Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
BLMOHC
Blacks in the Labor Movement Oral History Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Michigan
Boggs Papers
James and Grace Lee Boggs Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Michigan
Cleage Papers
Albert B. Cleage Jr. Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Michigan
CRDP
Civil Rights Documentation Project, Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
DCCR
Detroit Commission on Community Relations, Human Rights Department Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Michigan
Dillard Papers
Ernest C. and Jessie M. Dillard Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Michigan
DULR
Detroit Urban League Records, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Michigan
Dunayevskaya Papers
Raya Dunayevskaya Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Michigan
FBI-GLB
Grace Lee Boggs File HQ 100-356160, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C.
FBI-JB
James Boggs File HQ 100-405600, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C.
Franklin Papers
C. L. Franklin Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Michigan
Glaberman Papers
Martin and Jessie Glaberman Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Michigan
JALC
Joseph A. Labadie Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Michigan
James Papers
C. L. R. James Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York
NAACP-DBC
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Detroit Branch Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Michigan
OHALC
Oral History of the American Left Collection, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York
Paine Papers
Frances D. and G. Lyman Paine Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Michigan
UAWLocal7
United Automobile Workers Local 7 Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Michigan
INTRODUCTION
1. This is the first full-length treatment of James and Grace Lee Boggs. The following works explore various dimensions of their activism and thinking. Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, presents a collection of Jimmy’s writings over four decades and provides an overview of their careers, focusing in particular on James Boggs’s activism and intellectual work. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism, includes a chapter on the thought of James and Grace Lee Boggs, calling them “the most significant Afro-Asian collaboration in U.S. radical history” (xliii) and “two of contemporary radicalism’s most seminal thinkers” (111), adding that their thinking “awaits a still more complete explication” (162). A special issue of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society examined James Boggs and his book The American Revolution. The issue is titled “Reflections on a Black Worker’s Notebook: The Legacy of James Boggs’s The American Revolution” and is guest edited by Matthew Birkhold (Souls 13, no. 3). An examination of James Boggs’s thought in relation to Mao Zedong and China is presented in Frazier, “The Assault of the Monkey King on the Hosts of Heaven.” Two articles investigating Grace Lee Boggs within Asian American political traditions are Fu, “On Contradiction”; and Choi, “At the Margins of the Asian American Political Experience.”
Additional studies identify the Boggses as pivotal figures. Speaking specifically to their place in Detroit’s history, Angela Dillard writes, “If cross-generational influence was indeed key to the development of political radicalism in 1960s Detroit, Grace Lee and James Boggs personified that influence” (Faith in the City, 226). Literary scholar James Edward Smethurst characterizes James Boggs “as a sort of father figure” (Black Arts Movement, 187) to many young radicals, while political scientist Michael Dawson writes that the Boggses’ influence “went beyond Detroit’s black radicals,” noting that their works “were standard fare in black study groups, in worker circles, and among student activist from New York to California” (Black Visions, 200–201). Van Gosse cites James Boggs, together with Malcolm X, Harold Cruse, Amiri Baraka, and others, as a key figure who helped to forge the transformation of the civil rights movement into a struggle for black power (Rethinking the New Left, 114).
2. Bill Strickland, “Remembering My Man, James Boggs,” statement for memorial celebration of James Boggs, October 12, 1993 (in author’s possession).
3. James Boggs, “Think Dialectically, Not Biologically,” Save Our Sons and Daughters Workshop, March 1993 (videotape in author’s possession).
4. James Boggs, “Think Dialectically, Not Biologically,” text of speech delivered at Atlanta University, February 17, 1974. This speech is reprinted in Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook. This quotation appears on 273.
5. Stephen M. Ward, Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 266.
6. Ibid.
7. Aneb Gloria House, “For Grace Lee Boggs’ 100th Birthday” (in author’s possession). House read this poem at Grace Lee Boggs’s 100th birthday celebration at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. This event is briefly discussed in the Epilogue.
8. James and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, 128, 226.
CHAPTER 1
1. Jimmy made these remarks at the James and Grace Lee Boggs Community Celebration, Detroit, May 1990 (videotape in author’s possession; hereafter cited as Community Celebration). His remarks are also cited in Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 228. The “About the Author” page at the end of James Boggs, The American Revolution, reads in part, “James Boggs, born in Marion Junction, Alabama, forty-four years ago, never dreamed of becoming President or a locomotive engineer. He grew up in a world where the white folks are gentlemen by day and Ku Klux Klanners at night. Marion Junction is in Dallas County where even today, although Negroes make up over 57 percent of the total county population of 57,000, only 130 Negroes are registered voters.”
2. Community Celebration.
3. James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line,” interview by WBAI Pacifica Radio, recorded October 11, 1963; broadcast November 25, 1963.
4. James Boggs interview in OHALC.
5. Glenn Feldman, Politics, Society, and the Klan, 20, 261–68; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 73–76, 101.
6. Flynt, Alabama in the Twentieth Century, 318.
7. Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence; Tuttle, Race Riot, 14, 22.
8. Community Celebration.
9. In Way Out of No Way, Swann-Wright cites the following “African American folk saying” on the page facing the table of contents: “Our God can make a way out of no way.… He can do anything but fail.”
10. For further discussion of this phrase and its meanings, see Ladner, The Ties That Bind, chapter 11. Two recent studies of African American culture, focusing particularly on black women, have taken the phrase as their titles: Boehm, Making a Way Out of No Way: African American Women and the Second Great Migration, and Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology. Boehm centers resilience—“the capability of a human being to continue on in the face of great adversity”—as the basis of this shared cultural experience. She writes, “Resilience is an often undervalued attribute; resilience is a form of courage, but it requires a continuity of spirit that is not necessarily a component of all types of bravery. A soldier might gather up his personal fortitude, take a deep breath, and run headlong into danger. Resilience entails not only a momentary conviction of spirit, but a continued devotion to persisting in the face of adversity, a commitment to ‘making a way out of no way’ ” (19). A similar reflection comes in Marian Wright Edelman’s discussion of her memory of Martin Luther King Jr. Herself a veteran of the civil rights movement, a child of the South, and a longtime activist, Edelman writes, “I also remember him as someone able to admit how often he was afraid and unsure about his next step. But faith prevailed over fear and uncertainty and fatigue and depression. It was his human vulnerability and his ability to rise above it that I most remember. In this, he was not different from many Black adults whose credo has been to make ‘a way out of no way’ ” (The Measure of Our Success, 11).
11. Community Celebration.
12. James Boggs’s birth certificate gives May 27 as his date of birth, but May 28 is the date that he and his family celebrated as his birthday. May 28 is the date of birth listed on the program of his memorial service and in the tribute booklet distributed at the service.
The most useful sources of biographical information on James Boggs are the following: James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line”; James Boggs’s oral history in Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 149–56; transcript of the interview with James Boggs conducted by Detroit Urban League (for Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes), Boggs Papers, Box 16, Folder 9; the text of James Boggs’s statement during the “Pendle Hill Seminar/Search: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Modern Freedom Movement,” led by Vincent Harding and Rosemarie Freeney Harding, July 18, 1979 (in author’s possession); Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution; James Boggs interview in OHALC; James Boggs interview in Detroit Committee for the Liberation of Africa Newsletter 1, no. 4 (February–March 1974): 1–3; “Biographical Data on James Boggs,” Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 7; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, chapter 4; Phelps, “James Boggs”; Darrell Dawsey, “An American Revolutionary,” Detroit News, April 21, 1992; and the author’s interviews with Grace Lee Boggs.
13. These passages come from James Boggs, “Why Are Our Children So Bored?,” which appeared in the Save Our Sons and Daughters Newsletter in the summer of 1991. It is reprinted in Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 357–58. The quoted passages appear on 357.
14. It seems that “Dr. Donald” and “Miss Elvie” are the names by which James Boggs and other members of the family referred to the couple. I am grateful to Joy Boggs, James Boggs’s niece, for sharing this and other family information with me. James Boggs regularly mentioned the couple in interviews, but never by name. He only refers to them as “the doctor and his wife.”
15. James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line.”
16. Ibid.
17. James Boggs interview in OHALC.
18. Ibid.
19. James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line.”
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. The state of Alabama reported Marion Junction’s population to be 1,114 in 1920, the year after James Boggs was born, and 1,053 in 1930. See State of Alabama Department of Archives and History, Alabama Official and Statistical Register, 1931, 440.
23. Bond, Negro Education in Alabama, 3.
24. Kolchin, First Freedom, 12.
25. Ibid., 16.
26. Fitts, Selma, 108
27. Griffith, Alabama, 288, 141.
28. Hereford, “A Study of Selma and Dallas County, Alabama,” 11.
29. Bond, Negro Education in Alabama, 123.
30. Alabama Department of Archives and History, Alabama Official and Statistical Register, 1919, 436–37.
31. Flynt, Alabama in the Twentieth Century, 6.
32. Ibid., 7.
33. Bond, Negro Education in Alabama; Flynt, Alabama in the Twentieth Century.
34. Flynt Alabama in the Twentieth Century, 3.
35. Ibid., 14; Fitts, Selma, 101; Alabama Department of Archives and History, Alabama Official and Statistical Register, 1915, 362. One of the most effective disfranchisement measures was the poll tax, which also resulted in a decline of white voters.
36. Bond, Negro Education in Alabama, 226.
37. Alabama Department of Archives and History, Alabama Official and Statistical Register, 1919, 436. A key reason for the decline in agriculture was the boll weevil, which came to Alabama during the first half of the 1910s and by mid-decade had devastated the state’s cotton crops. While Alabama boasted a cotton crop of 1,731,751 bales in 1914, two years later it had plunged nearly 70 percent, to just 552,679 bales.
38. Bosworth, Black Belt County, 1–2.
39. Alabama Department of Archives and History, Alabama Official and Statistical Register, 1919, 436.
40. James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line.”
41. I am again grateful to Joy Boggs for confirming the name Thomas Boggs. In James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line,” Boggs says, “my father’s father was white,” but does not give his name.
42. Ibid.
43. James Boggs Jr. interview with author. He says that his uncle Bill (his father’s older brother) told him that they played with the white cousins as children.
44. James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line.”
45. James Boggs, “Pendle Hill Seminar/Search,” 1. He does not name his great-grandmother in this document, but Grace Lee Boggs identifies her as Big Ma in Living for Change. She writes that James Boggs’s relationship with Big Ma was an early expression of his lifelong concern for elders and describes another dimension to their relationship: “As a boy he had taken care of Big Ma, his great-grandmother, feeding and dressing her and emptying her bedpan” (93).
46. James Boggs, “Pendle Hill Seminar/Search,” 1.
47. Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 246.
48. Ibid., 248, 168.
49. Ibid., 168–69.
50. Ibid., 248.
51. Ibid., table 19 on 208.
52. Ibid., 169.
53. Phillips, Alabama North, 53, citing the Department of Labor study “The Negro at Work.”
54. James Boggs made these remarks during a speech titled “The Next Development in Education” delivered in Detroit in 1977. The text of the speech is included in Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 284–92. The quoted passage appears on 284.
55. Sisk, “Negro Education in the Alabama Black Belt.”
56. Fitts, Selma, 118–19. Fitts reports that Knox was one of four private schools for blacks in Selma. The one public school, with 1,300 students, was “highly overcrowded.” There were six public schools for whites.
57. Grace Lee Boggs e-mail correspondence with author, August 14, 2009. In this correspondence Grace Lee Boggs relates information related to her by Annie Boggs, James Boggs’s first wife, who attended the same elementary school.
58. James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line.”
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Fitts, Selma, 119.
62. In “Walking a Chalk Line,” James Boggs describes his change of schools but does not say it was because of Knox closing or reducing the grades offered. He says, “I stayed in Selma until I got in the 10th grade, and then I decided I wanted to go to this town called Bessemer, Alabama.”
63. After leaving Dunbar, Morton attended Morehouse College and Columbia University before settling in Detroit, where he had an accomplished career as an educator, philosopher, and member of the clergy.
64. Charles Morton interview with author.
65. Annie Boggs interview with author. As she recalls, Jimmy “followed” her to Bessemer.
66. Charles Morton interview with author.
67. Bailey, They Too Call Alabama Home, 345–50; Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 348–51; Powledge, Free at Last?, 45–47, 149–50, 172, 484, 638; and McWhorter, Carry Me Home.
68. Charles Morton interview with author.
69. As Vanessa Siddle Walker explains, black communities throughout the South used “professor” to describe “an empowering leader who was the lever elevating racial progress in black schools and communities.” Through his leadership of Dunbar, as well as his example of educational and professional attainment, Shores embodied “this community definition of an educational agent who used his influence to motivate the educational aspirations of black children” (Walker with Byas, Hello Professor, xiv).
70. James Boggs to A. D. Shores, September 14, 1963, Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 22.
71. Bailey, They Too Call Alabama Home; Eskew, But for Birmingham, 54–57; McWhorter, Carry Me Home, 96–104, 498–501.
72. James Boggs to A. D. Shores, September 14, 1963.
73. Annie Boggs interview with author.
74. Quoted in Dawsey, “An American Revolutionary.”
75. James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line.”
76. James Boggs interview in OHALC.
77. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 84–85; transcript of interview with Jimmy Boggs conducted by Detroit Urban League, 2.
78. James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line.”
79. Ibid. Boggs offers this story as a prominent reason he decided to leave the South.
80. James Boggs high school diploma (in possession of Grace Lee Boggs); Grace Lee Boggs e-mail correspondence with author, July 13, 2005.
81. Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 150
82. Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 1.
83. Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 150.
84. Transcript of interview with Jimmy Boggs conducted by Detroit Urban League, 4.
85. James Boggs Jr. interview with author.
86. Transcript of interview with Jimmy Boggs conducted by Detroit Urban League, 4.
87. Babson, Working Detroit, 42.
88. Ibid., 104.
89. I have drawn this point from Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford. Bates provides an excellent discussion of black workers at Ford and the company’s evolving relationship with the city’s black community.
90. See map in Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It, 126.
91. Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 132, 348–49. Zunz shows how the city’s neighborhoods and social dynamics were reshaped by a dissolution of ethnic identification and a strengthening of both a class-based identity and a cross-class white racial identity.
92. Hyde, Detroit, unpaginated.
93. For rich discussions of the Great Migration, black settlement patterns, and the intense struggles over housing during the two-and-a-half decades preceding James Boggs’s arrival in the city, see Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford, and Miller, Managing Inequality.
94. Black Bottom earned its name from the area’s dark, fertile soil, on which Detroit’s early settlers farmed, but the name took on new meaning as African Americans came to inhabit the area in the first half of the twentieth century. As literary scholar and poet Melba Joyce Boyd explains, “During the Great Migration, that name [Black Bottom] acquired additional symbolic meaning as black southerners crowded into a neighborhood situated on the bottom of the city’s social strata” (Wrestling with the Muse, 35).
95. Young and Wheeler, Hard Stuff, 143.
96. Ibid., 144.
97. For businesses along Hastings, see Wilson with Cohassey, Toast of the Town, 104–5; and various selections in Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes.
98. Examples include Detroit Count, “Hastings Street Opera”; John Lee Hooker, “Boogie Chillen”; and Dudley Randall, “Hastings Street Girls.”
99. Wilson with Cohassey, Toast of the Town, 46. Wilson writes, “Benny Ornsby’s B&B Fish Dock served only fried fish. Take-out or sit-down, it had wonderful bass and pickerel sandwiches. You could smell the fish cooking down the street.” Roxborough’s office was in the Watson Investment Real Estate Company, owned by Everett I. Watson, who was himself a businessman involved in both legal and extralegal affairs. This building may have also housed the recently established black weekly newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle. See Poinsett, Walking with Presidents.
100. See Miller, Managing Inequality, 241, for the “East Side Blighted Area”; Boykin, A Handbook, 54, for boundaries of the area; Thomas, Race and Redevelopment, 20–22, for the city’s plans; and Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, for multiple former residents describing life in the Brewster Homes.
101. Wilson with Cohassey, Toast of the Town, 105–6. Most of the bars as well as many other establishments in the area were Jewish owned, as Jewish immigrants had lived in the area during the decades prior to, and to some extent during, black settlement.
102. Ibid., 104.
103. Ibid., 106, citing the Detroit Tribune.
104. This description of James Boggs’s arrival in Detroit is drawn from his oral history in Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes. The quotation appears on 150.
105. Detroit population statistics from United States Census of Population, 1910–1970, cited in Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 23.
106. Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes.
107. See Detroit Tribune, July 17, 1937, 4, for Calloway advertisement; Detroit Tribune, July 31, 1937, 4, for Armstrong advertisement; Detroit Tribune, August 21, 1937, for Henderson and Hines advertisement. The Graystone was the largest ballroom in the city and, like others, generally only held dances for blacks on Monday nights. See Bjorn and Gallert, Before Motown, 8.
108. “Hot-Cha Sizzles at Melody Club,” Detroit Tribune, August 28, 1937, 11; advertisement for Temptation in Detroit Tribune, July 24, 1937, 11.
109. “Go and Register,” Detroit Tribune, August 28, 1937, 1.
110. Announcement for First Annual Emancipation Picnic and Dance, Detroit Tribune, July 24, 1937, 3. On the Michigan Federated Democratic Clubs, see Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It, 267.
111. Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It, 187. Thomas reports that several black papers collapsed during the Depression. The Tribune merged with one of these, the Detroit Independent.
112. Detroit Tribune, June 12, 1937, 1.
113. On Kirk see Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, 40.
114. Poinsett, Walking with Presidents, 13.
115. Ibid., 17. For more on Diggs, see Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It, 265–70.
116. Louis Martin, “The Ford Contract: An Opportunity,” Crisis, September 1941, cited in Poinsett, Walking with Presidents, 23.
117. Babson, Working Detroit, 93.
118. James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line.”
119. Ibid.; Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 150–51.
120. Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 1.
121. James Boggs interview in OHALC; Annie Boggs interview with author.
122. Annie Boggs interview with author.
123. Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 151.
124. Annie Boggs interview with author.
125. Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 151.
126. James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line”; “Biographical Data on James Boggs”; Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 150–51; Dawsey, “An American Revolutionary.” In the apprentice program he would have made 60 cents an hour as a template maker (pattern maker), whereas he would earn 68 cents an hour as a new factory worker. He reported that his earnings at Chrysler had risen to $1.02 an hour by 1945.
