WE MUST BE THE CHANGE
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, Jan. 26-Feb.1, 2003
This is Part I of a five-part reprint of the speech by Grace Lee Boggs
at the University of Michigan MLK Symposium on January 20, 2003 - Editor
I'd like to thank the MLK Symposium Committee for inviting me to keynote
the university's 16th annual celebration of the birthday of Dr. King. It
is a great honor, especially in this period when the national spotlight is
on the University for its righteous insistence on maintaining race as a
factor in university admissions for the benefit of the whole student body.
I'd also like to commend the committee for choosing Gandhi's maxim "We
must be the change we wish to see in the world" as the theme of this year's
symposium. I don't know any other statement that sums up so succinctly
the challenge facing us as individuals and as a nation in the wake of
9/11. Whatever our class, religious, ethnic or sexual identity, if we
want to enjoy the safety and happiness that have been the promise of this
country, we can no longer evade making profound personal and public
changes in how we live and how we carry out our responsibilities as
citizens. At this point this means accepting the responsibilities of
global citizenship and saying NO to the war in Iraq, as King did to the War
in Vietnam.
I hope that what I have to say will renew the commitment to change
that is the main purpose of these celebrations.
Speaking here this morning is for me a kind of culmination of my warm
relationships with the University of Michigan over many years. More than
30 years ago Jimmy and I started meeting with Jim Chaffers class in Urban
Design and Social Change every fall after the November elections to
explore the question of Cities and Citizenship. Over the years I have also
participated in the imaginative Futuring and Environmental Justice
conferences organized by Bunyan Bryant. and the School of Natural Resources
and the Environment.
Since the publication of my autobiography five years ago students
from this and other campuses frequently interview me about Detroit where
I have lived for fifty years, most of that time in the same house.
In the last two years the Boggs Center has become a magnet for faculty,
students and visiting speakers who enjoy our tours of Detroit and our
Scholar-Activist dialogues. From the GIEU video you got a sense of how
hands-on work with young Detroiters gives students an opportunity to
practice transformation, as Danny Glover put it. Asian American students
meet at the Center to map plans for revitalizing the cityıs Chinatown.
Every other Sunday teachers, students preparing to be teachers and
university professors preparing them meet to begin building the movement
needed to replace our existing "factory-type schools" with Freedom
Schools which nurture the creativity and critical thinking of children. This
is a broadsheet we've just published.
As I approach 88, with three pair of glasses, two hearing aids, very
few teeth but most of my marbles, I am often asked why I haven²t been
burned out by so many decades of Movement activism. I think it is because I
believe so passionately in the power of ideas both to enlarge and to
restrict our imaginations.
I became a Movement activist more than sixty years ago when, after
receiving my Ph.D. in philosophy, I discovered that there were no jobs for
Chinese-American woman philosophers. In those days even department stores
would come right out and say, :"We don't hire Orientals." So I joined the
March on Washington Movement initiated by A.Philip Randolph in 1941 to
demand jobs for blacks in the defense plants, and after I discovered the
power of the black movement to change blacks and the country, decided to
devote the rest of my life to being a movement activist in the black
community.
In the early 1950s I met and married Jimmy Boggs, an African American
auto worker, labor-community activist and writer who was born and raised in
a little town in Alabama and who was fond of saying that his ideas came from
living through three different epochs: Agriculture, Industry and Automation.
So when the Black Power movement began in Detroit in the early 1960s I was
able to dive into it, becoming so active that FBI records suggest that I
might be Afro-Chinese.
The urban rebellions were a great awakening for me. In the late 60s
I had been an activist in the black community for nearly three decades but
had never found it necessary to distinguish between a Rebellion and a
Revolution. Now, with young blacks joining the Black Panther Party by
the tens of thousands, with black politicians and other careerists taking
advantage of the rebellions to advance themselves, and with corporations
and institutions falling over one another in their rush to coopt blacks,
Jimmy and I had to ask ourselves new questions. Out of that questioning,
we concluded that although rebellions are important because they represent
the standing up of the oppressed, they fall short of revolution because
people at the grassroots and community level have not been involved in
creating the new values, new truths, new relationships and new
infrastructures that are the foundation for a new society.
That is why, beginning with 1968, Jimmy and I felt that we had to go
beyond "Protest Politics" and concentrate instead on projecting and
initiating new ideas and new forms of struggles that involve young people
especially in exploring in theory and practice the new forms of Work,
Education, Community, Citizenship that have become possible and necessary
in the wake of the rebellions.
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