LIVING FOR CHANGE
A Weekend To Remember
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, May 13-19, 2007
Since I became a Detroiter 54 years ago I’ve been back to New York many times. But last weekend’s visit was outstanding.
That is partly because I stayed with artist Karen Taylor who lives in the building in Harlem where Paul Robeson once lived. So I enjoyed talks with her and people who stopped by. Also we had a great group discussion on Saturday night at a dinner for 25 in a nearby building.
The main purpose of the trip was to give a talk at the Brecht Forum, a loft in downtown Manhattan where diverse social movement organizations, including the Taxi Workers Alliance, meet.
There was standing room only at the Brecht meeting. Equally heart-warming was the diversity: blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, white-haired elders sitting next to Generation Xers and baby boomers. Folks I’d never met told me how much books by Jimmy and me had meant to them over the years. The response to my speech was overwhelming.
I talked about Malcolm and Martin in the context of our ongoing struggles in Detroit, a city so devastated by deindustrialization that the world views it as on its last legs.
By contrast, I believe that precisely because our devastation is so total, Detroit offers the space and place to create an environmentally-friendly 21st century city of lively neighborhoods where we grow our own food and produce most of our necessities, instead of importing them from great distances, and feel responsible for one another, for our communities and the Earth.
The 1967 Detroit Rebellion, I said, was so huge that it forced the Establishment to make enormous concessions. So blacks were elected or appointed to all kinds of high positions. This struck an important blow against racism but it also created a black middle class which no longer feels the need for systemic changes with the urgency that they felt during the Jim Crow decades when they viewed the system as a “burning house.”
The Detroit Rebellion also forced Jimmy and me to distinguish between Rebellion and Revolution. That is why we wrote Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century in 1974.
In that book we explained that “Rebellion is a stage in the development of revolution, but it is not revolution. It is an important stage because it represents the standing up, the assertion of their humanity on the part of the oppressed. It breaks the threads that have been holding the system together.”
“A revolution, however, begins with projecting the notion of a more human human being, who is more advanced in the specific qualities which only human beings have: creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, a sense of political and social responsibility.”
Jimmy spelled out the practical meaning of that rather abstract statement in the chapter on Dialectics and Revolution.
“The revolution to be made in the United States,” he wrote nearly 30 years before 9/11, “will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has enjoyed at the expense of damning over one third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease and early death. “
Until then, “this country will not be safe for the world and revolutionary warfare on an international scale against the United States will remain the wave of the present.”
In other words, the struggle for the American revolution is not about helping more Americans achieve the American Dream of a higher standard of living. It is about how we transform ourselves, from materialists and militarists into global citizens who recognize that we can only preserve the best in our traditions AND enjoy homeland security, by living more simply so that others can simply live.
That is essentially what Martin Luther King was projecting when he called on Americans to make a radical revolution in values in his April 1967 “Break the Silence” speech. The urban rebellions helped him arrive at this understanding.
Malcolm was assassinated six months before the first major urban rebellion in Watts. But two months earlier he had gone to see King in Selma to discuss how they could work together. Also, as a result of his pilgrimage to Mecca, he was seriously rethinking black nationalism.
I’ll be writing more about my New York weekend in future columns. Meanwhile, my conversation with Bill Moyers in his new PBS series will soon be aired, perhaps as early as Friday, May 11 or Sunday, May 13.
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