CHAPTER 2
1. From the text of James Boggs’s statement during the “Pendle Hill Seminar/Search: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Modern Freedom Movement,” led by Vincent Harding and Rosemarie Freeney Harding, July 18, 1979, 2 (in author’s possession). He would express this sentiment on multiple occasions during and after his tenure in the plant. See, for example, these interviews: James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line” interview by WBAI Pacifica Radio, recorded October 11, 1963; broadcast November 25, 1963; Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 6; James Boggs interview in OHALC.
2. Thomas J. Sugrue makes this point in Origins of the Urban Crisis. He writes, “World War II represented a turning point in black employment prospects. In 1941 and 1942, firms with predominantly white work forces gradually opened their doors to blacks” (26).
3. Weaver, Negro Labor, 63.
4. Ibid., 286.
5. Ibid., 63.
6. Ibid., 289.
7. James Boggs, The American Revolution, 80. In this passage, Boggs also restated his interpretation of the war’s impact: “Negroes did not give credit for this order to Roosevelt or the American government. Far from it. Recognizing that America and its allies had their backs to the wall in their struggle with Hitler and Tojo, Negroes said that Hitler and Tojo, by creating the war that made the Americans give them jobs in industry, had done more for them in four years than Uncle Sam had done in three hundred years” (The American Revolution, 79–80). This book is reproduced in its entirety in Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook. These quotations appear on 133.
8. For wartime black activism see Bates, “ ‘Double V for Victory.’ ” In The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford, Bates provides a provocative and compelling analysis of black community and labor activism during the 1920s and 1930s, making a strong argument for how to understand the transformations during World War II. For other and sometimes competing discussions of the years leading up to World War II, see Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW; and Miller, Managing Inequality. Each of these identifies the significance of the 1937–41 period, though they give contrasting arguments about the specific political dynamics at play. Bates challenges these interpretations, particularly Meier and Rudwick’s, and identifies the early 1930s as a crucial moment leading to black workers and the black community acting as a major force in the success of the UAW’s victory at Ford in 1941. In Life for Us Is What We Make It, Richard W. Thomas says the years 1936–41 were a period of “radical transformation of the social consciousness of black Detroit” (190). Dillard, Faith in the City, gives an insightful exposition of the overlapping political spaces leading up to, during, and after World War II, with particular attention to religious expressions of radicalism.
9. James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line.”
10. Jimmy began working at Chrysler between 1940 and 1942, but his exact starting date is unclear. The year most frequently given is 1940. For example, in his oral history in Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, he makes a reference to working at Chrysler in 1940 (151). Similarly, in her autobiography Grace says that when they, along with their comrades and friends Freddy and Lyman Paine, collectively made the decision in 1968 that Jimmy should resign from his job at Chrysler to allow him to devote his full energies to political activities, this meant that he would be leaving “two years short of the thirty years required for retirement on pension” (Living for Change, 156). This suggests that he began in 1940 and stayed there for twenty-eight years. This time frame is repeated elsewhere, and I followed this usage in the introduction to Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook (11). However, other evidence suggests he began at Chrysler in 1941 or 1942. A biographical statement written in 1970 describes him as “an auto worker for 27 years … from 1941–1968” (“Biographical Data on James Boggs,” Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 7). It is not clear if 1941 refers here to his first, and short-lived, job at Dodge, or to his starting date at Chrysler. In an interview decades later, Annie Boggs recalled that James began at Chrysler in 1942, shortly after the birth of their second child in that year (Annie Boggs interview with author). The FBI’s file on James Boggs records his starting date at Chrysler as July 21, 1942 (FBI-JB, Summary Report, October 15, 1953, 4).
11. Boyle, “Auto Workers at War,” 103, 105; Babson, Working Detroit, 80; Jefferys, Management and Managed, 84–87.
12. Bailer, “The Negro Automobile Worker”; Korstad and Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost”; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 95.
13. Weaver, Negro Labor, 61–77; Capeci, Race Relations in Wartime Detroit, 31.
14. Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford; Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW; Dillard, Faith in the City; Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It.
15. Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford; Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, 90, 92.
16. Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford; Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW; Babson, Working Detroit; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis.
17. See Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford, for an analysis of the dynamics involved in this relationship among black workers and the black community of Detroit, the Ford Motor Company, and the city’s labor movement.
18. Garfinkel, When Negroes March, 38, 54–60. The MOWM is discussed in greater detail in chapter 4.
19. “Publishers at the White House,” Michigan Chronicle, February 19, 1944, 1, quoted in Washburn, The African American Newspaper, 177.
20. Bates, “ ‘Double V for Victory’ ”; Garfinkel, When Negroes March. For the meaning and use of Double V in Detroit, see Shockley, We, Too, Are Americans. For more on the MOWM in Detroit, including FEPC-inspired activism, see Dillard, Faith in the City, 115–23.
21. Lewis-Colman, Race against Liberalism, 25–29; Bates, “ ‘Double V for Victory,’ ” 27–28.
22. Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford; Lewis-Colman, Race against Liberalism. Such organizations include the National Negro Labor Council in the 1950s, the Trade Union Labor Council in the 1950s and 1960s, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the early 1970s.
23. Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW; Lewis-Colman, Race against Liberalism.
24. George Lipsitz gives an especially thoughtful analysis of these wildcats and hate strikes, examining their significance locally and placing them in a national context, in his Rainbow at Midnight, chapter 3.
25. For DiGaetano’s relationship with James Boggs, see Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 93, and discussion below. For DiGaetano’s efforts in the Ford strike, see Babson, Working Detroit, 105.
26. Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, 89, 103.
27. Lewis-Colman, Race against Liberalism, 26.
28. Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It, 245. See also Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, chapter 3. For a listing of the many walkouts throughout the city during the spring of 1943, see Hill, FBI’s RACON, 130–35.
29. “Detroit Is Dynamite,” Life, August 17, 1942. The article was published anonymously, but Meier and Rudwick indicate its authorship. See Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, 192, 264n37.
30. June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race, 20–21.
31. “Detroit Is Dynamite,” 20.
32. Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 151–52. For a broader discussion of the wartime housing crisis, see Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis.
33. Capeci and Wilkerson, Layered Violence, 184; Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, 191.
34. For a discussion of the gendered dimensions of these rumors, see Marilynn S. Johnson, “Gender, Race, and Rumours,” 264–67.
35. For descriptions and analyses of the riot, see Capeci and Wilkerson, Layered Violence; Lee and Humphrey, Race Riot; Sitkoff, “The Detroit Riot of 1943”; Marilynn S. Johnson, “Gender, Race, and Rumours.”
36. Capeci and Wilkerson report that the number of Belle Isle visitors that day was 100,000 and that on the east side “the temperature broke 90 degrees” that afternoon (Layered Violence, 5).
37. Annie Boggs interview with author. James Boggs Jr. also recalled this incident, with slight variation in the details (James Boggs Jr. interview with author).
38. Quoted from the 1995 documentary Claiming Open Spaces, which explores the use and significance of public space for black urban communities. It focuses on Franklin Park in Columbus, Ohio, and uses the experiences in four other cities—Detroit, Birmingham, New Orleans, and Oakland—to frame and reevaluate the history and meaning of Franklin Park. James and Grace Lee Boggs appear in the film speaking about Belle Isle and the 1943 Detroit riot.
39. Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 4–5.
40. Ibid., 5. These same remarks also appear in James Boggs, “Beyond Militancy.” The quotations appear on 38.
41. Mast, Detroit Lives.
42. Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 153.
43. Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther, 100.
44. Widick, Detroit, 72.
45. Joe Maddox interview with author.
46. “Local 7 Organization Committee Rules,” UAWLocal7, Box 9, Folder 19.
47. Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 152.
48. Darrell Dawsey, “An American Revolutionary,” Detroit News, April 21, 1992.
49. Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 152.
50. Nick DiGaetano oral history, BLMOHC; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 93.
51. James Boggs, “Conversations with James Boggs, #2,” interview by Kenneth Snodgrass, YouTube video, May 25, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywjrbGdsrO4 (accessed March 23, 2013). This is one of a series of video segments from a longer interview conducted by Snodgrass, a Detroit activist, writer, and videographer, in 1990. Snodgrass was a longtime comrade of Jimmy, beginning in the late 1960s.
52. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 93.
53. Lundberg, America’s Sixty Families, 3–4.
54. James Boggs, “Conversations with James Boggs, #2.”
55. Ibid.
56. James Boggs, The American Revolution, 11; Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 84. Similar language appears in the subtitle of James Boggs’s second book, Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook. He stopped working at Chrysler in 1968, thus when this book was published in 1970 he was no longer, at least in terms of current employment and activity, a factory worker. However, his nearly thirty years as a factory worker remained an important part of his political identity and analysis. Additionally, the title presents this book as something of a sequel to The American Revolution, also published by Monthly Review Press. Reflecting the shifting landscape, and political language, of the period, the second volume uses the word “black” in the subtitle rather than “negro,” which is used in the first.
57. James Boggs, “Conversations with James Boggs, #2.”
58. Glaberman, Wartime Strikes, 80.
59. Ibid., 62.
60. While he consistently spoke of an association with the Communist Party, James Boggs would make conflicting statements in interviews given over the course of two decades about his actual membership in the party. In James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line,” he says, “I always look at it like this: I never been a member of the Communist Party but if Communists have something good, that will make things good for me, well hell give me some of it. I don’t care about the labels” (track 8). However, two decades later in an interview for the OHALC he declared, “I belonged to the CP first. I belonged to a group called AYD, American Youth for Democracy.” He similarly claimed direct party membership in an interview with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee for their television program With Ossie and Ruby, also in the early 1980s. Discussing his activities during the 1940s, he said, “Some people were around [the Communist Party], I was in it.” Whatever his actual membership, the available evidence and the circumstances of his employment and union activities make clear that he had some interaction with the Communist Party and this was a component, however brief, of his early politicization.
61. Glaberman, Wartime Strikes, 73; Keeran, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions, 234.
62. Isserman, Which Side Were You On?, 143.
63. Glaberman, Wartime Strikes, 73.
64. Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 153; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 95–96.
65. James Boggs interview in OHALC. In this interview Jimmy says he was a member of the AYD. Additionally, FBI-JB identifies him as a member. On March 22, 1946, an informant “furnished a list of ‘American Youth for Democracy’ members who had signed 1946 membership cards. Included on this list was the name James Boggs” (FBI-JB, Correlation Summary, December 23, 1966, 4).
66. “Preamble and Constitution of American Youth for Democracy” (published January 1947), JALC, Pamphlet A57-5.
67. According to Aileen Kraditor, the AYD “contained the same three types of members who made up the party: the cadre and official leaders, the true believers in the ranks, and the short term members who were never true believers.” Jimmy fell into the third group, whom Kraditor says “did not even call themselves Communists.” See Kraditor, Jimmy Higgins, 10.
68. Ibid., 2.
69. Grace explained that her husband “was always measured in his attitude toward the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, always careful to avoid any association with the anti-Communism of the power structure.… Like most of his friends (in Detroit) Jimmy was aware that the American Communists had provided indispensable leadership in the struggle against Jim Crow and to create the unions” (Living for Change, 95–96).
70. Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 2 (emphasis in original).
71. Richard Wright engages this in Native Son, The Outsider, and Uncle Tom’s Children; Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man. Wright discussed his dissatisfaction with the Communist Party and his reasons for leaving it, and particularly his experiences as an aspiring writer in the party’s John Reed Club, in his 1944 essay “I Tried to Be a Communist.” Wright also took up his experiences with the Communist Party in his posthumously published book American Hunger, which was originally conceived as the second half of his autobiographical novel Black Boy (1945). The two are combined, thus restoring the full autobiography, in Black Boy (American Hunger), published by the American Library in 1991.
72. Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. See also Watts, Harold Cruse’s “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual” Reconsidered; and Cobb, The Essential Harold Cruse.
73. Also published in 1976 was Charles H. Martin, The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern Justice. In the preface Martin writes that “the relationship between Communists and blacks” is a “thorny problem. Traditionally, most historians have treated Communist efforts as nothing more than crude, cynical attempts to exploit blacks for propaganda purposes without actually securing anything tangible for them” (xiii).
74. The view emphasizing CP manipulation and attempts to infiltrate black organizations is represented by two books authored by Wilson Record: The Negro and the Communist Party and Race and Radicalism: The NAACP and the Communist Party in Conflict. The latter appeared as part of a series of scholarly case studies on “the problem of ‘Communism in American Life’ ” commissioned by the Fund for the Republic (Race and Radicalism, v). In that study Wilson asserted, “For over forty years the CP has tried to break what it conceived to be the weakest link in the American social chain, employing first one approach and then another to capture and direct the affairs of indigenous Negro organizations or, failing that, to establish competing groups of its own. The party has viewed racial conflict and unrest in the United States as issues on which a viable Communist movement might be built” (2). Scholarly challenge to and revision of this view emerged in the late 1960s, such as Carter, Scottsboro. Building on Carter’s work, Martin sought further to demonstrate “that the reality was more complex than previously depicted and that Communists did sometimes produce results.” Writing in 1976, he called for “a new synthesis … based not merely on rewriting old accounts but also on new research and detailed case studies” (The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern Justice, xiii).
Such works did indeed follow, and the study of the relationship between blacks and the Communist Party has achieved considerable analytical sophistication during the past three and a half decades. Three years after Martin’s call came Painter’s Narrative of Hosea Hudson. This was followed by two groundbreaking books: Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression; and Kelley, Hammer and Hoe. These works demonstrated the value of examining the inner lives of black Communists and the work of the party in black communities. The end of the 1990s saw the publication of four works of literary history that brought fresh interpretations of the cultural worlds and products emerging from the early and mid-twentieth-century interactions between blacks and the Communist Party: Solomon, Their Cry Was Unity; Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left; Mullen, Popular Fronts; and Smethurst, The New Red Negro. Subsequent works extended the study of the black-CP relationship into the postwar era, uncovering the connections, influences, and interactions between the Communist Left and younger activists and artists in the postwar black freedom struggle. Two important works in this regard are Biondi, To Stand and Fight; and Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement. A recent study that considers the relationship between African Americans and the Communist Party within a larger argument about the failure of various socialists and Marxists during the 1920s–1930s and the 1960s–1970s to fully account for race and enjoin black struggle is Dawson, Blacks In and Out of the Left.
A range of biographical studies has similarly expanded the scholarship on blacks and the CP by examining the activism and intellectual trajectories of black radicals who were members of or at some point affiliated with the party. Among them are three works by Horne, Black Liberation/Red Scare, Race Woman, and Red Seas; Davies, Left of Karl Marx; Lewis, Nash, and Leab, Red Activists and Black Freedom; and Ransby, Eslanda.
Four books published between 2011 and 2012 signal yet another stage in historical scholarship on the relationship between blacks, and particularly intellectuals, and the CP. Gore’s Radicalism at the Crossroads and McDuffie’s Sojourning for Freedom examine the largely neglected experiences and contributions of black women in or associated with the CP and Communist-affiliated organizations. Through their examination of different sets of organizations, activist campaigns, publications, and other political experiences, the two books make separate but complementary arguments about black women’s political practices and the place of the CP in the development and genealogy of black feminist politics. Makalani’s In the Cause of Freedom brings fresh insights to a familiar time period by providing a detailed account of the organizational, ideological, and institutional spaces within which black radicals in the Communist International forged an internationalist politics and movement. Gellman’s Death Blow to Jim Crow shines light on the CP-black relationship during the Depression and World War II through a case study of the National Negro Congress and its effort to craft a protest model for the emerging postwar movement.
Also noteworthy are recent debates in two journals over black anti-Communism as an aspect of the larger debate over the relationship between blacks and the CP and the role of the party in racial struggles. The Winter 2006 (vol. 3, no. 4) issue of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas features a forum on Eric Arnesen’s article “No ‘Graver Danger’: Black Anticommunism, the Communist Party, and the Race Question” with responses from Martha Biondi, Carol Anderson, John Earl Haynes, and Kenneth R. Janken. More recently, American Communist History devoted its April 2012 issue (vol. 11, no. 1) to a symposium on Arnesen’s article “Civil Rights and the Cold War at Home: Postwar Activism, Anticommunism, and the Decline of the Left” with responses from Dayo Gore, Alex Lichtenstein, Judith Stein, and Robert H. Zieger.
75. Beth Bates gives a nice picture of this context through her discussion of the Detroit local of the National Negro Congress in The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford, 201–5, and also in her “ ‘Double V for Victory.’ ” Other important studies providing analysis of Detroit black politics in this period are Dillard, Faith in the City; and Miller, “The Color of Citizenship.”
76. James Boggs interview in OHALC.
77. According to James Boggs’s FBI file, a letter dated April 15, 1946, “indicated that Jim Boggs, accompanied by two men from Chrysler had attended an SWP forum on Sunday.” The same report describes “a list of names of individuals who were members of the SWP, East Side Branch, Detroit. This list included the name of Jim Boggs and indicated that he used the Party name of Ross” (FBI-JB, Correlation Summary, December 23, 1966, 4). If these reports of James Boggs’s membership in the AYD (cited above) and the SWP are accurate, he would have been a member of both at approximately the same time.
78. James Boggs interview in OHALC.
79. “By the late 1940s,” writes historian Kevin Boyle, the UAW and other CIO unions “had become simply another special-interest group.” See Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 2.
80. “The Rise and Fall of the Union” is the title of chapter 1 of James Boggs, The American Revolution, published in 1963. “The End of an Epoch in the UAW” is the title of a talk he delivered in 1961. For both, see Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 85, 17, respectively.
81. Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 154.
82. Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It, 127–31; Neusom, “The Michigan Civil Rights Law and Its Enforcement.”
83. Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It, 127.
84. Neusom, “The Michigan Civil Rights Law and Its Enforcement,” 39.
85. Miller, “The Color of Citizenship,” 301.
86. “Detroit Conference Largest in History,” Crisis, August 1937, 250; Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It, 130.
87. Shockley, We, Too, Are Americans, 178–81.
88. Howe and Widick, The UAW and Walter Reuther, 230.
89. Neusom, “The Michigan Civil Rights Law and Its Enforcement,” 7; Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 53, 158–59, 258.
