strive for harmony with one another and with our Earth. The spirit that says WE THE PEOPLE will education our children. WE will create productive and loving communities. WE will rebuild our city.24

One month after the People’s Festival, the Boggses started planning Detroit Summer, their most ambitious and enduring project during this period. Jimmy and Grace joined with a small group of activists, including Howell and Barfield, to plan a youth program modeled on Mississippi Freedom Summer that would engage young people in the grassroots revitalization of Detroit. Guided by its mission to “rebuild, redefine, and re-spirit Detroit from the ground up,” Detroit Summer brought together young people from the city and around the country who spent four weeks in the summer of 1992 working in small groups on collaborative projects such as planting gardens, rehabilitating homes, and creating murals.25 Many projects involved intergenerational exchanges, such as planting vegetable and flower gardens with a group of elders called the Gardening Angels. One of the participants, fifteen-year-old Tracy Hollins, said of her experience in Detroit Summer, “It filled your head with answers to questions that you’d had all of your life and questions that no one can answer. It made you feel that you were an important part of the changing and molding of future generations. It made you feel that the hole you dug, the garden you watered or the swing set you painted, made a difference.”26 Another participant, Detroit High School student Julia Pointer (Putnam), recalled that during the Detroit Summer opening ceremony Jimmy “stepped to the mic and challenged every youth in the audience.” He told them that “it was up to us to make a difference in our communities,” leaving no doubt that the purpose of Detroit Summer was “to empower and inspire youth to reclaim some responsibility in rebuilding our cities. And we wanted to—because Jimmy made it clear that afternoon and every day afterwards that he was proud of us. And that made us proud of ourselves. Because this thin, wiry man, who a moment ago was a stranger, became our friend.”27

No Final Struggle

The contrast that Putnam identified between the strength of Jimmy’s words and the frailty of his body reflected a difficult reality: Jimmy’s health was rapidly deteriorating. In 1988 he was diagnosed with bladder cancer, for which he underwent chemotherapy and multiple surgeries. In 1991 doctors found a tumor in Jimmy’s lung. Radiation treatments put it into remission, but another tumor was found a year later. In February 1993 Jimmy was put on oxygen, and in the middle of May he entered hospice. He continued writing, attending meetings, and delivering speeches until his condition suddenly worsened on July 20. For two days, as the hospice nurse tended to him, Jimmy’s friends, neighbors, and family members filled the house. Jimmy could no longer speak, but Grace and others sat with him playing his favorite music and reading his favorite poems to him. Jimmy passed away on July 22, 1993, at the age of seventy-four.28

Grace was acutely aware of what she lost with the death of her partner, collaborator, and closest comrade. “Life is so different without Jimmy to dialogue and share and fuss with,” she told Rosemarie and Vincent Harding in a December 1993 letter. “After 40 years you begin taking a lot of things for granted,” she confided. “I realize what a unique partnership we enjoyed.”29 Indeed, theirs was very much a partnership of equals, from political work to housework, as Grace referenced in a letter to Xavier Nicholas a month later: “It’s strange without Jimmy but he’s very present in his absence. Not only when I go to a meeting or prepare a speech or an article, but in and around the house reminding me to keep an eye on the water level in the furnace or rub down the car when I come in from the rain or mop the kitchen floor—all the things that I never thought about because he took care of them.”30

The memorial services held after Jimmy’s passing occasioned multilayered reflections on his life and the life he built with Grace. A memorial service held on October 23 at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church, a vital meeting space for Detroit activists, grassroots organizations, and community-based programs, drew friends and fellow activists from across the country. The tributes and testimonies embodied the sense of community and commitment to change that had been central to Jimmy’s life and his partnership with Grace. The program ranged from a moving video by Frances Reid titled “James Boggs: An American Revolutionary” to musical selections from Duke Ellington’s “Sacred Concerts.” Speakers recited original poems and shared their memories. “The part of the celebration that I suspect [Jimmy] would have liked the best,” Grace recalled later, “was when individuals stood up and were introduced according to how many years they had known him, beginning with Faye Brown who had worked with him at the Chrysler-Jefferson plant in the early 1940s and Ping Ferry who had known him since 1962. Those who had known him the shortest time were the young people of Detroit Summer.”31 Characteristically, those who had attended the memorial service were all invited to join a set of roundtable discussions on the theme “The Struggle for the Future” hosted by Detroit Summer youth and adult volunteers.32

Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, the popular artist-activists who had known Grace and Jimmy since the mid-1960s, described their appreciation for Jimmy’s plainspoken and clearly written insights, praised his unique ability to challenge and push others in their thinking, and recounted how they had been so convinced of the importance of Jimmy’s The American Revolution that they sent copies of the book to major civil rights leaders. Davis explained that reading that book was the first in a series of moments when he felt “born again” through encounters with Jimmy’s ideas over the course of the two couples’ long friendship.33 Dee paid tribute to Jimmy in her poem “For James, Writer, Activist, and Worker.” Written for Jimmy on the eve of his death and now printed in the memorial service program, it expressed gratitude for all that Jimmy and Grace had meant to her and Davis. Representing “the nobleness of life,” the Boggses served as “stalwart cheerleaders of the BETTER WAY CONTIGENT,” opening new “horizons of thought and theory” and nurturing “the seed bed of exciting and necessary choices.”34

This recognition of Jimmy’s unique gifts and contributions, in combination with an equal appreciation of Jimmy’s partnership with Grace, was a consistent theme in the tributes that flowed in, some of them heard that day, others written and collected in a booklet that was distributed at the service. Bill Strickland, an activist and intellectual who was a principal figure in key movement organizations of the 1960s and 1970 such as the Northern Student Movement and the Atlanta-based Institute of the Black World, identified Jimmy as one of four black men by whom he was “politically molded” (along with Malcolm X, Jesse Gray, and Vincent Harding). From each of them he learned something specific and invaluable. “Jimmy Boggs—and when I say ‘Jimmy’ here I mean, of course, ‘Jimmy and Grace’—taught me that it was possible, indeed absolutely necessary, to make sense of the day-to-day reality in which I was immersed. I learned from them that RIGHT NOW was also History, as susceptible to analysis and understanding as anything that happened in decades past.” Over the years, Strickland regularly called or visited the Boggses “to hear their thoughts on the real contradictions underlying an unfolding event”: “Few memories are as lasting, or as fond, or as important to me intellectually … as are my memories of those talks … grappling with the latest developments in ‘The Struggle.’ These discussions enlarged my capacity to know and think and act less blindly. They also gave me a lesson in how a revolutionary intellectual thinks with clarity, reflects with humor, and speaks out in courage. The Boggses University at 3061 Field Street was a great place to learn and be warmed in the fire of a politically exciting intellectual hospitality whose like I have not encountered since. Above all, however, it was a place to get to know Jimmy Boggs, a man worth the knowing, and the loving, and now, the missing.”35 Strickland’s witty characterization of 3061 Field Street as “the Boggses University” aptly captured the significance of their home as a site of intergenerational exchange and mentorship of young activists and a gathering place where organizational meetings, movement strategizing, and political discussions constantly took place.

A year later, during an intergenerational gathering to assess Jimmy’s legacy, Vincent Harding offered a parallel reflection: “When we first met Grace and Jimmy more than a quarter of a century ago now, it was clear to me that we were meeting people who represented the spirit of continuing struggle.” This spirit was exemplified, he said, in Jimmy’s recognition “that there is always the need to begin again, that there is no permanent solution of anything, and that every set of solutions creates a new set of challenges. If we are looking for permanent solutions, we are looking for the grave. If we are looking for life, then we are looking for permanent challenges.”36 This was, of course, a recognition that Jimmy and Grace shared. As she wrote just a few years later, “I am often asked what keeps me going after all these years. I think it is the realization that there is no final struggle. Whether you win or lose, each struggle brings forth new contradictions, new and more challenging questions.”37

The founding of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership (BCNCL) in 1995 provided a organizational and political space through which Grace continued to engage the new contradictions and new questions that she believed were essential to revolutionary change. The idea for the BCNCL, commonly referred to as the Boggs Center, emerged when Jennings and Edwards raised it with Grace shortly after Jimmy’s death.38 In 1995, the three of them founded the Boggs Center as a nonprofit organization to serve as “a Community Think Place and Visioning Center.” Its purpose, in Grace’s words, was to honor community work and “open up the minds especially of young people and children to rethink fundamental ideas about revolution, politics, and citizenship.”39 Howell and Donald Boggs, Jimmy’s youngest son, served as the interim cochairs of its founding board of directors, whose members also included Grace, Jennings, Edwards, and Barfield. By 1998 the Boggs Center had raised the money to purchase 3061 Field Street, the house that Grace and Jimmy had lived in since 1962 and that had “been the site of so many movement-building activities over the years.”40 While Grace continued to live on the first floor, the upper floor became the home of the Boggs Center. The organization soon became an important vehicle for the public presentation and application of Jimmy and Grace’s ideas, and it has emerged, through its many activities over several years, as a consistent and generative force within Detroit’s vibrant community of grassroots activists. From its founding in 1995 to Grace’s passing in 2015, the Boggs Center served as Grace’s organizational base as she assumed the overlapping roles of movement elder, community activist, and revolutionary theoretician.41

