Grace Lee Boggs Memorial Tribute
Commemorating the Remarkable Life of Grace Lee Boggs on the 10th Anniversary of Her Passing (June 27, 1915 — October 5, 2015)
Detroit, MI — “The only way to survive is by taking care of one another.” Amid threats to democracy, the environment, and public health, the words of the late Grace Lee Boggs and her nonviolent vision of {r}evolution continue to inspire educators, artists, and organizers of all ages. The tenth anniversary of her death is October 5, 2025.
On the evening of October 18, 2025, the James and Grace Lee Boggs Foundation in partnership with the Eastside Community Network will sponsor “Reimagine Everything: The Grace Lee Boggs 10-Year Memorial Tribute.” As family and friends gather to honor the renowned author and activist, all are invited to celebrate and learn more about Boggs at this free public event.
Speakers paying tribute to Boggs include Tiffany Lee (Grace’s niece), Ernestine Favors and Sonequia “Sone” Spears (James’s granddaughters), Sen. Stephanie Chang of the Michigan Senate 3rd District, Rep. Mai Xiong of the Michigan House 13th District, and adrienne maree brown (appearing by Zoom), author of Emergent Strategy. Stew Stewart, the Tony-winning creator of Passing Strange, will offer a live musical tribute. Brittany Luse, host of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute, will serve as emcee.
The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Grace Lee received a PhD in philosophy but dedicated her life to building movements to stretch humanity. She moved to Detroit in 1953, where she lived to the age of 100 on the city’s Eastside. Grace was active as a speaker, writer, and organizer for 75 years, including four decades in marriage and political partnership with James Boggs, a Black autoworker, organizer, and theorist of the freedom movement from the Jim Crow South.
“Reimagine Everything” will take place at the Eastside Community Network, 4401 Conner St, Detroit, MI 48215, with free parking available. Doors will open at 6:00pm on Saturday, October 18, 2025, with Boggs books and artist-designed tribute items on display. The program will run from 7:00 to 9:00pm. Free Registration at https://www.boggsfoundation.org/reimagine-everything-rsvp
For more information or questions: contact@boggsfoundation.org
About the James and Grace Lee Boggs Foundation
The Boggs Foundation is a nonprofit organization that was created based on directives in the will of Grace Lee Boggs to carry on the Boggses’ humanitarian legacy, expand their network of sustainers, and manage their archives and intellectual property.
Biographical Information About Grace Lee Boggs
The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Grace Lee was born in 1915 above her father’s Chinese restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in Queens, New York. She received her bachelor’s degree from Barnard College in 1935 and PhD in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1940, which was an almost unheard-of achievement for a US-born Chinese woman. Despite her brilliance, she did not foresee any possibility of getting hired as an academic in the face of discrimination based on race and gender.
Instead, Grace was inspired by the civil rights struggles of World War II to become a lifelong activist. This led her to becoming rooted within the Black community, first in Chicago, then in Detroit from 1953 until her death at the age of 100 on October 5, 2015. Grace’s early activism was shaped by her involvement in a series of socialist organizations, where she collaborated with prominent figures like C.L.R. James, and met James Boggs, a Black autoworker from rural Alabama.
Grace Lee and James Boggs married in 1954, sustaining a four-decade long partnership in life and politics through the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. They worked on Correspondence, an activist newspaper; co-authored Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (1974); and became mentors to multiple generations of activists who visited their Eastside Detroit home known as “Field Street University.”
Detroit’s industrial decline led them to reimagine the city as a place where residents come together to sustain community through self-reliance. They were co-founders of Detroit Summer, a program which highlighted youth leadership to revitalize Detroit through initiatives like urban farms that produced healthy food on formerly blighted vacant lots.
After James passed away in 1993, Grace expanded her work with the Asian American and environmental justice movements, while she confronted the epidemic of violence in Detroit and U.S. society. Her nonviolent approach to {r}evolution reached wider audiences with the publication of her memoir, Living for Change (1998); her humanitarian manifesto, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century(co-authored with Scott Kurashige, 2011); and the award-winning documentary, American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs (directed by Grace Lee, 2013). Grace maintained an active lifestyle, publishing a weekly newspaper column for the Michigan Citizen and traveling locally and nationally to speak until the age of 99.
The lasting mark of Grace Lee Boggs, and her partnership with Jimmy Boggs, can be found in the work of activists, educators, artists, care providers, and many types of community builders. For example, the James and Grace Lee Boggs K-8 School, formed in 2013, embodies the Boggses’ vision of community-based education and their belief in the power of Detroit’s youth to help solve the city’s problems.
Quotes from Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (co-authored with Scott Kurashige, University of California Press, 2011)
You don’t just “strongly disagree” with a right-wing coup or a junta. You expose it as illegal, immoral, and illegitimate, and you start building a movement to challenge and change the system that created it.
Can we create a new paradigm of our self-hood and our nationhood? Or are we so locked into nationalism, racism, and determinism that we will be driven to seek scapegoats for our frustrations and failures as the Germans did after World War I, thus aiding and abetting the onset of Hitler and the Holocaust? We live at a very dangerous time because these questions are no longer abstractions.
Normally it would take decades for a people to transform themselves from the hyperindividualist, hypermaterialist, damaged human beings that Americans in all walks of life are today to the loving, caring people we need in the deepening crises. But these are not normal times. If we don’t speed up this transformation, the likelihood is that, armed with AK-47s, we will soon be at each other’s throats. That is why linking Love and Revolution is an idea whose time has come.
My hope is that as more and different layers of the American people are subjected to economic and political strains and as recurrent disasters force us to recognize our role in begetting these disasters, a growing number of Americans will begin to recognize that we are at one of those great turning points in history. Both for our livelihood and for our humanity we need to see progress not in terms of “having more” but in terms of growing our souls by creating community, mutual self-sufficiency, and cooperative relations with one another.
We are not aiming simply to impact one election or one government. Rather, we are striving for long-term and sustainable transformation, and for that we need the wisdom that comes from many cultures, movements, and traditions.
We are not agitating or mobilizing faceless masses but organizing a community base of caring individuals transforming ourselves and becoming the change we want to see in the world.
We are creating a revolutionary alternative to the counterrevolutionary and inhuman policies of the U.S. government, but we are not subversives. We are making the leap forward in the precious human qualities of social responsibility and creativity, now necessary and possible in the evolution of the human species. We are creating the kind of global citizenship that Martin Luther King Jr. said every nation needs to create to preserve the best in its traditions. We are struggling to change this country because we love it.
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