90. This description of how the DAC worked is drawn from a document titled “Discrimination Action Committee” in Dillard Papers, Box 1, Folder 44; Neusom, “The Michigan Civil Rights Law and Its Enforcement,” 16–17; the oral histories of Dillard and Boggs in Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes; Arthur Johnson’s oral history in Mast, Detroit Lives; and Arthur L. Johnson, Race and Remembrance, 213–14.
91. Quote in Neusom, “The Michigan Civil Rights Law and Its Enforcement,” 28.
92. “Jim Crow Broken” and “Discrimination Action Committee” in Dillard Papers, Box 1, Folder 44. See also Fine, Expanding the Frontiers of Civil Rights.
93. Nicholas, Questions of the American Revolution, 9.
94. Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 154–55.
95. Unlabeled document reporting on a meeting held at the YMCA on Saturday, April 1, 1950, Dillard Papers, Box 1, Folder 44. They were among at least a dozen autoworkers representing their local unions.
96. Dillard interview in Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 157–58; quote on 158. For more on Dillard, see Dillard, Faith in the City, 209–14, 216, 231.
97. Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 159.
98. Ibid., 158–60.
99. Owens originally wrote the book under the pen name Matthew Ward, and it appeared as Matthew Ward, Indignant Heart (New York: New Books, 1952). Subsequent editions appeared under the pen name Charles Denby, including the edition cited here: Charles Denby, Indignant Heart: A Black Worker’s Journal (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989).
100. Denby, Indignant Heart, 149.
101. Constance Webb and Grace Lee Boggs both report, in their respective memoirs, that Webb wrote Indignant Heart: Webb, Not Without Love, 247, 249–50, 266; and Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 62.
CHAPTER 3
1. Grace Lee Boggs, “Our Country,” xvii. This is the text of a speech she delivered on May 15, 1999, at the Asian American Student Center, University of Minnesota.
2. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 16. She made a similar comment in an oral history interview during the early 1990s. At the beginning of the interview, she states, “Insofar as I would say that there are some influences with regard to myself from [my parents], it would be that my mother was a rebel form the very beginning, and my father had … some ties with Sun Yat-sen and some consciousness with regard to the need for revolutionary struggle in China.” “Transcript of Oral History Interview with Grace Lee Boggs,” Boggs Papers, Box 9, Folder “James, C. L. R.” This is the transcript of her interview in the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.
3. Grace Lee Boggs, “Our Country,” xviii.
4. Yung, Chang, and Lai, Chinese American Voices, 225.
5. Political scientist Cedric J. Robinson describes the combination of these two developments as leading to the “rewhitening of America.” See chapter 2, “In the Year 1915: D. W. Griffith and the Rewhitening of America,” in Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning.
6. Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 48–50.
7. Shehong Chen, Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American, 75.
8. For a fuller explication of this argument, see ibid., chapter 3, “Constructing a Chinese American Identity, 1915.”
9. For the significance and scale of migration from Toishan (Taishan), see Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home. See also Erika Lee, At America’s Gates, 112, 114; Chang, The Chinese in America, 170, 216.
10. On Chinese exclusion see Erika Lee, At America’s Gates; Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home, chapter 3.
11. On the paper son system see Erika Lee, At America’s Gates, 4–5, 194–95, 203–7; Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home, 74–85; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 235; Chang, The Chinese in America, 146–47.
12. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 1–4.
13. Grace Lee Boggs interview with author (March 23, 2005).
14. Ibid.; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 4–5.
15. Shehong Chen, Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American, 14.
16. Mark and Chih, A Place Called Chinese America, caption on 61.
17. Shehong Chen, Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American, 14; Tung, The Chinese in America, 25.
18. Erika Lee, At America’s Gates, tables on 99 and 101.
19. The chances are remote that she was classified in any of the other categories in which Chinese women immigrants were recorded for that year: student, U.S. citizen, and daughter of merchant.
20. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 234.
21. Erika Lee provides an especially thoughtful discussion of Chinese immigrant women, including a section on exclusions, gender, and sexuality (At America’s Gates, 92–100).
22. Fessler, Chinese in America, 187.
23. Ibid.; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 230–33. Takaki gives these figures: “By 1920, 58 percent of Chinese were in services, mostly restaurants and laundry work, compared to only 5 percent for native whites and 10 percent for foreign whites. Only 9 percent of Chinese were employed in manufacturing, compared to 26 percent for native whites and 47 percent for foreign whites.… Chinese workers had been crowded into a Chinese ethnic economy” (240).
24. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 9.
25. Ibid., 8.
26. Lew, The Chinese in North America, 42. The statement appears in the caption for a photo of Chin Lee’s.
27. Iris Chang writes that most of these restaurants “were tiny mom-and-pop enterprises in which the owner worked as cook and dishwasher and his wife—if he had one—as the waitress and cashier. A few Chinese with sufficient capital rented their own buildings, installed expensive Asian décor, and hired battalions of chefs, waiters, and hostesses” (The Chinese in America, 163).
28. Kung, Chinese in American Life, 57, 182; Julia I. Hsuan Chen, “The Chinese in New York,” 53–54; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 240.
29. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 14–15.
30. Ibid., 14.
31. Grace Lee Boggs interview with author (March 23, 2005).
32. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 15.
33. Shehong Chen, Becoming Chinese, Becoming Chinese American, 121.
34. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 10.
35. Ibid., 5.
36. Ibid., 5–6.
37. Grace Lee Boggs interview with author (March 23, 2005).
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 5, 13.
40. Historian Shehong Chen pinpoints the year 1911 as a key moment in the “transformation of traditional Chinese identity” characterized by an intense nationalist discourse and “the search for modern China” (Becoming Chinese, Becoming Chinese American, 10).
41. Chang, The Chinese in America, 159.
42. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 16.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 6, 16 (quote appears on 10); Shehong Chen, Becoming Chinese, Becoming Chinese American, 10.
45. Grace Lee Boggs interview with author (March 23, 2005); Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 10–11.
46. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 245–46.
47. Ibid.
48. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 11. She adds that avoiding Chinatown may have also been a matter of safety because of the violence associated with the tongs, which were secret societies involved with drug distribution, gambling, and prostitution.
49. Grace Lee Boggs interview with author (March 23, 2005); Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 13–14.
50. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 12–13.
51. Ibid., 9.
52. Ibid., 10 (emphasis in original).
53. Ibid., 192–93.
54. Ibid., 10. She also discusses the impact of this repeated query on her consciousness at the beginning of her interview in the OHALC.
55. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 10.
56. Ibid.
57. Zia, Asian American Dreams, 9.
58. Interestingly, Grace and Zia both received the Legacy Award from the Museum of the Chinese in America in New York in 2002.
59. Comparative literature and Asian American studies scholar Lisa Lowe describe this as “the contradictions of Asian immigration.” Lowe writes that since the middle of the nineteenth century “the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant, legally, economically, and culturally. These definitions have cast Asian immigrants both as persons and populations to be integrated into the national political sphere and as the contradictory, confusing, and unintelligible elements to be marginalized and returned to their alien origins” (Immigrant Acts, 8, 4 [emphasis in original]).
60. Reflecting on his childhood in 1930s San Francisco, Victor Wong explained that in the mind of white Americans “we were all immigrants in those days, no matter where we were born” (Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 268 [emphasis in original]). This view is confirmed by Kit King Louis, a scholar studying the “problems of American-born Chinese” during the early 1930s, who found that “in spite of the fact that they are legally and qualitatively American citizens,” Chinese Americans “are treated to all intents and purposes by the Americans as if they were aliens” (“Problems of Second Generation Chinese,” 256). Even in American jurisprudence, where the matter should have been settled by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the question of American nationality for a person of Chinese descent born in the United States lingered in the courts until 1898, less than two decades before Grace’s birth, when the Supreme Court finally ruled in United States v. Wong that a person born in the United States of Chinese parents was indeed of American nationality by birth (Tung, The Chinese in America, 21).
61. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 21.
62. Ibid., 25.
63. Ibid. The careers of Buck and Wong, along with analyses of their representations of China, Chinese Americans, and the relations between the two countries during the 1930s and 1940s, are thoughtfully presented in Leong, The China Mystique. Leong argues that the lives of Buck, Wong, and Soong (whom most Americans knew as Madame Chiang Kai-shek) illustrate the “romanticized, progressive, and highly gendered image of China” that emerged during the late 1930s, which Leong terms the “China mystique” (1).
64. Leong, The China Mystique, 2, 57.
65. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 11.
66. Grace has suggested that part of the reason is that she was the owner’s daughter and thus class distinctions prevented her from forming close ties (Grace Lee Boggs interview with author [March 23, 2005]). Though, of course, she also indicated that the restaurant was like family, and some of the workers were in fact relatives.
67. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 25.
68. Grace frequently identified such books. For one example, in 2009 she briefly discussed four books that “have especially sustained my activism over the years”: Confucius, The Analects of Confucius; Georg W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century; and Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. See Grace Lee Boggs, “Movement Reading.”
69. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 75. While the book is a landmark in feminist thought, it is also steeped in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century discourse on civilization and its attendant assumptions about white racial superiority and a commitment to racial hierarchy. Gail Bederman provides an insightful discussion of Gilman’s use of civilization discourse and racial ideology in Women and Economics and in her other writings in Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, chapter 4.
70. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 25; Grace Lee Boggs interview with author (March 23, 2005).
71. Ibid.
72. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 25.
73. She describes the experience in ibid, 37. In 2010, seventy-eight years after hearing Reid, she again recalled the event in her weekly column, also titled “Living for Change,” published in the Michigan Citizen, a Detroit weekly newspaper. There she wrote, “When I was an undergraduate in the early 1930s, I heard Ira D. Reid speak at a weekend college conference and learned truths about the African American experience which I felt had been kept from me. At the time I was in my teens. So Dr. Reid (1901–1968), who was in his 30s and director of research for the Urban League, seemed much older and wiser than I would ever be. I never met Reid again. But today, 80 years later, when I talk to students, I recall the impact he had on me and wonder whether decades hence they will remember me the way I remember Reid.” Grace Lee Boggs, “Living for Change.”
74. Grace Lee Boggs, “My Philosophic Journey” (unpublished manuscript in author’s possession), 2.
75. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 26.
76. Ibid., 27.
77. Ibid.
78. In her autobiography, Grace writes that there were only two other women of color on campus during her years at Barnard: Louise Chin, a Chinese American also in the graduating class of 1935 whose family owned a small laundry near Grace’s house; and Grace Ijima, a Japanese American in the class of 1934 (ibid., 18). In 2000, on a visit to Barnard during which she was named a distinguished alumna, Grace learned that a fourth woman of color, Jean Blackwell Hutson, was also her classmate. Hutson became the second African American (after Zora Neale Hurston) to graduate from Barnard. Hutson’s distinguished career as a librarian and intellectual included serving as curator for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.
79. Ibid., 12.
80. Ibid., 25.
81. Grace Lee Boggs, “My Philosophic Journey,” 3.
82. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 27.
83. Ibid.
84. Krutch, The Modern Temper, 19.
85. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 28.
86. Ibid., 29.
87. Ibid.
88. On Weiss see Hahn, The Philosophy of Paul Weiss.
89. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 29.
90. Ibid., 30.
91. Ibid.; see also Grace Lee Boggs, “My Philosophic Journey,” 3.
92. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 31.
93. Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 16. In his guide to understanding Hegel, David James identifies freedom as a central theme of Hegel’s thought (David James, Hegel, 1–2).
94. Grace Lee Boggs, “Coming Full Circle” (unpublished manuscript in author’s possession), 2.
95. Quoted in Robinson, Black Marxism, 73–74. Citing this and other passages, Robinson explains that “Hegel privileged Western Civilization in his historical philosophy, citing the absence of Reason elsewhere.… For Hegel, ultimately, the historical development of the species-being was discoverable only in Europe” (Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism, 96).
96. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 31–32.
97. She subsequently had the work published as a book: Grace Chin Lee, George Herbert Mead.
98. Ibid., v.
99. Ibid., vi.
100. Ibid., 1.
101. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 33–34.
102. Ibid., 34.
103. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 265.
104. Ibid., 267.
105. Kung, Chinese in American Life, 57.
106. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 267.
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid. Kung reports that there were 190 Chinese and Chinese American professors in U.S. colleges and universities between 1935 and 1944 (Chinese in American Life, 192).
109. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 34.
110. Ibid.
111. Grace Lee Boggs to Horace Cayton, November 22, 1963, Paine Papers (unprocessed), Box 2, Folder “1962–1963 Grace, Reply.”
112. Grace Lee Boggs interview in OHALC.
113. Grace Lee Boggs, “My Philosophic Journey,” 3–4; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 34–35.
114. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 35.
115. Ibid.
116. Ibid., 36.
117. Ibid.
CHAPTER 4
1. Grace Lee Boggs interview in OHALC; Grace Lee Boggs, “My Philosophic Journey,” 4; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 36.
2. For fuller descriptions and analysis of Trotskyism, see Breitman, Le Blanc, and Wald, Trotskyism in the United States; Wald, The New York Intellectuals; Callinicos, Trotskyism; and Alexander, International Trotskyism.
3. Phelps, “C. L. R. James and the Theory of State Capitalism,” 158–59.
4. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 42.
5. Ibid. She is somewhat circumspect about the full nature of their relationship in her autobiography, telling us in passing and somewhat cryptically that “what became for me a relatively casual affair became an obsession for him, forcing me to break off all contact” (ibid., 42).
6. They published the series under their party names: Harry Allen and Ria Stone, “World War I in Retrospect: An Historical Examination,” New International, June–July 1942. Grace suggests in her autobiography that Abern wrote the articles alone, despite both names appearing in the byline. See Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 274n11.
7. The series appeared under the name Ria Stone in four successive issues of The New International: “China: Colossus of the East” (February, 1944), “The China of Chiang Kai-Shek” (March 1944), “China Under the Stalinists” (April 1944), and “China Under Japanese Domination” (May 1944).
8. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 42.
9. Ibid., 39–40.
10. Ibid., 40.
11. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 380; Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 112.
12. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 380, 603.
13. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 37.
14. She later recalled the circumstances in a letter to Horace Cayton: Grace Lee Boggs to Horace Cayton, November 22, 1963, Paine Papers (unprocessed), Box 2, Folder “1962–1963 Grace, Reply.” See also Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 37–38.
15. Finding Aid to Horace R. Cayton Papers, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Chicago Public Library; Lawrence P. Jackson, The Indignant Generation, 96.
16. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 37–38.
17. Grace Lee Boggs to Horace Cayton, November 22, 1963.
18. Grace Lee Boggs, “My Philosophic Journey,” 4; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 39.
19. Quoted in Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph, 248.
20. Ibid., 250.
21. Garfinkel, When Negroes March, 38–66.
22. Anderson, A. Philip Randolph, 251.
23. Garfinkel, When Negroes March, 6.
24. Garfinkel says the MOWM was “the outstanding mass protest organization in the Negro community in 1941 and 1942” (When Negroes March, 112).
25. Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 155. Bates demonstrates the centrality of grassroots organizing to the MOWM and shows how it was enabled by or drew from BSCP chapters, networks, activists, and experience nationally (Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 148–74). Garfinkel says “a vast amount of organizational work” was required to build the movement (When Negroes March, 41).
26. Chicago Defender, February 15, 1941, 7; Amsterdam News, February 15, 1941, 13.
27. As an important community institution, the Defender served as a vital source of information and means of communication for both the local and the national black communities, as well as for activists like Grace. She regularly read the Defender and recalled that “everyone in the radical movement read the Defender, the Courier, and the Afro-American” (Grace Lee Boggs interview with author). Her statement refers to the three most widely read black newspapers, each with a national circulation: the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Baltimore Afro-American. During this period Horace Cayton wrote a column for the Pittsburgh Courier, including several pieces devoted to Randolph and the MOWM.
28. Editorial, “Crusade for Democracy,” Chicago Defender, June 28, 1941, 14.
29. Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 165–66.
30. Ibid., 164–65.
31. Garfinkel, When Negroes March, 89.
32. Quoted in ibid., 88. Garfinkel adds that there was “almost total involvement of the Negroes in the MOWM demonstrations” (91).
33. Pittsburgh Courier, July 4, 1942, 14; Garfinkel, When Negroes March, 90–91.
34. Garfinkel, When Negroes March, 93; “fighting spirit” is from George F. McCray, “12,000 in Chicago Voice Demands for Democracy,” Chicago Defender, July 4, 1942, 3.
35. McCray, “12,000 in Chicago Voice Demands for Democracy,” 3; “Chicago Decorated for Monster Rally,” Amsterdam News, June 27, 1942, 5; George F. McCray, “Chicago March-on-Washington Meeting Cheers, Randolph, White, Webster,” Amsterdam News, July 4, 1942, 2.
36. McCray, “12,000 in Chicago Voice Demands for Democracy,” 3.
37. Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 165.
38. Quoted in ibid., 165.
39. Garfinkel, When Negroes March, 109.
40. McCray, “12,000 in Chicago Voice Demands for Democracy,” 3.
41. The WP’s analysis of MOWM was shaped and clouded by its rivalry with the CP. The WP overplayed the CP’s role in the MOWM, misread the racial politics of the National Negro Congress (which it took to be nothing more than a CP front), and ignored A. Philip Randolph’s rocky relationship with—and even hostility to—the CP. Indeed, the WP’s criticism of Randolph was particularly problematic. Their charge that he was in tune with the Communists was laughable. In fact, his long record of activism showed an aversion to the CP, and he had recently resigned from the leadership of the National Negro Congress in protest of the Communists’ role in that organization. Randolph bitterly opposed Communist participation in the MOWM and took clear steps to exclude them.
