Boggs, James and Grace Lee

BOGGS, JAMES AND GRACE LEE (1919-1993;1915- 2015). Beginning in 1953, the Detroit activists and theorists James Boggs and Grace Lee married and formed an intellectual partnership that lasted for four decades,. Together, they helped to inform currents in Marxist political thought, Black radicalism, and the Left’s turn toward the Third World.

Born in 1915 to parents who had recently emigrated from China to New York, Grace Lee earned a PhD in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College before moving to Chicago where she became active in the Trotskyist Workers Party (WP). Meeting CLR James in the early 1940s through her work with the WP, Lee became a key member of James and Raya Dunayevskaya’s Johnson Forrest Tendency (JFT). She affirmed their argument that the USSR had reverted to a form of state capitalism, and that no existing socialist states were worthy of the name. Searching for new, non-Soviet sources of revolutionary agency, JFT writers emphasized the generative role of Black activism, the creativity and spontaneity of the masses, and the need for theorists to return to the Hegelian elements underpinning Marx’s thought. It was Grace Lee who first translated sections of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts into English. In 1951, Lee and other members of the JFT formed Correspondence: a new group, based in Detroit rather than New York, through which they hoped to develop their theoretical and political work independent of any existing socialist organization. It was through her work with Correspondence that Grace Lee met James Boggs.

Born in 1919 in Marion Junction, Alabama, James Boggs moved to Detroit shortly after graduating high school, and by 1940 he had found steady employment as an autoworker. During the early 1940s, Boggs became active both in Detroit’s labor movement and in more radical politics, first in the Communist Party (CP) and later in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). By 1952, Boggs had become an active member of Correspondence. By 1953, James and Grace had begun a relationship that would last until James’s death in 1993.

Forced into exile in London in 1953, CLR James remained the de facto leader of Correspondence, which Dunayevskaya quit that same year. The relationship between the Boggses and James became strained after 1956-7, when James prioritized the Hungarian Revolution over anti-colonial movements. In 1963, they parted ways, disagreeing about the centrality of the Black struggle to the proletarian revolution. Unlike James, Boggs believed that displaced and marginalized Black workers represented a new “universal class."

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, James and Grace Lee Boggs connected to currents in radical Black politics in the United States that backed anti-colonial movements in Africa and, increasingly, the Cuban Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party. Following their split with CLR James, the Boggses continued to be animated by the question that had led to the creation of the Johnson Forrest Tendency two decades earlier: how could a dialectical study of American political economy reveal the next agent of revolutionary transformation? Their clearest statement was James Boggs’s The American Revolution (1963). First published in Monthly Review as a special double-issue, The American Revolution argues that increasing automation in industrial production would lead to higher unemployment, an outcome that would disproportionately affect Black workers: Made obsolescent by technology and denied the benefits of the welfare state, these displaced Black workers would become a potentially revolutionary force distinct from the (white-dominated) industrial working class.

The same year The American Revolution was published, James and Grace Lee Boggs became active in the Freedom Now Party (FNP). The FNP represented the first sustained attempt to forge an all-Black political party with leaders who explicitly defined themselves as part of a global anti-colonial front. Guided by a platform primarily written by Harold Cruse, and campaigning in San Francisco, New Haven, and New York, the FNP activists focused their electoral efforts on Michigan, where the Party hoped to capture local offices while securing enough support nationally to hold the Black vote hostage. Though failing to achieve any measure of electoral success, the FNP played a key role in restructuring the American Left, in particular through debates among leadership over balancing Black workerism, Black nationalism, and international socialism. During debates about the FNP platform, James Boggs emerged as the most nuanced defender of Black workerism; Harold Cruse, in contrast, emphasized the development of Black revolutionary culture. These two paths—the urban proletarianism of Boggs and the cultural nationalism of Cruse—continued to define much of radical Black internationalism through the 1960s and 1970s.

The Boggses’ experience with the FNP campaign deepened their already jaundiced view of democracy. Working to adapt the Cuban revolutionary model of community organizing to American urban geography, the Boggses came to envision Black-controlled cities as “beachheads,” where—as they wrote in “The City is the Black Man’s Land” (1966)-- “black revolutionary governments would be in the most strategic position to contend with and eventually defeat [the] national power structure.” Focusing on western and northern cities led them toward a politics of global scope and local action. Approaching politics through this global-local matrix would be key to the praxis of organizations like the Dodge Revolutionary Movement, which simultaneously demanded Black control of mostly Black assembly lines and offered a critique of international finance-power and imperialism.

During the mid-1960s, James and Grace Lee Boggs became key—if relatively unknown—figures in the emergence of Black Power. James Boggs’s 1967 essay, “Black Power: A Scientific Concept Whose Time Has Come,” relates the rise of Black Power to the Maoist challenge to Soviet socialism, arguing that “the uniqueness of Black Power stems from the specific historical development of the United States.” Here and elsewhere, the Boggses warned against thinkers like Harold Cruse, who emphasized cultural nationalism, in their opinion, at the expense of the struggle for real political power. Though they were in Los Angeles during the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, the Boggses had become so synonymous with the city’s Black Left that critics of the uprising held them partially responsible.

Though their commitment to revolution did not diminish, James and Grace Lee Boggs emerged as perhaps the most perceptive critics of Third World Leftism during the late 1960s and 1970s. As early as 1965, they were concerned that Black militants had become overly reliant on “spontaneous action by the masses.” By the end of the decade, when they presented their Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party at National Black Economic Development Conference, they had concluded that groups like the Black Panther Party had failed to adequately develop a revolutionary ideology applicable to the unique conditions of the United States. In a series of essays written in 1973-4, the Boggses diagnosed the failures of both the Black-and-Third-World-workerism and the Cultural Nationalism that had developed in the decade since the collapse of the Freedom Now Movement. Both the Marxists and the nationalists, they argued, had failed to think dialectically about the United States and about the possibility of revolutionary politics in a country dramatically different from the Third World nations. Writing twenty-five years after the Chinese Revolution, the Boggses implored their readers to recognize that the lesson of China, Cuba, and Vietnam was “to start grappling with the question of how to make an American revolution and stop talking so much about the revolutions taking place elsewhere in the world.” Failure to do so, “only reinforces the already powerful tendency of the radical intellectual…to turn living ideas into dogmas and abstractions.”

Following the election of Jimmy Carter, the Boggses determined that Black Americans were no longer a potentially revolutionary force in the United States. They turned their attention toward the National Organization for American Revolution (NOAR), which they founded in 1980. Through NOAR, they hoped to build a revolutionary alliance of poor white and Black Americans who could stand against the multinational capitalism of the Reagan years. However, as Grace Lee Boggs later recorded, NOAR was an outdated model of party-building. Organizing slowed to a halt in the mid-1980s, after which James and Grace Lee Boggs focused on grassroots activism in Detroit. Shortly before James Boggs’s death from cancer in 1993, he and Grace Lee co-founded the Detroit Summer, a program to train young people as community activists. The program led to the establishment of the James & Grace Lee Boggs School. Living more than 100 years, Grace Lee Boggs published an autobiography in 1998 (Living for Change) and remained politically engaged and active until shortly before her death.

Boggs, James. The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro Workers Notebook. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1963.

Boggs, James, edited by Stephen M. Ward. Pages From a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011.

Boggs, Grace Lee. Living for Change: An Autobiography. Minneapolis: The Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1998.

Ward, Stephen M. In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.