HOPE AT THE GRASSROOTS

By Grace Lee Boggs

Michigan Citizen, October 21-27, 2007

Since talking with Bill Moyers on PBS in June (the conversation was re-aired in September), my ongoing experiences reinforce my sense that a movement to transform infrastructures, based on what MLK called “a radical revolution in values,” has begun.

For example, early last week a young man came by to give me (and Detroit Summer) a copy of his new book in which he tells the story of the struggle at the all-black Frederick Douglass High School in New Orleans to put students, rather than the economy, at the center of education. With him was a friend who is planning to create a crafts/construction center to work with inner city youth.

On Wednesday night I told about 25 students, mostly African American, in Wayne State University Professor Beth Bates’ class on Black Urban History, the story of how my involvement in the 1941 March on Washington Movement inspired my decision to become (and remain) an activist in the black community. I was delighted when most of them said they were planning to stay in Detroit after graduation.

Friday morning I listened to Rev. Richard Wilson (Triedstone Baptist Church) and Pastor Bill Wylie-Kellerman (St. Peters Episcopal) discuss food production as the foundation of a new Detroit economy on WDET/Detroit

Today. The next afternoon 50 people showed up at Triedstone to continue the discussion.

Then, at noon I sat in my study and discussed “Commitment” with a class of incoming freshmen at Kalamazoo College 150 miles away. It was my first teleconference.

On Saturday I enjoyed a visit with three community activists from Houston, Texas, who have been reading Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century and Living for Change and emphasize the need to combine reflection with practice.

“Young people growing up in the urban environment,” said Busi, who is organizing a Women Helping Empowering Women (WHEW) conference, “need the contact with the Earth and animals that Catherine Ferguson Academy students are getting. They are living a spiritual oneness, not just the cold world of books and paper. You cannot be a revolutionary if you don’t know how to grow food, if you can’t sustain yourself.”

“The Western method of education, which makes students compete with one another, goes against the grain of people of color who come out of a more collective culture and don’t do well on individual projects. This tradition was lost with integration. A lot of black people left our community behind and became more individualistic. This has not only been happening with black people. It is a byproduct of consumerism.”

“Instead of looking for a Messiah, we need to recognize that we all have something to contribute on the issues we face. It is not one silver bullet.”

The discussion was so stimulating that we are planning another conversation to be videotaped for circulation

Meanwhile I have been reading From Revolutionaries to Race Leaders by Cedric Johnson, just published by the University of Minnesota Press. Johnson, a Professor of Political Science, provides a much-needed critical account of how black power activists, by taking ethnic racial identity and black unity as their starting point, became so attached to black elites that they lost touch with the real issues facing the black masses. Amiri Baraka, Sadaukai, Nelson Johnson and others tried to free themselves from the liberal democratic and capitalist politics of black elected officials by converting to various forms of Marxist-Leninism. But this further isolated them because Marxist-Leninism was created for a period when the working class was expanding rather than shrinking.

“A more promising path to a viable left populism,” Johnson concludes, “is to begin with the most basic desires and needs of local people.”

So he ends his book with the story of the community-based struggle of the mostly poor, black residents of Convent, Louisiana, against the attempt of Shintech, a giant multinational firm, to build the world’s largest polyvinyl chloride plant in their hometown. This successful struggle against corporate globalization was initiated by Emelda West, a 72 year old retired schoolteacher. “Bridging ethnic, racial and national divides” and based on “an alternative set of values regarding community, altruism, ecology and work,” their natural allies in the struggle were Greenpeace; the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, the Tulane University Environmental Law Clinic, and the Louisiana Environmental Action Network.

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