42. Ria Stone, “ ‘March on Washington’ Movement Stirs Again,” Labor Action, June 8, 1942, 1.
43. In fact, Randolph’s policy of excluding white membership in the MOWM was less an expression of black nationalism than a pragmatic and to some extent ideological decision, designed both to galvanize black political resolve and to help deter Communist involvement. Thus, the two movements did share a commitment to building mass (and largely working-class) movements with all-black memberships, but Randolph’s decision to exclude white membership was made for very different reasons from those of Garvey. Contemporaries during the 1920s, Randolph initially worked with Garvey and had praise for the efforts of his Universal Negro Improvement Association, but ultimately the two men diverged significantly in their political programs and economic philosophies. Randolph eventually became one of the black leaders who opposed Garvey—even leading the “Garvey Must Go” campaign in Harlem. Bates provides a thoughtful discussion of Randolph’s relationship to Garvey’s black nationalism and his insistence on the MOWM remaining all black (Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 167–71). Also see Garfinkel, When Negroes March, 128–30.
44. Ria Stone, “A Labor Base for Negro Struggles,” New International, August 1942, 207–8.
45. Ibid., 208.
46. Ibid. On the decline see Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America; Garfinkel, When Negroes March.
47. Ria Stone, “A Labor Base for Negro Struggles,” New International, August 1942. Her comments can easily be read as failing to recognize the vitality and importance of religion in black communities. While she would later develop a more nuanced understanding of black religious experience, in 1942 her view was likely informed by a standard radical view of religion as the opiate of the masses.
48. Drake, “Profiles: Chicago,” 268.
49. Pittsburgh Courier, July 4, 1942.
50. Anthony Marcus explains that a “tendency” in Trotskyist organizations “refers to a politically defined group, usually within a political party or organization, that does not have factional intent but subscribes to a certain political worldview that may not be shared by the entire organization.” This is distinguished from a “faction,” which “refers to an internal group within a party or organization that seeks political change in the party and is willing to wage a battle for this change. Factional struggles usually lead to splits” (Malcolm X and the Third American Revolution, 19).
51. This biographical information is drawn from Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary; Paul Buhle, C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary; and Worcester, C. L. R. James. See also Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom; Paul Buhle, C. L. R. James: His Life and Work; Cudjoe and Cain, C. L. R. James; Glaberman, Marxism for Our Times; Grimshaw, The C. L. R. James Reader; Grimshaw and Hart, American Civilization; McLemee, C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question”; McLemee and Le Blanc, C. L. R. James and Revolutionary Marxism; Robinson, Black Marxism, 241–86.
52. Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary, very effectively traces the development of these two spaces. Also see Hill, “In England, 1932–1938,” for an insightful discussion of the genesis and early formation of this “conjuncture of Pan-African agitation and organized Trotskyism” and the ways it pointed to “the type of organized political activity which would characterize the rest of [C. L. R.’s] entire political career, namely the small Marxist organization” (69, emphasis in original).
53. Paul Buhle, C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, 62.
54. Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary, 17.
55. See Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, especially 213–18; also see the introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley to C. L. R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt, in addition to the various biographical studies of C. L. R. cited above.
56. See McLemee, C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question,” xvii–xxiii, 3–16; Breitman, Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination.
57. McLemee, C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question,” xxiii.
58. Hill, “Literary Executor’s Afterword,” 304.
59. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 43.
60. This statement is from a letter that C. L. R. wrote to JFT member Martin Glaberman on December 17, 1962, recounting the history of their collaboration after a split in the organization ended their political relationship. The letter is reprinted in Glaberman, Marxism for Our Times, 72–85 (the quotation appears on 81).
61. Scott McLemee reinforces this point when he notes, “The cooperative nature of [the JFT’s work] has often been neglected in the rush to celebrate James as a genius” (“Afterword,” 217). Paul Buhle makes a similar observation in C. L. R. James: His Life and Work. In an essay titled “The Marxism of C. L. R. James,” longtime C. L. R. comrade Martin Glaberman identifies three levels on which the organization, by which he means JFT and its successor groups, “was an integral element in the development of [C. L. R.’s] ideas. On one level there was the sharing of work and the production of work that would have been beyond the capacity of any individual.… But the significance of organization was far beyond the assistance of individuals. When James said he was not afraid to make mistakes, it was because he knew there was an organization that would sustain its members, would correct mistakes, and he encouraged the members of his group to take risks in the development of their ideas.… But an organization meant much more than this. It was the way to participate in class and other struggles. It was the way to see and meet and understand workers who were fighting the class struggle in their daily lives, blacks who were struggling for freedom and equality, women who were trying to transform the social reality of gender in modern society, young people who were battling the oppression and restriction of youth.” The essay is cited in Staughton Lynd, Martin Glaberman, 187.
62. The letter is cited in Grimshaw, “Introduction,” 10.
63. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 61.
64. Ibid., 60–61.
65. Grace Lee Boggs interview in OHALC.
66. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 51–54.
67. Ibid., 52.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., 53; Grace Lee Boggs interview with author.
70. Richard Feldman, introduction to Conversations in Maine, xv–xvi.
71. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 147.
72. Freddy Paine, “All Living Is Politics—It Embraces Everything,” Paine Papers (unprocessed), Box 1, Folder “Correspondence, etc., Lyman.” This document includes a biographical statement about Lyman written by Freddy, an interview that Lyman gave in 1941, and an autobiographical sketch that Lyman wrote in 1947 on the occasion of his Harvard School of Architecture twenty-fifth reunion.
73. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 147.
74. Ibid., 148–49, 174.
75. Grace Lee Boggs, “C. L. R. James,” 164. A similar passage appears in Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 48.
76. Grace Lee Boggs, “When C. L. R. Was a Part of Our Lives—And We of His,” Boggs Papers, Box 9, Folder “James, C.L.R.—Correspondence, Speeches, Obituaries.” This is the text of a speech Grace delivered on July 7, 1989, in New York City at “An Evening in Memory of C. L. R. James,” sponsored by the Coalition for Caribbean and Central American Unity and WBAI Radio.
77. C. L. R. James to Marty Glaberman, January 3, 1963, reproduced in Glaberman, Marxism for Our Times, 90. In a footnote to this statement, Glaberman writes that 629 Hudson Street “provided a home for the Johnson-Forest Tendency” (128n16).
78. C. L. R. James to Lyman Paine, December 1, 1976, Paine Papers, Box 1, Folder 21.
79. Raya Dunayevskaya interview in OHALC; Kellner, “Raya Dunayevskaya,” 205; Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary, 67.
80. Grace Lee Boggs interview in OHALC.
81. Martin Glaberman interview in OHALC.
82. Ibid.
83. For some contextualization and a sampling of her work during and after this period, see Selma James, Sex, Race, and Class. For a discussion specifically of Selma James’s contributions to the JFT and to C. L. R. James, see Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary, 89–94.
84. Selma James, “Striving for Clarity and Influence: The Political Legacy of C. L. R. James (2001–2012),” in Sex, Race, and Class, 285, 288–289.
85. Grace frequently used this phrase, including as the title of a talk she delivered at the “C. L. R. James: The American Years” conference at Brown University in April 1993. The text of the speech was published as Grace Lee Boggs, “Thinking and Acting Dialectically.”
86. The most recent scholarly assessment of the book is McClendon, C. L. R. James’s “Notes on Dialectics.” One of the first close readings of Notes on Dialectics is found in Robinson, Black Marxism, 278–85.
87. The work appeared in mimeographed form as C. L. R. James, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel and Marxism (Detroit: Friends of Facing Reality, 1966); and Notes on Dialectics: Hegel and Marxism, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Friends of Facing Reality, 1971). In its published book form, the work has appeared as Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1980); and Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (London: Allison and Busby, 1980). For a discussion of the book’s origins as “The Nevada Document” and an analysis of its content, see Paul Buhle, C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, 92–93. Grace Lee Boggs discusses the work in relation to the other studying and writing that the JFT and particularly she, C. L. R., and Dunayevskaya were undertaking at the time (Living for Change, 59). For additional (and competing) assessments of the work and its place in C. L. R.’s body of work and in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, see Turner, “Epistemology, Absolutes, and the Party”; Roderick, “Further Adventures of the Dialectic”; and Glaberman, “The Marxism of C. L. R. James.” See also McClendon, C. L. R. James’s “Notes on Dialectics.”
88. Rosengarten briefly discusses their influence on C. L. R.’s thinking regarding Hegel and on the text in Urbane Revolutionary, 30.
89. For example, the following description of the book reflects the view of the text as singular: “In Notes on Dialectics, James set out to teach his followers how to use Hegel’s Science of Logic. Dialectical reason, he explained, was a way of thinking which reflected the movement of the object of thought, the world in which we live. Analytical thinking and common sense can only identify what is or has been; but the dialectic, in contrast, enables us to imagine a different future by combining speculation with knowledge in the context of action” (Grimshaw and Hart, “American Civilization: An Introduction,” 12). Grace Lee Boggs acknowledges in Living for Change her appreciation for Notes on Dialectics, but she contextualizes and situates that recognition within the shared efforts and contributions within the group. In particular, she first explains that Dunayevskaya made a prior contribution to their collective study of Hegel when she translated Lenin’s notes on Hegel and adds that this translation inspired C. L. R.’s Notes on Dialectics. Grace Lee Boggs then writes, “I will always be grateful to Raya for making Lenin’s notes on Hegel accessible.… Together Lenin’s notes on Hegel and CLR’s Notes on Dialectics taught me that, in times of crisis or transition in any organization, movement, or society, it is a matter of life and death for the organization, movement, or society, to recognize that reality is constantly changing, that the contradictions present in everything are bound to develop and become antagonistic, and therefore that ideas or strategies that were progressive and mind-opening at one point have become abstractions and fixations. At such times revolutionary leadership must have the audacity to break free of old ideas or strategies and create a new vision or visions based on concrete actions by the masses that suggest a forward leap in their self-determination or ability to assume greater control and responsibility for their own lives” (Living for Change, 60).
90. Grace Lee Boggs, “Thinking and Acting Dialectically,” 45–46.
91. Glaberman, “The Marxism of C. L. R. James,” 307, 310 (the phrase appears on both pages, in one case with “was” instead of “is”).
92. C. L. R. lists the titles of his New International pieces in “Education, Propaganda, and Agitation,” republished in Glaberman, Marxism for Our Times, 26. They were: “Negroes in the Civil War: Their Role in the 2nd American Revolution,” “In the American Tradition: The Working Class Movement in Perspective,” and “The American People in One World: An Essay in Dialectical Materialism.” For a discussion of them and of his and the JFT’s engagement with American culture and society, see Grimshaw and Hart, “American Civilization: An Introduction,” and Robert A. Hill, “Literary Executor’s Afterword,” especially 13–14, 303–7. On C. L. R.’s thinking and writing about African American history and politics, see McLemee, C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question.” “Notes on American Civilization” was posthumously published as C. L. R. James, American Civilization.
93. In their respective discussions of “Education, Propaganda, and Agitation,” Robert Hill and Scott McLemee both make the point that C. L. R. was not the first to call for Americanization of Marxism, and both scholars cite in particular the work of V. F. Calverton. See Hill, “Literary Executor’s Afterword,” 305–6; and McLemee, “Afterword,” 222.
94. C. L. R. James, “Education, Propaganda, and Agitation,” 18.
95. Ibid., 19.
96. Ibid., 20.
97. Ibid., 28–29.
98. McLemee, C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question,” xvi.
99. C. L. R. James, “Preliminary Notes on the Negro Question,” in McLemee, C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question,” 4. This document was originally published under the pseudonym J. R. Johnson in the Socialist Workers Party’s Internal Bulletin 1, no. 9 (June 1939), and then in Breitman, Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination.
100. The rival Communist Party’s work in black communities and recruitment of black members surely helped to motivate C. L. R.’s concern with the Trotskyists’ Negro work and shape his prescriptions. C. L. R. makes several references to the CP throughout “Preliminary Notes on the Negro Question.”
101. C. L. R. James, “Preliminary Notes on the Negro Question,” 9.
102. This document is reproduced as “The Historical Development of the Negroes in American Society” in McLemee, C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question,” 63–89.
103. Ibid., 71.
104. Ibid., 73.
105. The speech was first published under the pseudonym J. Meyer in Fourth International 9, no. 8 (December 1948). It has since appeared in these collections of C. L. R.’s writings: a special C. L. R. James issue of Radical America 4, no. 4 (May 1970); C. L. R. James, The Future in the Present; Grimshaw, The C. L. R. James Reader; McLemee and Le Blanc, C. L. R. James and Revolutionary Marxism; McLemee, C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question.”
106. The party referred to here is the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). As described later in the chapter, in 1947 the JFT left the Workers Party and joined the SWP.
107. C. L. R. James, “Revolutionary Answer,” in McLemee, C. L. R. James on the “Negro Question,” 139.
108. C. L. R. James, “The Historical Development of Negroes in American Society,” 72.
109. This analysis appears in ibid., 72–73.
110. Glaberman, “The Marxism of C. L. R. James,” 305. Historian and C. L. R. James’s literary executor Robert Hill reports the same (“Literary Executor’s Afterword,” 313).
111. The announcement appears in the Militant, January 10, 1949, 2. In her autobiography, Grace Lee Boggs says that Dunayevskaya taught a weekly class on Capital, but she does not mention her own teaching. See Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 58.
112. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 58.
113. Johnson, Forest, and Stone, Essays by Karl Marx, 1. A copy of this publication can be found in the Boggs Papers, Box 28, Folder 4-7.
114. Ibid., 1.
115. Ibid., 5.
116. Ibid., 1.
117. Ibid., 5.
118. Ibid., 7.
119. Ibid., 3.
120. Ibid., 5.
121. Ibid., 6–7.
122. A year before Essays by Karl Marx, C. L. R. had cited the phrase in an essay titled “They Showed the Way to Labor Emancipation: On Karl Marx and the 75th Anniversary of the Paris Commune,” Labor Action, March 18, 1946.
123. In her autobiography, written four decades later, Grace uses the phrase in her recollection of their discovery of Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, saying that Marx’s essays “were important because they reinforced the Johnson-Forest view that the essence of socialist revolution is the expansion of the natural and acquired powers of human beings, not the nationalization of property” (Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 102).
124. Johnson, Forest, and Stone, Essays by Karl Marx, 5.
125. Ibid., 6. The quotation appears in the chapter titled “Machinery and Modern Industry” in Marx, Capital.
126. Grace recalled this goal in her interview in OHALC.
127. See, for example, Mills, The New Men of Power; Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization; and Mayo, The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization.
128. Romano and Stone, The American Worker, 1.
129. Ibid., 42.
130. Ibid.
131. Ibid., 42–43.
132. Ibid., 43.
133. Ibid., 70. This passage is also quoted in Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 65.
134. Johnson-Forest Minority, WP, and Fourth International, “Resolutions Adopted by the Johnson-Forest Minority at Its National Conference,” July 5–6, 1947, Glaberman Papers, Box 22, Folder 14.
135. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 63.
136. Glaberman, Marxism for Our Times, xv–xvi.
137. Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom, 97; Glaberman, Marxism for Our Times, xv–xvi.
138. Glaberman, Marxism for Our Times, xvi.
139. “Report and Discussion on Break with S.W.P.,” 3–4, Glaberman Papers, Box 22, Folder 14. This internal JFT document briefly describes the interim period and lists the works published in a 1951 document. For subsequent descriptions of this period from Grace Lee Boggs and Martin Glaberman, see Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 64; Glaberman, Marxism for Our Times, xvi. Two of the works from the interim period have been published as “Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity,” in Grimshaw, The C. L. R. James Reader; and C. L. R. James, Forest, and Stone, The Invading Socialist Society.
140. Johnson-Forest Tendency, Balance Sheet, 18.
141. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 65; Alexander, International Trotskyism, 312.
142. Dunayevskaya excitedly reported meeting Castoriadis in a letter to C. L. R. on September 22, 1947, which is reproduced in “Three Letters,” in Cudjoe and Cain, C. L. R. James, 298–300. For the biographical information on Castoriadis, see Curtis, Cornelius Castoriadis, viii.
143. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 65.
144. Castoriadis, “C. L. R. James and the Fate of Marxism,” 283; Curtis, Cornelius Castoriadis, 18, 36n5.
145. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 65–66.
146. Curtis, Cornelius Castoriadis, xxv.
147. Castoriadis describes his relationship with the Johnson-Forest Tendency and Grace’s role in building that relationship in Castoriadis, “C. L. R. James and the Fate of Marxism.”
148. FBI-GLB, Section 1, 307, 311–14.
149. Report dated December 20, 1948, in FBI-GLB, Section 1, 300–309.
150. The JFT had of course entered the SWP known as the “state capitalist” minority, with its position on the nature of the Soviet Union deviating from the SWP’s position on the Russian Question, but this difference was recognized and accepted, and it was not the source of conflict.
151. Published as C. L. R. James, with Dunayevskaya and Lee, State Capitalism and World Revolution. Quotation appears on 3.
152. Johnson-Forest Tendency, Balance Sheet, 1, 35.
CHAPTER 5
1. Martin Glaberman interview in OHALC.
2. There is no record of his participation in any of the three gatherings, and the available evidence points to him not attending. In her recollection of the first gathering, held in the fall of 1951, Selma James said “C.L.R. was not at the convention because he was fighting deportation,” adding that at the end of the convention she and others were “shepherded to some hall and [C. L. R.] appeared there” (Selma James interview with author). C. L. R. could not have attended the second gathering, which convened in the fall of 1952, because he was then incarcerated on Ellis Island. The third gathering, in July 1953, occurred just as C. L. R. departed for England. Selma James recalled seeing him off in New York just before she left for the convention (ibid.). Robert Hill gives his departure date as July 3, 1953 (“Literary Executor’s Afterword,” 301), and the convention met July 3–7 in Detroit.
3. FBI-JB, Section 1, 4, 7.
4. Al Whitney, “Why the Split,” 1, Glaberman Papers, Box 3, Folder 8.
5. Selma James interview with author; Nettie Kravitz interview with author.
6. Glaberman, Marxism for Our Times, xviii, xix.
7. Selma James, Sex, Race, and Class, 294. Selma James situated the Third Layer School as an important part of C. L. R.’s legacy. She called the Johnson-Forest Tendency one of the two “masterworks” (285) created by C. L. R. (the other being his book Black Jacobins) and identified the Third Layer School as “perhaps the most startling Johnson-Forest innovation” (294). Highlighting the purpose and impact of the Third Layer School, she explained, “It was to train us to stand up to our own leaders. It was to train third layer people who are not used to it to express their point of view to those who are ‘educated’ or in other ways more socially powerful, whether or not other third layer people joined in. I think a number of us found our voice. I certainly did” (294). By contrast, Glaberman judged the group’s effort to implement the third-layer concept “a good faith attempt, but it was probably maintained essentially on the strength of James’s support. I cannot say that it was successful” (Glaberman, Marxism for Our Times, xxix).