Throughout most of these final two decades of her life, even as she experienced the inevitable physical limitations of advanced age, Grace maintained a consistent and active schedule of writing, attending meetings, organizing programs, speaking, holding discussions, and strategizing. Throughout the 1990s, Grace was an ever-present and influential figure in grassroots struggles to shape Detroit’s future. The publication of her autobiography Living for Change in 1998 generated new interest in Grace’s life and ideas, and by the turn of the twenty-first century she was receiving increasing national recognition as a growing number of people across the country became aware of her long history of activism and found inspiration in her work in Detroit. In 2011 Grace published her last book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, presenting a distillation of her thinking during the preceding decade about revolutionary change in the new century. Written in collaboration with historian and Boggs Center board member Scott Kurashige, The Next American Revolution provides the historical and theoretical foundation for what Grace and the Boggs Center called “visionary organizing”: grassroots political work not focused solely on protesting current injustices, but rather geared toward projecting alternatives and creating new visions for the future. This concept had its roots in Jimmy and Grace’s theorizing dialectical humanism, in their distinction between rebellion and revolution, in their belief in two-sided transformation, in their commitment to community building and grassroots leadership, and in Grace’s continuing embrace of the “new contradictions” and the “new and more challenging questions” of the twenty-first century that she confronted as a movement elder who not only inspired a new generation of activists but also directly engaged with them.42

In 2013, filmmaker Grace Lee (no relation) released the documentary film American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, presenting a compelling portrait of her long life and record of political engagement. “I don’t know what the next American revolution is going to be like,” Grace says at the end of the film, “but you might be able to imagine it, if your imagination were rich enough.”43 This statement, like the concept of visionary organizing, reflected two central dimensions of the political practice that Grace and Jimmy had fashioned together: an evolutionary conception of revolutionary change, and a commitment to dialectical thinking. She insisted that we question old ideas about the purpose and practice of revolution, allowing our creativity and imagination to envision news ways of relating to each other and the earth, new ways of building our communities, and in the process challenging ourselves to create the world anew.

Grace celebrated her 100th birthday on June 27, 2015. A group of Grace’s comrades, friends, and supporters formed a Grace Lee Boggs Birthday Committee to plan a weeklong series of events in Grace’s honor taking place at various locations in Detroit.44 In poor health and bedridden, Grace was unable to attend any of the events, but she received visitors during the week, including friends and former comrades from across the country. The culminating event at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History brought together a wonderfully broad collection of people. It included people who admired Grace but never met her and people who had known her for decades, younger people she had inspired and older people who had been in various organizations with her, people who read her writings and people who participated in movements with her. The collection of people gathered to celebrate Grace, and by extension Jimmy, stood as a testament to the legacy Grace and Jimmy left. In this gathering were multiple generations and overlapping networks of the activists, friends, family, and admirers who were a part of Grace and Jimmy’s life or shared their commitments.

On October 5, 2015, 100 days after her 100th birthday, Grace passed away peacefully at her home, with her closest friends, longtime comrades, and caregivers by her side. Friends and admirers of Grace held an impromptu memorial that evening outside her home, and then organized a large public memorial service at the end of the month. More than 500 people attended the service, some forced to watch the video feed in an overflow room after the union hall reached its capacity, while others elsewhere watched on live stream. The number of people attending or watching the memorial service, like the outpouring of reflections and tributes in the days and weeks following her passing, reflected Grace’s influence and standing among activists, artists, and others in Detroit and beyond. In that moment it was easy, and on some level appropriate, to think of Grace and her legacy in the singular. To be sure, a good number of those in attendance and watching remotely knew of Grace primarily or even exclusively from the public profile she developed and the recognition she garnered during the two decades since Jimmy’s death. Still, in important moments, speakers and performers on the memorial service program pointed out that Grace and Jimmy’s four decades of activism and theoretical work had been the foundation for her thinking, writing, and activism during this period. Among the various tributes, remembrances, poems, and songs attesting to the depth and meaning of Grace’s life, several made it clear that a full assessment of Grace’s legacy and impact must recognize the unique and generative partnership that she and Jimmy built together. Activist, poet, and Boggs Center board member Tawana “Honeycomb” Petty, for example, captured the spirit of their relationship in the poem she delivered at the memorial: “Grace was struggle wrapped in love.… She was the other half of Jimmy, dynamic duo in the struggle.”45

Three years before his death, on the occasion of Grace’s seventy-fifth birthday, Jimmy made a public tribute that articulated what their partnership meant to him: “To my wife of many years whom I love and respect not only for our good fortune and relationship, but because of my deep appreciation of what I have learned from her. She has enriched my life.”46 The enrichment, of course, flowed both ways, with Grace and Jimmy continually learning from each other as they grew together. With the goal of making the next American revolution as their guiding commitment, James and Grace Lee Boggs crafted a remarkable partnership, forged in love and struggle.