James Boggs was a Black autoworker, writer, and revolutionary theorist who drew his ideas from the factory floor and the struggles of his own community. Born in Marion Junction, Alabama, in 1919, he grew up under Jim Crow, the grandson of a man born into slavery. As a young man he rode the freight trains north to Detroit, and for nearly three decades he worked on the line at Chrysler's Jefferson Avenue plant. There he became an organizer in the United Auto Workers. He came to see that neither the union nor the Democratic Party would win liberation for Black workers.

In 1963 he published The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook. It warned that automation was making masses of workers, especially Black workers, permanently expendable to capital, and it argued that the struggle for Black liberation had become the leading force for revolution in the United States. That same year he helped organize the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference in Detroit, where Malcolm X delivered his "Message to the Grass Roots." Boggs became one of the most important theorists of Black Power, and his essays, later collected in Racism and the Class Struggle, insisted that racism and capitalism had to be fought together.

With his wife and lifelong comrade Grace Lee Boggs, he spent decades building organizations and political education in Detroit. As the auto plants closed, the two called for rebuilding the city from the ground up. Their vision of community-based production and of people taking responsibility for one another led to the founding of Detroit Summer in 1992. James Boggs died in 1993. His legacy is a revolutionary practice rooted in working-class experience and in the belief that ordinary people can, and must, make history.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*