8. These topics and statements were reported by multiple sources and recorded in FBI-JB, 7.
9. These statements are from the memorial booklet produced after James Boggs’s death: Zola, Gruchala, and Grace Lee Boggs, James Boggs. Her statement begins and ends with these words: “I will remember many things in many places about Jimmy Boggs, but mainly I will remember him in New York in 1952 when we first met. We were at the school which C. L. R. James had devised for working class people like us to educate our intellectual comrades.… Jimmy’s gifts—acknowledging others’ unique needs and therefore making the right help available—are what village life at its best offers. He bestowed these gifts in cities where they rarely re-root and are even more rarely blended with political resistance. During a better time he would have had a broader arena in which to act. Jimmy was that rare being, a civilizer in politics” (unpaginated).
10. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 77–78.
11. A Woman’s Place is included in Selma James, Sex, Race, and Class, 13–31; Punching Out is included in Lynd, Martin Glaberman, vi–viii, 2–23; James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways. Owens published his book under two pseudonyms, Mathew Ward for the first edition and Charles Denby for the second edition. The most frequently cited is the second edition. See Denby, Indignant Heart. For a discussion of the book’s authorship and evolution, see Jones, A Dreadful Deceit, 248, 268–69, 283–84,
12. Grace Lee Boggs, speech to Convention of Correspondence Committees, text in author’s possession, 1.
13. Ibid., 8.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 11. The passage appears in Marx, Capital, 929.
16. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 48.
17. Grace Lee Boggs, speech to Convention of Correspondence Committees, 25 (emphasis in original).
18. Ibid. (emphasis in original).
19. Ibid., 29–30.
20. Ibid., 39 (emphasis in original). This passage remained one of Grace’s favorites in the Marxist canon. In her autobiography, Grace cites this passage to illustrate Marx as a “humanist prophet,” “the Marx I love to quote” (51). The original passage is to be found in Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 16–17.
21. Grace Lee Boggs, speech to Convention of Correspondence Committees, 39 (emphasis in original).
22. Anon., report on Convention of Correspondence Committees, 9, Boggs Papers, Box 28, Folder 14. The identity of the author is not indicated. The text of the report suggests that the author was familiar with Correspondence and largely agreed with its politics. The text also suggests that the author may have been a European or was writing for a European audience. The report begins, “I was invited by a group of people to attend a conference they had organized to publish a newspaper which will tell the story of the other America, that is the America little known to the European who gets his picture of America from LIFE, the Voice of America and other such semi-official and official channels. They are a small group, less than 100, of intellectuals and workers, most them quite young, but fairly representative, it seems to me, of the American population, white and Negro workers, women, and young people. The whole conference was centered around launching the paper and all of them are very enthusiastic about it. They feel that America has never had such a paper that tells the story of how the ordinary people live, at work, in their homes, schools, and in their communities, and they feel that you and people like you abroad would be interested not only in the paper but in hearing who they are and how they function” (1).
23. Anon., report on Convention of Correspondence Committees, 2.
24. Ibid., 31.
25. Ibid., 5.
26. Ibid., 2.
27. Grace Lee Boggs, speech to Convention of Correspondence Committees, 4.
28. Grace also had had family in Detroit, as her brothers Harry and Eddie had preceded her in the city, coming in 1949 to work in the auto industry. However, she said that by the time she arrived in Detroit she did not have much contact with them. They “were out of politics” and no longer involved in the organization (Grace Lee Boggs interview with author).
29. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 125–26. Sugrue writes that these and other shocks to the city’s economy represented “the beginning of a long-term and steady decline in manufacturing employment” that brought “a systematic restructuring of the local economy from which the city never fully recovered” (126).
30. Sugrue provides an exhaustive discussion of Detroit’s industrialization (ibid.).
31. The 1950 census recorded the city’s population as 1,849,568, and the Census Bureau estimated the population to be 2 million in 1955. Other demographic estimates locate the peak of 2 million residents in 1953. By 1960 the city’s population dropped to 1,670,144, and in 1970 it was 1,511,482. See Gavrilovich and McGraw, The Detroit Almanac, 289, 294.
32. Aberbach and Walker, Race in the City, 9.
33. June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race, 45–79; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 47–51, 82–86; Dillard, Faith in the City, 200–203, 260–62.
34. June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race, 56–62, 76–78.
35. June Manning Thomas reports that two of the city’s lead planners, as well as the city’s comprehensive planning program, were the most widely respected according to a 1961 survey of prominent members of the planning profession. In 1964, Detroit won the American Institute of Planners Honors Award in Comprehensive Planning. See June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race, 103–4, 120. For a recent analysis of the impact of urban renewal on black communities nationally, including a strong critique of the notions of progress that undergirded urban renewal programs, see Fullilove, Root Shock.
36. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 47. One observer noted in 1952 that 17,000 people had already been displaced by the expressways (Norris, “Dislocation without Relocation,” 474).
37. June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race, 60–61.
38. “The Magnitude of the Relocation Problem,” November 21, 1950, 4–5, DULR, Box 38, Folder A2-1.
39. Ibid., 3.
40. “Report of the Housing Situation as It Affects the Community in the Gratiot Redevelopment Area—Survey Findings,” 4–5, DULR, Box 38, Folder A2-2.
41. Ibid., 3.
42. “Recommendations to the Executive Board of the Detroit Urban League,” March 23, 1951, 1, DULR, Box 38, Folder A2-2.
43. Norris, “Dislocation without Relocation,” 475.
44. Ibid.
45. The articles appeared between February 21 and March 28, 1953. The Michigan Chronicle subsequently published the series as a pamphlet by Charles J. Wartman under the same title, “Detroit—Ten Years After!,” which can be found at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan (call number EC 2 D4834 W297). All citations below are from the pamphlet.
46. Wartman, “Detroit—Ten Years After!,” 14.
47. Ibid., 14–15.
48. Ibid., 15.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 17.
51. Ibid., 14.
52. Halpern, “ ‘I’m Fighting for Freedom.’ ” See also Dillard, Faith in the City, 186–91; and Salvatore, Singing in a Strange Land.
53. Halpern, “ ‘I’m Fighting for Freedom,’ ” 28–30; Salvatore, Singing in a Strange Land.
54. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 79.
55. These quotations and this information about the Boggses’ courtship are drawn from a video recording of Grace Lee Boggs, James Boggs, and Freddy Paine at Sutton Island, Maine made by France Reid (in author’s possession). While the exact date is not known, it was likely during the 1980s. Parts of this recording, including the quotations cited here, appear in a memorial tribute video of James Boggs produced by Reid, titled James Boggs: An American Revolutionist (1993). In her autobiography, Grace also describes this night and its place in their courtship. Her account differs in that she says they made the decision to marry that night, whereas he said that decision came months later (Living for Change, 78).
56. FBI-GLB, 288–91.
57. FBI-JB, 3, 5, 10, 11. All of the quotations appear on 3.
58. FBI-JB, 16; FBI-GLB, 203, 205. The quotations are from FBI-GLB, in which the two informants are T-1 and T-4.
CHAPTER 6
1. Speech by Weaver, July 17, 1953, 1, Glaberman Papers, Box 10, Folder 2 (emphasis in original).
2. Ibid., 10.
3. Ibid., 2 (emphasis in original).
4. Grace Lee Boggs interview with author.
5. Ibid.
6. See Peterson, “Correspondence.” For a broader discussion, see Doody, Detroit’s Cold War.
7. As we will see later in the chapter, the frequency of publication and number of pages fluctuated over the paper’s nearly eleven-year history. It was twelve pages for its first year. The first issue shorter than twelve pages appeared on October 30, 1954 (it was eight pages). Plans to turn it into a weekly never materialized.
8. The initial issues did not yet have “Readers’ Views” but instead had sections called “Letters to the Editor” and “Letter Box.” By the fourth issue (November 14, 1953) these became “Readers’ Views.” During the period that Correspondence was twelve pages, “Readers’ Views” usually covered three columns of page six and three columns of page seven, thereby constituting the very center of the paper.
9. “Statement of the Editor,” Correspondence, October 1, 1953, 1.
10. “I Talk about What I Please—To Whom I Please,” Correspondence, October 3, 1953, 10.
11. Ibid.
12. Selma Weinstein (soon to be Selma James) wrote “A New Relationship.” The article’s title is drawn from A Woman’s Place, the pamphlet written by Weinstein that Correspondence published a year earlier, and the article quotes from the pamphlet. Weinstein was the driving force behind the women’s page, and A Woman’s Place provided material for it in several of the initial issues of Correspondence. For example, the November 14 (“The Family Divided”) and December 12 (“A Feeling of Independence”) issues each carried an excerpt from the pamphlet. Beginning with the December 26, 1953, issue, Weinstein wrote a regular column titled “A Woman’s Place,” with most pieces written under her pseudonym Marie Brandt (sometimes incorrectly spelled Brant). The full text of A Woman’s Place, along with several other writings by Selma James, is reproduced in her book Sex, Race, and Class. For a short discussion of her experiences writing for Correspondence see 32–33.
13. “A New Relationship,” Correspondence, October 3, 1953, 11.
14. Ibid.
15. “Readers Say What They Think of the First Issue,” Correspondence, October 17, 1953, 1, 6, 7. The front page and particularly its lead article drew most of the criticism. A reader identified as a housewife from Detroit said “the paper on the whole is very good,” though she felt that “the articles on the front page are too long and the Beria article is too abstract for the front page.” A young Detroit reader said “the front page is dead” with “too many long articles on it,” and a Chrysler worker similarly did not think the Beria article belonged on the front page because “political events like that just past, they don’t last.” Yet another Detroit reader agreed that the Beria article was too long and called the front page “dull,” but added that “as you get into the rest of the paper it get pretty interesting.” Supporters from West Virginia “felt the front page too crowded and a little too colorless,” and also found the first issue “lacked a sense of urgency. The only exception was the Kinsey Report.” A more general critique also came from a reader in Los Angeles who said, “The paper has too much content, too much material on how things are loused up in production. There’s not enough humor and the give and take of daily life.” A secretary in New York similarly found the paper a bit underwhelming, writing, “I don’t think it was as terrific as it was built up in advance,” though this reader did “like the way it is written not by professional writers.” Articulating a dynamic that would play out through much of the paper’s early history, a “Ford Woman Worker” in Detroit wrote in to say, “I want to subscribe.… At first I thought the paper was Communist, but after reading it, I saw it wasn’t.”
16. “From January 15 through June,” 5, Glaberman Papers, Box 3, Folder 1 (emphasis in original).
17. “Building Correspondence,” Correspondence, October 31, 1953, 1.
18. Correspondence, August 7, 1954, 6.
19. Correspondence, December 12, 1953, 6.
20. “Statement of the Editor,” Correspondence, November 14, 1953, 1.
21. Ibid., 6 (emphasis in original).
22. “Our Aim and Our Program,” Correspondence, April 17, 1954, 6.
23. “Special Mexican-American Feature,” Correspondence, January 23, 1954, 10.
24. “Puerto Ricans in America,” Correspondence, March 20, 1954, 12.
25. The series ran from May 15 to July 10, 1954 (nos. 17–21).
26. “They Wanted Only Boys,” Correspondence, January 9, 1954, 9.
27. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 4.
28. Ibid., 1.
29. Ibid., 5.
30. Minutes of the REB, May 11, 1954, Glaberman Papers, Box 3, Folder 4.
31. “From January 15 through June,” 1, Glaberman Papers, Box 3, Folder 1.
32. “The Transition Point: A Memo to the Membership,” 1, Glaberman Papers, Box 10, Folder 3 (emphasis in original).
33. FBI-JB, 29.
34. Ibid., 29–30.
35. “Tour Report, Motions, the Letter,” 7, Glaberman Papers, Box 10, Folder 3.
36. Minutes of the REB, May 25, 1954, Glaberman Papers, Box 3, Folder 4.
37. “Tour Report, Motions, the Letter,” 8.
38. Ibid., 7, 11.
39. Al Whitney, “Talent for Sale,” Correspondence, January 23, 1954, 8. This column is reprinted in Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 42.
40. Al Whitney, “Wasted Energy,” Correspondence, February 6, 1954, 8.
41. Al Whitney, “Negroes and Negro Organizations,” Correspondence, March 20, 1954, 8.
42. Al Whitney, “Negro Leaders and the $64 Question,” Correspondence, March 6, 1954, 8.
43. Al Whitney, “Negro Challenge,” Correspondence, August 7, 1954, 8. This column is reprinted in Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 45. Margaret Garner’s act of infanticide in 1856 dramatically represents gendered experiences of enslavement, the centrality of rape, and the complexity and importance of women’s resistance to slavery. Jimmy accurately conveyed the essence of Garner’s story, though he inaccurately reported some of the details. He wrote, “It has been over 100 years since Margaret Garner, a Negro mother, tossed her son into the Ohio River, giving him back to his maker rather than give him to slavery.” In fact, Garner and her family crossed the Ohio River to escape, but she did not throw her child into the river. Rather, she cut the child’s throat with a knife. The child was Garner’s two-year-old daughter, not son. I have corrected this last error by replacing the word “his” in the original with “[her]” in my quotation of the text. For a range of thoughtful discussions of Garner’s story and its implications, including artistic responses and renderings, see Frederickson and Walters, Gendered Resistance.
44. Al Whitney, “Viewing Negro History Week,” Correspondence, February 20, 1954, 8. This column is also reprinted in Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 43–44.
45. Ibid.
46. Al Whitney, “Tension and Social Change,” Correspondence, December 11, 1954, 6.
47. The name of the page was a deliberate expansion of what constitutes news, as very few actual news reports appeared on the page. Instead, the page mostly carried opinion pieces, personal reflections, letters, and commentary on topical or timely subjects of interest to black communities.
48. J.O., “Police Brutality,” Correspondence, September 4, 1954, 8.
49. “Housing Shortage—They Move You with Bulldozers,” Correspondence, December 26, 1953, 8.
50. Correspondence, September 4, 1954, 8.
51. “An Editorial: Segregation,” Correspondence, December 26, 1953, 8.
52. “Americanism,” Correspondence, January 23, 1954, 8.
53. “Say Negro News Dominates Paper,” Correspondence, November 14, 1953, 7.
54. Ibid.
55. “On the Negro Discussion,” Correspondence, December 12, 1953, 1.
56. Ibid.
57. “What Do You Think?,” Correspondence, January 23, 1954, 8.
58. “What Do You Think?,” Correspondence, June 12, 1954, 8.
59. “What Is Wrong with Special Negro News,” Correspondence, March 6, 1954, 8.
60. “Editor’s Note,” Correspondence, March 6, 1954, 8.
61. “What Is Wrong with Special Negro News,” Correspondence, March 6, 1954, 8.
62. Ibid. A short letter titled “House Parties” from a reader in the “What Do You Think?” section appearing next to the letter from “Firm Supporter” speaks to the significance of note parties: “In most Negro communities, there are all types of house parties. Some are savings clubs, some for poker games where everyone takes turns as the house man, and then there are some to help each other. The latter are the best. Friends rotate to give the parties and attend each other’s parties. It may be for a back mortgage payment, for a doctor’s bill, or for a new coat, but from my experience, there seems to be a common understanding that we are all in the same boat” (Correspondence, March 6, 1954, 8).
63. “Negro History: Crispus Attucks,” Correspondence, February 20, 1954, 8.
64. “Two Worlds: Notes from a Diary,” Correspondence, July 24, 1954, 7.
65. “American Politics and the Negro,” Correspondence, March 6, 1954, 1.
66. Correspondence, March 6, 1954, 1.
67. Minutes of the REB, May 25, 1954.
68. “Worker’s Journal,” Correspondence, June 12, 1954, 1; “Letter of the Week: Activity in Kentucky on Supreme Court Decision,” Correspondence, June 12, 1954, 1; “An Editorial: The Supreme Court,” Correspondence, June 12, 1954, 8.
69. All comments appeared in “Readers’ Views,” Correspondence, June 12, 1954, 6.
70. Al Whitney, “Supreme Court Indecision,” Correspondence, June 12, 1954, 8.
71. Al Whitney, “Negroes and the Supreme Court Decision,” Correspondence, May 29, 1954, 8.
72. Al Whitney, “A Decision of Necessity,” Correspondence, June 26, 1954, 8.
73. Al Whitney, “Negroes and the Supreme Court Decision”; Al Whitney, “Supreme Court Indecision”; Al Whitney, “A Decision of Necessity.”
74. “An Editorial: Talented Tenth Are Retreating,” Correspondence, July 24, 1954, 8. I have determined that Jimmy wrote this editorial because he was the editor of the SNN page, the editorial is consistent in language and tone with his other writings, and some of the subject matter is similar to that of his other work, such as the critique of the talented tenth and the reference to the Detroit NAACP’s acquiescence to a recent ruling on public housing, which is the subject of his column on the same page.
75. Ibid.
76. Stefan, “Labor Struggles and Negro Struggles,” Correspondence, July 10, 1954, 12.
77. Negro Housewife, “Letter of the Week—Supreme Court Decision,” Correspondence, July 24, 1954, 1; “An Editorial: Talented Tenth Are Retreating.”
78. On the plans for Daddario to make the trip, see FBI-GLB, 221, 250, 256. It seems that the plans initially called for Grace and Daddario to travel together, but this later changed, with them traveling separately and meeting in London. In her autobiography, Grace briefly discusses the trip but does not mention Daddario being there (Living for Change, 69).
