100 Minds

Aus der ganzen Welt

Grace Lee Boggs

Activist and Author, Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership

Detroit, United States

We are revolutionaries, evolutionaries, and solutionaries finding the power within ourselves to make the world anew.

I was born above my immigrant parents’ Chinese restaurant in 1915, so I have been blessed with the opportunity to see how dramatically our world could change in one century. No one in 1915 could have predicted a fraction of the things that have occurred in my lifetime; nor could they have imagined the extent to which humankind would bear witness to unprecedented beauty and disaster. We developed advanced technology, mass production, and rapid distribution to establish an American empire and deliver a middle-class standard of living to tens of millions of people. At the same time we created patterns of consumption and destruction that will render the planet uninhabitable in far less than one hundred years unless we alter course immediately. As Einstein once said, “The unleashed power of the atom bomb has changed everything except our modes of thinking, thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophes.”

Why is envisioning the future such a vital task? It’s not to give people a promise of what awaits them if they just sit back and observe but to challenge them to think seriously about the critical choices we are confronted with right now. Amid the devastation, poverty, and abandonment surrounding my home in inner-city Detroit, I am privileged to experience a way of life that I hope will define the future. The collapse of industry has challenged us to recreate models of subsistence and artisanship rather than beg for jobs that will never return. The collapse of our local government has challenged us to reinvent democracy by emphasizing and empowering participatory forms of grassroots activism that go far beyond voting for others to represent us. The collapse of our schools has challenged us to develop new models of education that emphasize critical thinking, problem solving, and community engagement. The degradation of our environment has challenged us to create a green city rooted in urban agriculture and bike transportation. Decades of rampant racism, crime, and violence have challenged us to uphold new visions of community based on neighborly interdependence rather than reliance on the wealthy and the powerful.

Visionaries Detroiters are rediscovering hope and creating a whole new culture for the 21st and 22nd centuries. We are revolutionaries, evolutionaries, and solutionaries finding the power within ourselves to make the world anew. As more and more Americans find themselves in situations they once thought unique to devastated cities like Detroit, our struggles will continue to attract greater and greater attention. Therein lies the possibility to raise our humanity to a new plateau.

Grace Lee Boggs Bio:

Grace Lee Boggs (b. 1915) is an activist, writer, and speaker whose seven decades of political involvement encompass the major U.S. social movements of the past hundred years. A daughter of Chinese immigrants, Boggs received her B.A. from Barnard College (1935) and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College (1940). She developed a twenty-year political relationship with the West Indian radical thinker and organizer, C.L.R. James, followed by extensive Civil Rights and Black Power Movement activism in Detroit in partnership with husband and black autoworker, James Boggs (1919-93).

She is author or co-author of Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, Conversations in Maine: Exploring Our Nation’s Future, Living for Change: An Autobiography, and The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century.

At the age of 96, Grace remains exceptionally active as a community activist in Detroit and weekly columnist for the Michigan Citizen. She received honorary doctorates from the University of Michigan, Wooster College, Kalamazoo College, and Wayne State University; lifetime achievement awards from the Detroit City Council, Organization of Chinese Americans, Anti-Defamation League (Michigan), Michigan Coalition for Human Rights, Museum of Chinese in the Americas, and Association for Asian American Studies; Detroit News Michiganian of the Year; and a place in both the National Women’s Hall of Fame and Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame.