NEW YORK — Grace Lee Boggs, one of the nation’s oldest human rights activists, who waged a war of inspiration for civil rights, labor, feminism, the environment, and other causes for seven decades with an unflagging faith that revolutionary justice was just around the corner, died on Monday at her home in Detroit. She was 100.
Her death was confirmed by her friend Alice Jennings.
Born to Chinese immigrants, Ms. Boggs was an author and philosopher who planted gardens on vacant lots, founded community organizations and political movements, marched against racism, lectured widely on human rights, and wrote books on her evolving vision of a revolution in America.
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Her odyssey took her from the streets of Chicago as a tenant organizer in the 1940s to arcane academic debates about the nature of communism, from the confrontational tactics of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement to the nonviolent strategies of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and finally to her own manifesto for change — based not on political and economic upheavals but on community organizing and resurgent moral values.
“I think too much of our emphasis on struggle has simply been in terms of confrontation and not enough recognition of how much spiritual and moral force is involved in the people who are struggling,” Ms. Boggs told Bill Moyers in a PBS interview in 2007. “We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently.”
Many of her ideas were explored in “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs,” a widely praised documentary by Grace Lee that was part of a film project about people who shared her name. It premiered on PBS in 2014.
Early in her career, Ms. Boggs translated works by Karl Marx. She joined and quit the Workers Party, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Trotskyite movement, and collaborated with the revolutionaries C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and others in tortuous dialectical analyses that described the Soviet Union variously as “a degenerated workers’ state,” a “state capitalist” system, and “autonomous Marxism.”
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In 1953, she moved to Detroit and married James Boggs, a black autoworker, writer, and radical activist. The city, with its large black population, racial inequalities, and auto industry still in its postwar heyday, seemed poised for changes, and the couple focused on African-Americans, women, and young people as vanguards of a social movement.
For years they identified closely with Black Power advocates across the country. Malcolm X stayed with them on visits to Detroit. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was said to have monitored their activities.
“What we tried to do is explain that a rebellion is righteous, because it’s a protest against injustice,” she told Moyers. But the violence, she said, also became “a turning point in my life, because until that time I had not made a distinction between a rebellion and revolution.”
Ms. Boggs eventually adopted King’s nonviolent strategies and in Detroit, which remained her base for the rest of her life, fostered King’s vision of “beloved communities,” striving for racial and economic justice through nonconfrontational methods.
Grace Lee was born above her father’s Chinese restaurant in Providence .
She grew up in Queens. A brilliant scholar, she enrolled at 16 at Barnard College, graduated with a degree in philosophy, and earned a doctorate from Bryn Mawr College.
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In her last book, Ms. Boggs aligned herself with revolutionaries in the spirit of Thoreau, Gandhi, and King. “We are not subversives,” she wrote. “We are struggling to change this country because we love it.”