79. Grace Lee Boggs lists these activities in Living for Change, 69.
80. FBI-GLB, 260–63. Having kept Grace under consistent surveillance since that initial trip, the FBI activated its network of informants and government agencies to monitor Grace’s activities in London. Shortly after her departure, Hoover wrote a memo about her to the director of the Office of Security in the Department of State sharing the information the bureau had gathered from informants and other sources. Copies of the memo went to the director and deputy director of plans for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Foreign Service Desk, and the legal attaché in London, with a note to the attaché: “Through sources available to you it is requested that subject’s contacts and activities be determined while in England” (FBI-GLB, 219–20).
81. Gerald Horne discusses American and British surveillance of Koinange in Mau Mau in Harlem?, 97–98, 117.
82. This portrait of Koinange is drawn from these sources: Kithinji, “Koinange, Peter Mbiyu,” 408–10; Kithinji, “Koinange wa Mbiyu,” 96–98; Koinange, The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves, 7–10, 25–28, 56–64, 71.
83. Rawcliffe, The Struggle for Kenya, 124.
84. Koinange, The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves, 1.
85. She shared this in an interview conducted by Stephen Ferguson and Jennifer Choi (transcript in author’s possession). The quotations appear on 1.
86. “Murder Inc.,” Correspondence, January 9, 1954, 5.
87. “Neither Terror, nor Treachery, nor Bargain,” Correspondence, May 1, 1954, 5; “Accident and Treachery in Africa,” Correspondence, May 15, 1954, 5; “White Man’s Burden,” Correspondence, August 7, 1954, 5.
88. “The People Are a Mighty Fortress in East Africa,” Correspondence, November 27, 1954, 8 (emphasis in original).
89. Grace Boggs to Saul and Bessie, November 5, 1954, Glaberman Papers, Box 3, Folder 3.
90. FBI-GLB, 180–81.
91. Ibid., 180.
92. Ibid., 175.
93. Grace Lee Boggs to Freddy Paine, November 10, 1960, Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 7.
94. For a thoughtful discussion of the relationship between the Kenyan liberation struggle and the United States, including black Americans’ response to Kenya and activism in support of the independence movement, see Horne, Mau Mau in Harlem?
95. See Plummer, Rising Wind, 241–43.
96. Padmore, “Behind the Mau Mau,” 355.
97. Ibid., 372.
98. For more on the CAA and an analysis of its place in the history and politics of African American anticolonial activism from the 1930s through the early 1950s, see Von Eschen, Race against Empire.
99. Ibid., 141; Horne, Mau Mau in Harlem?, 116.
100. Koinange, The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves, “Acknowledgment.”
101. Ibid., 115.
102. Ibid.
103. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 69; Grace Lee Boggs to Conrad Lynn, May 28, 1962, Paine Papers (unprocessed), Box 2, Folder “1962–1963, Grace Reply.”
104. Grace Lee Boggs to Conrad Lynn, May 28, 1962, June 5, 1962, June 18, 1962, all in Paine Papers (unprocessed), Box 2, Folder “1962–1963, Grace Reply.”
105. Abe McGregor Goff to Rowland Watts, June 3, 1955, Glaberman Papers, Box 3, Folder 10.
106. Martin Glaberman to friends and supporters of Correspondence, September 30, 1954, Paine Papers, Box 2, Folder 11.
107. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 100.
108. William Page, “Can We Build a Workers’ Paper?,” Correspondence, May 1, 1954, 12.
109. Al Whitney, “A New Form of Association,” Correspondence, July 24, 1954, 2.
110. Al Whitney, “The Paper and a New Society,” Correspondence, October 30, 1954, 1. This column is reprinted in Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 46–47.
111. Raya Dunayevskaya quoted in Jones, A Dreadful Deceit, 269.
112. Correspondence, October 1957, 1.
CHAPTER 7
1. C. L. R. James to comrades, November 3, 1956, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 6 (emphasis in original).
2. Letter dated November 5, 1956, with no signature or addressee, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 6 (emphasis in original). Read in the context of the other letters, this can be identified as written by C. L. R. The top of the letter says copies have been or are to be sent to “Sh,” Th,” and “Neff,” which are references to Sherman (Glaberman), Thompson (Grace), and Lyman Paine, respectively. C. L. R. struck the same tone in a letter to Glaberman dated December 13, 1956: “I want to repeat, and I say so because it will take you some time to understand; the Hungarian Revolution is the greatest political event since the October Revolution of 1917.” C. L. R. James to Martin Glaberman, December 13, 1956, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 7.
3. J (C. L. R. James) to friends, November 15, 1956, 3, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 6. This is a letter from C. L. R. to members of the organization in the United States. It includes a copy of a letter from Grace (signed Thompson) to C. L. R. on November 10, 1956. C. L. R.’s statement cited here is from a postscript that he wrote at the end of Grace’s letter.
4. J (C. L. R. James) to friends, November 15, 1956.
5. Thompson (Grace Lee Boggs) to friends, November 15, 1956, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 6.
6. New York Editing Committee of Correspondence to friend, November 17, 1956, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 6.
7. Press release, November 16, 1956, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 6.
8. New York Editing Committee of Correspondence to friend, November 17, 1956 (emphasis in original).
9. “The Hungarian Revolution,” Correspondence, December 1956, 1.
10. Thompson (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), November 10, 1956. C. L. R. sent this letter out to the group with his November 15 letter.
11. Jim (James Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), November 28, 1956, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 6. All quotations in this paragraph are from this letter.
12. Ibid. All quotations in this paragraph are from this letter.
13. Ibid.
14. Th (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), March 24, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 10.
15. Nkrumah, Ghana, 281–83; Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom, 64–69; Milne, Kwame Nkrumah, 73, 75.
16. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins. The quotations cited here appear in the unpaginated “Preface to the Vintage Edition.” The final pages of the study to which C. L. R. refers are 375–77.
17. C. L. R. James to Martin Glaberman, December 13, 1956, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 7.
18. C. L. R. James to friends, February 10, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 9.
19. C. L. R. James to Martin Glaberman, February 8, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 9.
20. C. L. R. was still recovering from an illness that had slowed down his writing of the Hungary pamphlet. Nkrumah said that his government would pay for C. L. R.’s passage to and from Ghana and also host him as a guest of the government. Nonetheless, C. L. R. indicated in letters to the American group that there would be other expenses incurred. Lyman Paine subsequently agreed to cover these expenses.
21. C. L. R. James to Martin Glaberman, February 8, 1957.
22. J (C. L. R. James) to friends (February 18, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 9.
23. J (C. L. R. James) to friends, March 3, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 10; J (C. L. R. James) to [unidentified], March 14, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 10; C. L. R. James to everybody, March 20, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 10.
24. J (C. L. R. James) to friends, March 3, 1957 (emphasis in original).
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. J (C. L. R. James) to [unidentified], March 14, 1957.
29. C. L. R. James to everybody, March 20, 1957. All quotations in this paragraph are from this letter (emphasis in original).
30. Ibid.
31. For “one of the most important speeches in his life,” see Milne, Forward Ever, 2. For “possibly the finest expression of his vision for Ghana and Africa,” see Rahman, The Regime Change of Kwame Nkrumah, 172. In a subsequent biography of Nkrumah, Milne writes that the speech “was one of his finest. Every seat in the Assembly was filled, and large crowds had gathered outside. He spoke at length of events leading up to the demand for an end to colonial rule” and “went on to remind members that independence was not an end itself, but a means to an end.” She further explains, “The Motion of Destiny took Britain by surprise. It demanded self-government now, and a clear commitment by Britain to a date for full independence. The colonial planners had not expected such a Motion so soon. At most, they anticipated a Motion on self-government. But Nkrumah, having felt the pulse of the people, wanted to telescope the entire period of preparation to a few years. In doing so, it was Nkrumah who was setting the pace” (Milne, Kwame Nkrumah, 65, 66).
32. G (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), March 17, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 10.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Th (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), March 24, 1957.
36. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 141n1.
37. Miliband, “Bonapartism,” 55.
38. Th (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), March 24, 1957.
39. Ibid.
40. Grace’s first encounter with Hegel and the impact of this book were described in chapter 3. For the book’s continuing significance for her, see Grace Lee Boggs, “Movement Reading,” and Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 31–32.
41. J (C. L. R. James) to friends, March 21, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 10.
42. C. L. R. James to friends, March 25, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 10. This letter has been published in Grimshaw, The C. L. R. James Reader, 271–76; Paul Buhle, C. L. R. James: His Life and Work,153–58. These publications provide a valuable contribution in making this letter widely available, however a fuller understanding of the letter can best be gained by reading it in the Glaberman Papers alongside other letters written between C. L. R. and his comrades in the United States during the spring of 1957.
43. C. L. R. James to friends, March 25, 1957.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid. All quotations in this paragraph are from this letter.
47. I am thankful to Matt Birkhold for his insight and editorial work that helped me to arrive at this analysis.
48. C. L. R. James to friends, March 25, 1957. All quotations in this paragraph are from this letter.
49. The organization formed in early 1957, taking the name Southern Leadership Conference. In August the organization added the word “Christian” to its name. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 85, 90, 97.
50. “Montgomery and Melville,” Correspondence, April 1957, 6.
51. C. L. R. James to everybody, March 20, 1957, 3 (emphasis in original).
52. C. L. R. James to friends [unsigned], April 13, 1957, 2, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 11.
53. Ibid.
54. C. L. R. James to everybody, March 20, 1957, 4–5.
55. Grace reported this conversation and shared Jimmy’s comments in, G (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), April 9, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 11.
56. Th (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), March 24, 1957.
57. Ibid (emphasis in original).
58. J (C. L. R. James) to [unidentified], March 14, 1957.
59. C. L. R. James to everybody, March 20, 1957, 5 (emphasis in original).
60. J (C. L. R. James) to Sherman (Martin Glaberman), March 29, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 10.
61. G (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), April 9, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 11.
62. Th (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), March 24, 1957.
63. Within Correspondence it was expected that intellectuals like Grace would learn from workers like Jimmy, who possessed, according to the group’s political worldview, unique and invaluable knowledge by virtue of their experiences in the factory and proximity to the world of production. The Third Layer School had formalized and solidified this idea as part of the group’s organizational philosophy. However, Grace intended her anecdote to show something slightly different. What she learned from Jimmy resulted not solely from his being a worker but from his broader life experiences and worldview; she attributed his critical insights and influence on her thinking to the type of person he was, the social background that shaped him, and the sharp contrast of his background and personality with hers.
64. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 85.
65. T (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), April 9, 1957.
66. Al Whitney, “A Report on the March on Washington,” Correspondence, April 1, 1957, 1.
67. C. L. R. James to friends, April 13, 1957.
68. Ibid. (emphasis in original).
69. Grace Lee Boggs to friends, May 2, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 12.
70. Ibid.
71. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 69; report dated October 7, 1957, FBI-JB, 53.
72. C. L. R. James to Constance, June 15, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 13; Marty Glaberman to C. L. R. James, October 13, 1957, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 15.
73. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 110.
74. During her stay in London in 1954, Grace worked mostly with Mbiyu Koinange on one project.
75. According to Grace’s later reports, her time in London was nothing like the Johnson-Forest days. Reflecting decades later on this period, Grace wrote that working with C. L. R in London during both her 1954 and 1957 trips “had been like a tour of duty” and that she felt a distance between them. See Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 111.
76. The cricket book appeared five years later as C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary. The Ghana book was not published until 1977, two decades after C. L. R. attended Ghana’s independence celebration and five years after Nkrumah’s death, as C. L. R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. For discussion of the eventual content of these books as well as the timing of their publication, see Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary.
77. Report dated March 11, 1958, FBI-JB, 58–59.
78. Marty Glaberman to C. L. R. James, October 13, 1957.
79. Correspondence, October 1957, 4. Reprinted in Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 52–53.
80. Al Whitney, “Who Is for Law and Order?,” Correspondence, October 1957, 4. Reprinted in Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 54–55.
81. Information from informants and other surveillance is documented throughout both FBI-JB and FBI-GLB. The specific cases cited from Grace’s file are from reports dated September 9, 1955, December 12, 1955, February 20, 1956, and April 17, 1958; those from Jimmy’s file are dated October 13, 1953, and March 22, 1957.
82. For example, see reports dated March 11, 1958, March 10, 1959, March 14, 1960, and March 27, 1961, FBI-JB.
83. Reports dated April 4, 1957, October 17, 1958, April 4, 1959, April 14, 1959, and June 1, 1960, FBI-GLB.
84. Grace Lee Boggs interview with author.
85. She had worked as a paid functionary for Correspondence during some stretches in the early 1950s, though the work she did for the organization during these periods differed very little if at all from that which she did for the organization at other times.
86. G (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), April 13, 1955, Glaberman Papers, Box 3, Folder 8. Also see Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 87.
87. G (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), April 13, 1955.
88. G (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), April 18, 1955, Glaberman Papers, Box 3, Folder 8.
89. G (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), April 15, 1955, Glaberman Papers, Box 3, Folder 8.
90. T (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), April 9, 1957.
91. Joe Maddox interview with author.
92. Jim Boggs to A. J. Muste, July 24, 1956, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 2.
93. G (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), June 9, 1956, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 1. With this letter is an untitled document that contains the quotation and describes the Local 7 election and the reasoning that Jimmy and Willis followed in their strategy. The document is also dated June 9, 1956.
94. Untitled document with G (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), June 9, 1956.
95. Marty Glaberman to J (C. L. R. James), June 21, 1956, Glaberman Papers, Box 5, Folder 1.
96. Ibid.
97. Pursell, “The Technology of Production.” See especially p. 65.
98. Bix, Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs?, 237.
99. “The Automatic Factory,” Fortune, November 1946, 165–66; Eric W. Leaver and J. J. Brown, “Machines without Men,” Fortune, November 1946, 92–204. See also Noble, Forces of Production, 67–68; and Bix, Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs?, 237–38.
100. Bix, Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs?, 238.
101. For an evocative discussion of the 1945–46 strike wave, see Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, part 2.
102. Meyer, “ ‘An Economic Frankenstein’ ”; Meyer, “The Persistence of Fordism”; Noble, Forces of Production, 67; Edsforth, “Why Automation Didn’t Shorten the Work Week,” 163–67; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 130–35; Bix, Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs?, 240.
103. “Automation: A Factory Runs Itself,” Business Week, March 29, 1952, 146–50; “Coming Industrial Era: The Wholly Automatic Factory,” Business Week, April 5, 1952, 96–99; and “Push Button Plant: It’s Here—Machines Do the Work and a Man Looks On,” U.S. News and World Report, December 4, 1953, 41–44. For more discussion of this surge in interest in automation, see Bix, Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs?; and Noble, Forces of Production.
104. Wiener, Cybernetics, 27.
105. Ibid., 220.
106. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 130, 144.
107. Ibid., 134 (table 5.1).
108. James Boggs, The American Revolution, 23–24; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 136.
109. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 136–37.
110. “Automation affected virtually every sector of the city’s economy,” writes Sugrue, “reshaping Detroit’s industrial labor market, and unleashing forces whose destructive powers no one—industrialists and workers alike—could fully anticipate” (ibid., 135).
111. G (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), February 19, 1955, Glaberman Papers, Box 3, Folder 5.
112. Sherman (Martin Glaberman) to all locals, April 6, 1958, Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 2; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 69.
113. C. L. R. James, Lee, and Chaulieu, Facing Reality, 6.
114. Though C. L. R. was the book’s primary author, the cover of Facing Reality listed three authors: J. R. Johnson, Grace C. Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu. At the initial publishing, the group decided that C. L. R.’s pen name should be used to highlight continuity between Facing Reality and the Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT), identifying the book as a continuation of the ideas developed by J. R. Johnson and the JFT. Subsequent editions use the name C. L. R. James instead of J. R. Johnson.
The third name, Pierre Chaulieu, was the pen name of Cornelius Castoriadis, the founder of the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism), whom Grace had made contact with during her 1948 trip to Paris. This attribution of authorship reflected the collaborative spirit in which C. L. R. and the group approached this work. More generally, it reflected the group’s practice of collaboration and collective authorship that had been at the heart of the JFT. However, this effort lacked a crucial quality of the group’s intellectual production during the 1940s: the unity of purpose and vision—that is, a shared intellectual and political viewpoint—that had bound the members of the JFT was not fully present in 1957. Castoriadis contributed only a small portion of the text, 12 pages of the 174-page book. More importantly, Castoriadis’s contribution was, in his words, “edited a bit and perhaps vulgarized in some sense by James,” and Castoriadis apparently never granted final approval for his portion to appear in the book. See Castoriadis, “C. L. R. James and the Fate of Marxism,” 285.
Grace, too, would distance herself from Facing Reality, though much later. “The book is pure C. L. R James,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I did not share CLR’s excitement about the Hungarian Revolution,” she recalled, adding that after living in Detroit for four years she had begun to “have some reservations about [C. L. R.’s] celebration of spontaneity. But I did not challenge him, and although I did little of the actual writing, I went along with including my name with Chaulieu’s as a coauthor.” See Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 69–70. She also says that the book “draws heavily on the experiences of Selma [James]” (70), adding that “Selma’s influence on CLR during their long partnership has not been sufficiently recognized” (277n32). Speaking again to her reservations about the book, Grace adds this about C. L. R.: “His idea, while still brilliant, struck me as increasingly abstract because he was not rooted in any place or any ongoing struggle. After living in Detroit and getting a sense of the diversity among workers and blacks and the need for both to struggle to transform themselves, I found his celebrations of spontaneity idealistic and romantic” (111). Of course, this may overstate the reservations she actually felt at the time. The surviving records do not reveal this ambivalence, and this passage was written decades later, by which time the full dimensions of her and Jimmy’s differences with C. L. R. had come to light and they had undergone a painful organizational split. Still, subsequent events do suggest that in 1957 she was developing some reservations, if subtle and unarticulated, about some of the ideas in Facing Reality and that she was not fully invested in the basic perspective underlying the book.
115. C. L. R. James, Lee, and Chaulieu, Facing Reality, 24, 27.
116. This biographical information on Lynn and his career is drawn from his memoir and an oral history interview: Lynn, There Is a Fountain; and transcript of tape-recorded interview of Conrad Lynn by Milaika Lumumba, January 27, 1970, CRDP.
