Grace Lee Boggs was a philosopher, writer, and revolutionary organizer whose seventy years of struggle made her one of the most original thinkers of the American left. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1915 to Chinese immigrant parents, she earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1940. Few doors were open to a Chinese American woman in academia, and she turned instead to the movement, organizing with tenants in Chicago. She worked alongside C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a Marxist group that insisted ordinary workers were capable of running society themselves.

In 1953 she moved to Detroit and married James Boggs, an autoworker, writer, and revolutionary theorist. For four decades the two were at the center of the city's Black liberation movement, and they built ties with Malcolm X, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the Black Power movement. The FBI kept watch over her for years. Together they wrote Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, which argued that revolution means more than seizing power: it requires people to transform themselves, their relationships, and their communities as they transform society.

As deindustrialization hollowed out Detroit, Boggs called for building a new society from the ground up. That meant community gardens, local production, youth programs, and neighborhood organizing to replace the failed promises of the auto industry and the market. In 1992 she co-founded Detroit Summer, a youth program to rebuild and replant the city, and the Boggs Center continues that work today. She died in 2015 at the age of one hundred. Her legacy reminds us that revolution is not a single event but a lifelong practice of growing our own capacity to create the world we need.

• 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 

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