117. Conrad Lynn, “Accommodating Negro Leadership,” Correspondence, November 1958, 3.
118. Lynn reports that the phone call occurred on November 2, 1958, in his autobiography There Is a Fountain (143).
CHAPTER 8
1. These biographical details are drawn from Tyson, Radio Free Dixie.
2. Ibid., 40–41.
3. Lynn, There Is a Fountain, 143.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 144.
6. Constance Webb, “I Went Behind Iron Curtain—in USA,” Correspondence, February 1959, 1.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Webb, Not Without Love, 277.
11. Ibid. Caution should be used with Webb’s memoir as a source to reconstruct this history. Like the genre as a whole, her memoir relies heavily if not exclusively on memory to recount long-ago events and experiences, in this instance four decades removed. Webb’s book seems to be especially burdened by the practice of some memoirists who color their recollections, many times unconsciously, but occasionally with intent, according to subsequent ideas and motivations. The result in this case is a book with clear historical inaccuracies and distortions. To cite one example, she relates at some length the internal organizational discussions centered on Raya Dunayevskaya’s response to the book Facing Reality, which was published in 1958. However, Dunayevskaya had departed from the group in 1955. More relevant to the present study, Webb provides an especially unflattering portrayal of Grace Lee Boggs. It is difficult if not impossible to refute or verify the events and actions that Webb describes to build her characterization of Grace. However, Webb’s portrayal of Grace as constantly seeking power within the organization and as scheming for prestige relative to Dunayevskaya and others stands at odds with considerable evidence to the contrary. This puts Webb’s picture of Grace in some question. I have chosen to cite the particular passages from Webb’s memoir regarding her trip to Monroe because other evidence, such as that provided by Tyson and Lynn, either corroborates or strongly suggests the accuracy of her account of the Perry home and the larger scene. That is to say, her words are used here to amplify the scene described because they are consistent with other sources.
12. Webb, “I Went Behind Iron Curtain,” Correspondence, February 1959, 1. In February and March 1959, Correspondence only appeared once, rather than bi-weekly.
13. G (Grace Lee Boggs) to friends, January 15, 1959, Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 5.
14. Correspondence, February 1959, 1.
15. “Broadcast Correspondence Monroe, N.C. Tapes,” Correspondence, June 20, 1959, 1.
16. Correspondence, July 4, 1959, 1.
17. Correspondence, November 21, 1959, 1.
18. Cited in Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 149.
19. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 149.
20. These quotations are from newspaper headlines and stories cited in Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 149–50.
21. Constance Webb, “Urges Open NAACP Hearing of Negroes’ Right to Self-Defense,” Correspondence, June 20, 1959, 1.
22. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 156–57.
23. Constance Webb, “Monroe NAACP Defies National Office Suspension of Local President Williams,” Correspondence, July 4, 1959, 1.
24. Quoted in Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 163.
25. Tim Tyson notes that the proceedings aired on New York radio. Indeed, it was through this broadcast that Mae Mallory, who would become one of Williams’s most committed supporters and cofighters, initially heard about and became interested in him. Tyson writes of that moment that Mallory “turned the dial on her radio and heard a voice that changed her life forever” (Radio Free Dixie, 189). Mallory is briefly discussed in chapter 9.
26. Quoted in Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 193.
27. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 195–96. For a fuller discussion of the Crusader see chapter 5 of Tyson’s excellent book, especially 193–201.
28. Correspondence, June 6, 1959, 1; and Crusader Weekly Newsletter, June 26, 1959, 1.
29. Crusader Weekly Newsletter, June 26, 1959, 1.
30. Mabel Williams, “The Night We Rode in a KKK Motorcade,” Correspondence, September 26, 1959, 4; Robert. F. Williams, “State Snatches People’s Doctor,” Correspondence, November 21, 1959, 1; Robert F. Williams, “Ghost of Buchenwald,” Correspondence, February 13, 1960, 4.
31. Constance Webb, “R. F. Williams: New Type of Leader,” Correspondence, August 1, 1959, 1.
32. Ibid.
33. Tyson cites a North Carolina newspaper as calling Williams “the biggest civil right story of 1959”; Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 149.
34. For a discussion of these debates, see ibid., 213–17.
35. Constance Webb, “Near-Riot Flares in Harlem,” Correspondence, August 29, 1959, 4.
36. Editorial, “Two Sides—But Only One Is Right,” Correspondence, December 19, 1959, 2. Jimmy used the phrase “but only one side is right” in other writings as well, including an early title for the manuscript that became American Revolution (which is discussed in chapter 9).
37. “Two Sides—But Only One Is Right,” 2.
38. Al Whitney, “The High Cost of Production,” Correspondence, April 11, 1959, 1.
39. Ibid.
40. Constance Webb, “Southern Students Score Victories; Sitdowns for Service Spreading,” Correspondence, March 12, 1960, 1.
41. Constance Webb, “Bell Tolls for Parliamentary Democracy as Students Act While Politicians Talk,” Correspondence, March 26, 1960, 1.
42. Constance Webb, “Real Voice of the American People Speaks through Today’s Sitdowns,” Correspondence, April 9, 1960, 1.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid. (emphasis in original).
46. “The First 50 Days—Chronicle of a Revolution,” Correspondence, April 9, 1960, 1.
47. “To All Student Strikers,” Correspondence, April 23, 1960, 1.
48. Ibid.
49. G (Grace Lee Boggs) to J (C. L. R. James), June 17, 1960, reprinted in C. L. R. James, Party Politics in the West Indies, 81–84; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 112, 280n23; FBI-GLB, 7, 16; FBI-JB, 88, 93.
50. FBI-GLB, 7.
51. FBI-JB, 88.
52. James Boggs notes, 1960, 2, 5, James Papers, Box 14, Folder 3 (emphasis in original).
53. “The Meaning of Negro History” speech was announced in the March 1959 Correspondence (a monthly issue), 4, and in the March 28, 1959 (returned to bi-weekly) issue, 4. The announcement for the sale of Black Reconstruction appeared in the April 11, 1959, issue. “The New Nations” speech was announced in the April 19, 1959, issue. The “Negroes and the Trade Unions” speech was announced in the November 21, 1959, issue.
54. Claudia Gwendolyn Mallett and Conrad Mallett interview with author.
55. Dolores Wilson interview with author.
56. Reginald Wilson interview with author.
57. Ibid.
58. Jim (James Boggs) to member, January 1, 1961, Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 8.
CHAPTER 9
1. Jimmy’s remarks to the class were printed as “Too Little, Too Late—Rights for Negroes in the U.S.A.,” Correspondence, June 17, 1961, 2.
2. Reginald Wilson, “Black Muslims Meet,” Correspondence, July 1, 1961.
3. “Too Little, Too Late,” 2.
4. Marty Glaberman to Freddy Paine and Frank, March 18, 1961, Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 8; announcement for the speech in Correspondence, March 11, 1961, 4. The front-page story in this issue also focused on Lumumba: “After the Death of Lumumba—His Truth Goes Marching On.”
5. Grace Lee Boggs to Freddy Paine, March 2, 1961, Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 8.
6. Grace Lee Boggs to Freddy Paine, January 24, 1961, Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 8.
7. Denise Wacker, “Negro Movement: Blame Whites for Racial Problems,” Michigan Daily, May 18, 1961, 1; “Correspondence on Campus,” Correspondence, June 3, 1961, 4.
8. James Boggs, “The First Giant Step,” Correspondence, June 3, 1961, 1. This article is reprinted in Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 67–68. The quotation appears on 67.
9. Arsenault, Freedom Riders. This “Nashville Movement Freedom Ride” was quickly followed by others, a few conducted by CORE, many others not. Over the next several months, hundreds of people participated in Freedom Rides traversing every state of the South. Arsenault gives a map of the many Freedom Rides between April and December 1961 (319) as well as an appendix listing a roster of Freedom Riders.
10. James Boggs, “The First Giant Step,” 1; Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 67.
11. Ibid.
12. President Kennedy announced the formation of the coordinating committee led by Roosevelt, Reuther, and Dr. Milton Eisenhower on May 24. See Kennedy, “Statement by the President on the Tractors-for-Freedom Movement.”
13. James Boggs, “The First Giant Step,” 1; Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 67.
14. Ibid.
15. Jimmy’s reference in his telegram to the UAW-AFL-CIO reflected the membership of his union, the UAW, in the merged AFL-CIO federation. In 1955, the once rival federations, American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), joined together. At its founding in 1935, the CIO was the standard bearer of industrial unionism, offering a more politically progressive, democratic, and militant alternative to the craft unionism of the AFL. The UAW, as a leading member of the new CIO, had briefly been home to radicals and militant trade unionists of the sort that fashioned the labor movement politics Jimmy encountered when he became an autoworker and nurtured his political growth in the early 1940s. His telegram to Reuther, who ascended to the leadership of the UAW and then the CIO during the preceding fifteen years, reflected Jimmy’s ongoing challenge to the union and the labor movement during the 1950s and early 1960s in the context of this devolution of the labor movement and the escalating civil rights movement. This comment on the AFL-CIO from historian Steve Babson further contextualizes Jimmy’s telegram: “From its founding, the AFL-CIO was riven by this contradiction between its official rhetoric on racial equality and its actual practice, particularly as the latter was carried out by affiliated unions. The national AFL-CIO was generally progressive, supporting implementation of the Supreme Court’s desegregation orders, contributing money to voter registration and civil rights groups in the South, and inviting Martin Luther King to speak at its national meetings. But the AFL-CIO made little effort to mobilize its members or align its affiliated unions with the civil rights movement” (Babson, The Unfinished Struggle, 142).
16. James Boggs to members of the executive board of Local 7, January 25, 1961 (in author’s possession).
17. James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle, 70.
18. Ibid., 71.
19. James Boggs, “Walking a Chalk Line,” interview by WBAI Pacifica Radio, recorded October 11, 1963; broadcast November 25, 1963.
20. I thank Richard Feldman—a longtime friend and comrade of James Boggs and an autoworker for many years—for his critical reading of and conversations about this material, which helped me to arrive at this point.
21. Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 68.
22. “The Second Civil War Has Begun in the United States of America,” Correspondence, June 3, 1961, 1.
23. James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle, 71–73.
24. “The Second Civil War Has Begun in the United States of America,” 1.
25. Ibid.
26. “Tide of Afro-American Nationalism Is Rising in the United States,” Correspondence, April 8, 1961, 1. As with most front-pagers, no author is given, but it was likely written by either Grace or Jimmy.
27. Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement, provides an especially insightful discussion of Harlem’s character and significance as a “central topography for African American artists and intellectuals” (111) during this period and an enduring site, symbolically and practically, for black radical politics before and during the early 1960s. As Smethurst points out, some groups located their headquarters in Harlem even when the leaders of the groups did not live there (113).
28. Smethurst gives an illuminating discussion of these figures and organizations, especially with regard to their leftist backgrounds or connections and the intersection (or perhaps inseparability) of artistic and political activity (ibid.).
29. On Lumumba, his meaning for African Americans, and the UN protests, see Baldwin, “A Negro Assays the Negro Mood,” reprinted as “East River, Downtown” in Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket; De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba; Hansberry, “Congolese Patriot”; Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour, 38–44; Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans, 208–40; Plummer, Rising Wind, 300–304; Polsgrove, Divided Minds, 138–41; Woodard, Nation within a Nation, 54–59.
30. “Tide of Afro-American Nationalism Is Rising in the United States,” 1.
31. Clarke, “The New Afro-American Nationalism,” 285.
32. Ibid., 292–93.
33. Ibid., 292.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 295.
36. Esther Cooper Jackson, Freedomways Reader.
37. Ibid., xxii.
38. On Liberator, see Tinson, “The Voice of the Black Protest Movement.” The reference to Clarke’s being on the editorial board is on 7.
39. For another discussion of Williams’s relationship to Detroit radicals, focusing on the period of his exile, see Mullen, Afro-Orientalism, chapter 3.
40. Tinson, “The Voice of the Black Protest Movement,” 5–6. Richard Gibson recalled giving a small party for Williams at his home on the eve of the UN demonstrations. He even suggests that Williams inspired the protests. Tyson reports that Williams delivered a speech, as part of his Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) tour, at a Harlem street rally on the night of February 14. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 237.
41. “Williams Lauds New Cuban Freedom,” Michigan Daily, February 16, 1961. This story and an accompanying photo of Williams and others at the forum shared the front page with two stories on the UN and a photo of the UN protest.
42. Announcement in Michigan Daily, February 15, 1961, 6; Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 148.
43. Both trips were facilitated by journalist Richard Gibson, at whose New York home Williams was the night before the University of Michigan talk. Gibson was a leader of the FPCC as well as a prominent figure in New York black radical circles around On Guard for Freedom, Liberator, and the others. See Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 147; and Tinson, “The Voice of the Black Protest Movement.”
44. Georgakas, “Frank Lovell,” 43. Also see General Baker’s recollections in Mast, Detroit Lives; and Dillard, Faith in the City, 231.
45. Student Council, February 11, 1961. The next night he spoke at Greater King Solomon Baptist Church on Fourth and Forest, near Wayne State University.
46. Marty Glaberman to Connie, March 5, 1961.
47. James Boggs to Conrad Lynn, June 5, 1961, Paine Papers (unprocessed), Box 2, Folder 8; Grace Lee Boggs to Frank, May 31, 1961, Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 9; Grace Lee Boggs interview with author (May 11, 2005).
48. James Boggs to Conrad Lynn, June 5, 1961.
49. Grace Lee Boggs interview with author (April 6, 2005); Reginald Wilson interview with author. Wilson recalled that he got the guns from Julian Mayfield. Tyson reports that Mayfield and Clarke delivered a truckload of weapons and clothes to Monroe in December 1960. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 204.
50. Grace Lee Boggs to Conrad Lynn, May 8, 1962, Paine Papers (unprocessed), Box 2, Folder “1962–1963 Grace, Reply.”
51. Grace Lee Boggs to C. L. R. James, January 13, 1961 (mistyped as January 31), Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 8.
52. Marty Glaberman to C. L. R. James, January 25, 1961, Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 8.
53. James Boggs to friends, December 30, 1961, Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 12.
54. James Boggs, “State of a Nation—America, 1962,” Glaberman Papers, Box 1, Folder 11.
55. Ibid., 1.
56. Ibid., 7, 8, 9.
57. Marty Glaberman to C. L. R. James, September 10, 1961, Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 11.
58. Marty Glaberman to Freddy Paine, November 11, 1961, Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 12.
59. C. L. R. James to Marty Glaberman, February 11, 1961, Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 13.
60. C. L. R. James to Grace Lee Boggs, November 20, 1961, Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 13.
61. C. L. R. James to secretary, Resident Editorial Board, January 15, 1962, Glaberman Papers, Box 6, Folder 13.
62. For an insightful discussion of Cleage’s background, including the roots and trajectory of his theological reasoning, as well as an overview of his political activism during the 1960s, see Dillard, Faith in the City, especially chapter 6 and conclusion.
63. Grace Lee Boggs to Conrad Lynn, May 28, 1962, Paine Papers (unprocessed), Box 2, Folder “1962–1963 Grace, Reply”; Dillard, Faith in the City, 252.
64. Grace Lee Boggs to Conrad Lynn, December 7, 1962, Paine Papers (unprocessed), Box 2, Folder “1962–1963 Grace, Reply.”
65. Grace Lee Boggs to Conrad Lynn, June 18, 1962, Paine Papers (unprocessed), Box 2, Folder “1962–1963 Grace, Reply.”
66. Grace Lee Boggs to Conrad Lynn, May 28, 1962.
67. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 88.
68. Grace Lee Boggs interview with author (September 15, 2008); Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 88. Grace adds that the owner never raised the rent above $150, in part because Jimmy did so much to take care of the house, tending to it as if he owned it.
69. Grace Lee Boggs to Freddy Paine, May 23, 1962, Paine Papers (unprocessed), Box 2, Folder “1962–1963 Grace, Reply.”
70. For example, members of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) spent time at the Boggses’ home during the early and mid-1960s, including a week in 1964 putting together an issue of their magazine Black America. RAM material listed 3061 Field Street as its address, as did RAM leader Max Standford, who was based in Philadelphia. Among the many Detroit activists who spent time at the Boggses’ home, General Baker, a central figure in the group Uhuru and later the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, recalled that he and his fellow young activists regularly went to Jimmy and Grace for counsel. At the Boggs home they could discuss revolutionary theory and political strategies, and they could get a wide array of radical literature, including hard-to-find material (General Baker and Marian Kramer interview with author).
CHAPTER 10
1. “Negroes Are the Ones Best-Suited to Govern the United States Today,” Correspondence, January 1963, 1. In 1963, the paper shifted back to monthly publication.
2. “Why This Issue?,” Correspondence, January 1963, 2.
3. Ibid.
4. “Negroes Are the Ones Best-Suited to Govern the United States Today,” 1.
5. Selma V. Sparks, “Embattled Harlem Makes World Forum of UN,” Correspondence, January 1963, 1.
6. Reginald Wilson, “Only Our Awakening to Celebrate,” part 5 of “What Are We Fighting For Anyway?,” Correspondence, January 1963, 1.
7. “Why Are We Called Negro?” and “Be Black and Like It,” Correspondence, January 1963, 2.
8. “Introducing Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr.—The Negro Struggle Is a Struggle for Power,” Correspondence, January 1963, 4.
9. “Black Beauty,” Correspondence, January 1963, Black Art Special Emancipation Supplement.
10. Grace Lee Boggs to Conrad Lynn, January 31, 1963, Paine Papers (unprocessed), Box 2, Folder “1962–1963, Grace Reply” (emphasis in original).
11. This essay was first published as “Black Political Power” in the March 1963 issue of Monthly Review and was subsequently published as “Liberalism, Marxism, and Black Political Power” in James Boggs’s second book, Racism and the Class Struggle. It has been reprinted in Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, under that title. The quotation appears on 160–61.
12. James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle, in Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 161.
13. Brink and Harris, The Negro Revolution in America.
14. King, Why We Can’t Wait, 115, 26.
15. Bennett, Before the Mayflower, 386.
16. Branch, Pillar of Fire, 88.
17. Eskew, But for Birmingham, 314–15.
18. “Call to Action!!!,” May 8, 1963, NAACP-DBC, Box 21, Community Action Committee, Folder “1963”; Fentin, “The Detroit Council for Human Rights and the Detroit Freedom March of 1963,” 20.
19. “A Profile of the Detroit Negro, 1959–1964,” prepared by the Research Department of the Detroit Urban League, June 1965, 3; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 23 (chart).
20. Fentin, “The Detroit Council for Human Rights and the Detroit Freedom March of 1963,” 20–21; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 124.
21. Both David Thomas Fentin and Grace Lee Boggs report that the meeting took place on the evening of May 10. Fentin writes that the National Urban League meeting occurred “a few hours after the NAACP-sponsored rally” and was attended by “representatives from over 100 organizations” (“The Detroit Council for Human Rights and the Detroit Freedom March of 1963,” 22). Grace Lee Boggs does not mention the location of the meeting, but says, “That night [after the rally] we began meeting in small groups to plan the kind of mass march down Woodward Avenue that Cleage had projected” (Living for Change, 124).
22. Both statements are from Titon, Give Me This Mountain, the first from the preface, the second from the foreword by Jesse L. Jackson.
23. On Franklin, see Salvatore, Singing in a Strange Land.
24. Franklin and King had developed a friendship after they met when King was a student at Morehouse College and Franklin served as a board member of the organization that King led, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. See Robbie L. McCoy, “C. L. Franklin Services Saturday,” Michigan Chronicle, August 4, 1984, 4A. Also see “Southern Christian Leadership Conference Board Members,” n.d., Franklin Papers, Box 1, Folder “Miscellaneous.”
25. J. C. Coles to R. V. Marks, “Inter-office Correspondence,” subject: Detroit Council for Human Rights, May 22, 1963, DCCR, Box 19, Folder 6.
26. Fentin, “The Detroit Council for Human Rights and the Detroit Freedom March of 1963,” 51–58, 70–72; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 124.
27. Carson, A Call to Conscience, 60; “125,000 in ‘Freedom Walk,’ ” Pittsburgh Courier (national edition), June 29, 1963, 1. This and other newspaper accounts reported police estimates of 125,000 marchers and 125,000 supporters along the streets.
28. Chester Higgins, “$350,000 Spent in Birmingham, King Tells Rally,” Pittsburgh Courier (national edition), June 29, 1963, 1; Detroit News, June 24, 1963, 2A; Detroit Courier, June 29, 1963, 8.
29. “125,000 in ‘Freedom Walk,’ ” Pittsburgh Courier, 4; Fentin, “The Detroit Council for Human Rights and the Detroit Freedom March of 1963,” 86–89. King’s speech was recorded as The Great March to Freedom, Gordy Records no. 906, distributed by Motown. The text of the speech is available in multiple sources, including Carson, A Call to Conscience.
30. Gwendolyn Mallett, “Freedom Walkers Pledge ‘We Shall Overcome,’ ” Correspondence, June 1963, 1.
31. Ibid.,
32. “Gus and Greasy,” Correspondence, June 1963, 1.
33. Mallett, “Freedom Walkers Pledge ‘We Shall Overcome,’ ” 1.
34. Fentin, “The Detroit Council for Human Rights and the Detroit Freedom March of 1963,” chapter 5.
35. Detroit News, June 8, 1963.
36. Fentin, “The Detroit Council for Human Rights and the Detroit Freedom March of 1963,” 87. On Grigsby, see Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It; and Miller, Managing Inequality.
37. Snow F. Grigsby, “An Open Letter,” DCCR, Box 12, Folder 8.
38. Fentin, “The Detroit Council for Human Rights and the Detroit Freedom March of 1963,” 87–88. For Cleage’s recollection of his statement see Cleage, Black Christian Nationalism, 106; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 124.
39. “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work, Support Selective Patronage Campaign” Illustrated News, June 24, 1963, 5.
40. Albert B. Cleage, “Not Someday—But Now! We Shall Overcome,” Illustrated News, June 24, 1963, 3–4.
41. “Boycotting May Hit Detroit A&P,” Illustrated News, April 29, 1963, 7.
42. Sewell, “The ‘Not-Buying Power’ of the Black Community,” 139–40. For a thorough discussion and analysis of the Philadelphia campaign and its connection to that city’s broader black political movements, see Countryman, Up South.
43. Albert B. Cleage, “Not Someday—But Now! We Shall Overcome,” 3.
44. Smith, Dancing in the Street, 52–53.
45. Ibid.; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 126.
46. Smith, Dancing in the Street, 56–57.
47. “Differs with Franklin on Policy, Rev. Albert B. Cleage Resigns from DCHR,” Illustrated News, October 28, 1963, 3–4.
48. “Freedom Now Party Platform,” Illustrated News, September 28, 1964, 7; Lynn, There Is a Fountain, 184.
49. “Differs with Franklin on Policy, Rev. Albert B. Cleage Resigns from DCHR,” Illustrated News, October 28, 1963, 3.
50. Ibid., 6.
51. Grace Lee Boggs interview with author; Milton Henry oral history transcript in CRDP; Jasmin A. Young, “Detroit’s Red,” 23. Malcolm’s brother Wilfred, of the Detroit NOI mosque, was in conversation with Grace and others, including about the Freedom Now Party. He may also have been involved in arranging Malcolm to speak on what would have been relatively short notice. Malcolm made other speaking engagements in and around Detroit, including at Wayne State University in Detroit on and at the University of Michigan in nearby Ann Arbor, both in late October.
52. Leo Huberman to James Boggs, April 20, 1962, Ping Ferry to friends, April 24, 1962, James Boggs to Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, April 30, 1962, all in Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 18.
53. Just weeks before publication, the title was still in question. In April 1963 James Boggs confessed to Huberman and Sweezy that he was having “a very hard time trying to arrive at a title because of the varied nature of the book. If it were just about race, the title would be easier to find; the same if it were just a question of work. But what the book does, in my estimation, is make an analysis of the economic, industrial, social, and political changes that have taken place in the United States and in its relations to world changes, and the effect that these changes are having on the people in molding them into the pattern that they are at present.” Explaining his thinking on the title to that point, James Boggs said that with his most recent revisions to the manuscript he felt that “a drive has now been injected into the book that will make it quite a controversial piece and that regardless of which side one is on, it will strike home to a lot of people. It is perhaps for this reason that I am tentatively entitling the book ‘But Only One Side is Right’ ” (James Boggs to Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, April 30, 1963, Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 18). At one point James Boggs considered as an alternative title “Rights Are What You Take” (table of contents, Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 6). Each of these discarded titles made its way as a phrase into the book’s introduction, in the opening and closing sentences, respectively. Sweezy suggested The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (Paul Sweezy to Jim Boggs, May 27, 1963, Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 18).
54. It appeared first as the ninety-six-page special double summer issue (July–August) of Monthly Review in 1963 and then in the fall as a Monthly Review Press paperback book.
55. The American Revolution remains Jimmy’s most well-known and enduring work. After a long period of being out of print, it has been republished twice. It is included in Stephen M. Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, and was also reissued by Monthly Review Press with short introductory essays by Grace Lee Boggs and six other Detroit-based activists. Each of these essays speaks to how the book contributed to the writer’s conceptions and practice of grassroots activism and social change. Together, these introductions give a vivid picture of the book’s legacy. Another statement on the book’s influence comes from Dan Georgakas’s personal reflections on Detroit radical politics from the late 1950s through the 1960s. The American Revolution “was widely admired in Detroit radical circles,” he writes. “I believe it was read by almost every person who later became a member of the [League of Revolutionary Black Workers] Executive Committee” (“Young Detroit Radicals,” 193n2).
56. The languages are French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Catalan, and Portuguese.
57. Monthly Review 15, no. 5 (September 1963). The statements appear in the “Notes from the Reader” section on the inside cover of the issue.
58. Bertrand Russell to James Boggs, August 20, 1963, Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 20. Their correspondence is discussed below.
59. Davis, Life Lit by Some Large Vision, 196. This passage comes from Davis’s remarks at a memorial service for James Boggs on October 23, 1993, in Detroit. As Davis recounted in his remarks, his reading of The American Revolution was the first in a series of times throughout their three-decade association when Davis reported this feeling: “One of the biblical passages I always loved was Christ’s response to Nicodemus: ‘You must be born again’—not going back to the womb, of course, but undergoing some fundamental change if you are going to save your life. There were several moments when, because of Jimmy, I was indeed born again” (195–96).
60. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 114. See also Ruby Dee’s note prefacing Davis’s statement in Life Lit by Some Large Vision, 195.
61. Wyndham Mortimer to James Boggs, August 12, 1963, Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 22.
62. Wyndham Mortimer to Boggs, September 1, 1963, Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 22.
63. Minnie Livingston to James Boggs, October 15, 1963, James A. Kennedy to Robert Harris, August 2, 1963, both in Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 22.
64. “’Freedom Now’ Heads Answer GOAL Call,” Michigan Chronicle, November 9, 1963, 1; Jim Cleaver, “Malcolm X Blasts ‘Big Six,’ Grassroots Conference Sets organizational Plans,” Michigan Chronicle, November 16, 1963, 1; “Black Revolution in North,” Correspondence, November 1963, 1; Announcement for Northern Negro Grassroots Leadership Conference, Illustrated News, November 11, 1963, 2.
65. “Grass Roots Leadership Conference,” tape 14, Boggs Papers.
66. “Support the Christmas Boycott: The Proudest Gift,” Illustrated News, November 25, 1963, 2.
67. “Grass Roots Leadership Conference”; “Black Revolution in North,” 1.
68. “Black Revolution in North,” 1; Cleaver, “Malcolm X Blasts ‘Big Six,’ Grassroots Conference Sets organizational Plans,” 1.
69. The full list of resolutions passed by the delegates of the Grass Roots Leadership Conference:
1. To organize a national boycott of General Motors
2. To support the Christmas boycott
3. To express and implement solidarity with the oppressed colored peoples of the world
4. To support the International All-Trades Union of the World
5. To organize a national boycott of schools “as necessary” to end biased textbooks and inferior education
6. To support the Freedom Now Party
7. To demand that Governor Rhodes of Ohio grant asylum to Mae Mallory, and that President Kennedy allow Robert Williams to return home
These are listed in “Black Revolution in North,” 1.
70. “Black Revolution in North,” 1; Cleaver, “Malcolm X Blasts ‘Big Six,’ Grassroots Conference Sets organizational Plans,” 1.
71. Breitman, Malcolm X Speaks, 6–10.
72. Ibid., 9.
73. Ibid., 10–11.
74. Ibid.
75. SNCC chairperson John Lewis was originally slated to appear. He had been one of the most militant though somewhat silenced voices at the March on Washington, where he was forced to change his speech by scaling down his criticism and condemnation of the federal government. Though he would maintain a moderate position as SNCC moved to Black Power in 1965 and 1966, in November 1963 Lewis—like SNCC more generally—represented the emerging militant opposition to accepted forms and assumptions of black protest.
76. Sylvester Leaks, “Definitions of the Negro Revolution,” Muhammad Speaks, December 20, 1963, 18.
77. Announcement for “Where is the Negro Liberation Movement Going?” included with Sybil May (for Leo Huberman) to James Boggs, November 22, 1963, Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 18.
78. Ibid.
79. Leaks, “Definitions of the Negro Revolution,” 18. All quotations in the paragraph are from this source.
80. “Final Draft of JB’s Speech, Town Hall, Nov. 21, 1963,” 2, Boggs Papers, Box 3, Folder 20.
81. Ibid., 7 (emphasis in original).
82. Ibid., 5 (emphasis in original).
83. Feinberg and Kasrils, Bertrand Russell’s America, 219.
84. Bertrand Russell to James Boggs, August 20, 1963, Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 20.
85. James Boggs to Bertrand Russell, September 5, 1963, Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 20.
86. Bertrand Russell to James Boggs, September 18, 1963, Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 20.
87. Ibid.
88. Feinberg and Kasrils, Bertrand Russell’s America, 219–21; James Feron, “Russell, Hailing March, Scores ‘Atrocity’ in Slaves’ Treatment,” New York Times, August 28, 1963, 21.
89. Feinberg and Kasrils, Bertrand Russell’s America, 227–28; “Negroes Warned by Lord Russell; Briton Says that Violence Would Set Back Cause,” New York Times, December 8, 1963, 56.
90. Feinberg and Kasrils, Bertrand Russell’s America, 228. Alice Mary Hilton, who like Russell contacted Jimmy following the publication of The American Revolution, had encouraged Russell to send the message and facilitated its arrival. After the forum, she wrote to Russell telling him, “Your reasonable words were not heeded. Jim Boggs expressed his appreciation, but—he said—‘unfortunately, Bertrand Russell does not understand revolution’ ” (Feinberg and Kasrils, 228).
91. James Boggs to Bertrand Russell, December 29, 1963, 1, Boggs Papers, Box 1, Folder 20; Feinberg and Kasrils, Bertrand Russell’s America, 229.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid.
EPILOGUE
1. “Neither White Nor Black—But Revolutionary,” Correspondence, June 1963, 2.
2. Grace Lee Boggs, “Who Will Blow the Trumpet?” Full audio of the speech is available at http://digital.library.ucsb.edu/items/show/5250. The speech was delivered August 20, 1963.
3. James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle, 418. The essay was written in 1963 and first published in the journal Revolution—Africa, Latin America, Asia.
4. On dialectical materialism and historical materialism, see Bottomore, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought.
5. James Boggs, Grace Lee Boggs, Freddy Paine, and Lyman Paine, Conversations in Maine, 270, 291.
6. In her autobiography, writing three decades later, Grace Lee Boggs modestly credits Lyman Paine with conceptualizing and coining the phrase “dialectical humanism” in 1968 (Living for Change, 152). The book’s addendum adds that the process by which Lyman Paine came to dialectical humanism began after he visited C. L. R. James in 1956. But the concept was surely a collective one, generated through shared intellectual work and political struggles.
7. James Boggs, “Black Power”; James Boggs, “The Revolutionary Struggle for Black Power”; James Boggs, “The Myth and Irrationality of Black Capitalism.”
8. James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle, 58, 52.
9. Ibid., 68.
10. James Boggs, “Beyond Rebellion,” in Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook, 251.
11. Grace Lee Boggs, “My Philosophic Journey” (unpublished manuscript in author’s possession), 1998, 7.
12. They continued this dialogue through an exchange of letters and writings that continued until Nkrumah’s death in 1972.
13. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 146–50. Portions of conversations from the years 1970–74 were published in Conversations in Maine, which has an excellent introduction by Richard Feldman.
14. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 149–50.
15. Ibid., 156.
16. Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Government Operations United States Senate, Ninetieth Congress, Second Session, March 21 and 22, 1968, Part 6. Quotations appear on 1422 and 1440.
17. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 196.
18. For more on the Asian Political Alliance, see Fu, “On Contradiction,” which provides a rich analysis of the group’s origins, activities, and historical significance.
19. James Boggs, Manifesto, 2. This pamphlet carried Jimmy’s name as sole author, but it was likely a collaborative effort of Jimmy, Grace, and others, such as their Philadelphia-based comrades James McFadden and Bill Davis.
20. Ibid.
21. James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution and Evolution, 15, 19.
22. James Boggs, statement on the inside cover of a pamphlet titled Grace: Selected Speeches, which was prepared by James Boggs, Joseph Eggly, Susan Eggly, Richard Feldman, John S. Gruchala, Sharon Howell, Freddy Paine, and Nkenge Zola, for Grace Lee Boggs’s seventy-fifth birthday in 1990.
23. For a brief explanation of the founding of Save Our Sons and Daughters, its evolution, and the Boggses’ involvement, see Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 210–18.
24. People’s Festival program, November 16, 1991, in author’s possession.
25. Howell, Brock, and Hauser, “A Multicultural, Intergenerational Youth Program; author’s electronic correspondence with Sharon Howell, November 25, 2015; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 232–35; Grace Lee Boggs and Kurashige, “Planting the Seeds of Hope.”
26. Hollins quoted in Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 233.
27. Putnam quoted in Zola, Gruchala, and Grace Lee Boggs, James Boggs.
28. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 235–38; Grace Lee Boggs, “Remembering James Boggs.”
29. Grace Lee Boggs to Rose and Vincent Harding, December 5, 1993, Boggs Papers, Box 9, Folder 7.
30. Grace Lee Boggs to Nick (Xavier Nicholas), January 11, 1994, in author’s possession.
31. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 238.
32. Program for “Celebration a Life,” October 23, 1993, First Unitarian-Universalist Church, Detroit, in author’s possession.
33. Davis, Life Lit by Some Large Vision, 195.
34. “A Celebration of Life.” A longer version of Dee’s poem appears in the booklet of tributes to Jimmy, James Boggs: An American Revolutionary, which was distributed at the memorial service.
35. Zola, Gruchala, and Grace Lee Boggs, James Boggs (no pagination); Bill Strickland to author, October 29, 2001; Bill Strickland, “Remembering My Man, James Boggs,” October 12, 1993, in author’s possession.
36. Transcript of “What Fire Can a Younger Generation Catch from the Work of James Boggs?,” November 36, 1994, in author’s possession.
37. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, xvi.
38. Author’s electronic correspondence with Alice Jennings, December 11, 2015.
39. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change, 260.
40. Ibid. In 2012, the City of Detroit established the house as a historic site, the “Grace Lee and James Boggs House Historic District,” based on a petition to the City of Detroit Historic District Commission filed by Alice Jennings and Carl Edwards.
41. For more on the history and continuing activities of the Boggs Center, see http://boggscenter.org/.
42. A full explication of Grace’s ideas, activities, and influence during these two decades is not yet available. To begin, see the following: Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change; Grace Lee Boggs with Kurashige, The Next American Revolution; Lee, American Revolutionary; Grace Lee Boggs, Birkhold, Feldman, and Howell, “A Detroit Story”; and the pamphlet A New Moment, published in April 2015 by the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership (available at http://boggscenter.org/).
43. Lee, American Revolutionary.
44. Information about the celebration can be found here: http://graceleeboggs100.org/
45. Poem delivered at Grace Lee Boggs memorial service, “Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Grace Lee Boggs,” October 31, 2015, IBEW Local 58, Detroit, Michigan.
46. James Boggs, statement on the inside cover of James Boggs et al., Grace: Selected Speeches.