LIVING FOR CHANGE
Speech by Grace Lee Boggs
Smith College/Pioneer Valley,
10/30/03
I was selected as the keynote speaker by a 25-person Planning Committee, consisting of faculty, staff and students for this yearís celebration of Otelia Cromwell Day, held to memorialize the first known African American graduate from Smith in 1900. The weeklong celebration seems to play the same role at Smith that the celebration of MLKís birthday does at UofM. It began this year with SNCC veterans sharing with students how they got involved in the movement, included (in addition to my keynote) exhibits, panels, a play and concert, and ended with a worship service, all listed on a colorful poster, under the title: LIVING FOR CHANGE.
It appears (from a panel on Smith's role in the civil rights movement) that it was quite a struggle for Smith to begin admitting blacks in the 1960s. They are able to laugh at it now but it was touch and go back then when they knew they had to change but didn't know how their white student body would react. One of the panelists, Louise Hall, an African American who now lives in D.C.but grew up in Chicago and was admitted in 1964 (her mother had graduated from Mt.Holyoke) told me that while connecting doors between roommates were normally left open, the administration had locked the one between her room and that of her white roommate because they didnít know whether the latter would feel safe with a black roommate. One of the leaders in the struggle, Phoebe Hall, is now a law professor at Temple and a Smith trustee.
However, I still didn't see much pepper sprinkled through the salt of the audience.
The initiative to invite me came from Kevin Quashie (his parents were from Ghana), co-chair of the Planning Committee and Professor of African American studies. Kevin knew about me and Jimmy because while he was at Adrian College, he used to come into Detroit. His enthusiasm about Living for Change was apparently shared by the other members of the Committee and faculty whom I met at a luncheon at the Presidentís house prior to the speech.
Smith's student body is less than 3000, all women, but it has a huge campus with scores of buildings spread out over beautiful grounds. I gave my speech in a concert hall seating several hundred people. A number of people, including the new president, Carol Christ, said it was great, and the bookstore sold out all the books they had brought.
I didn't see many Asian Americans in the audience (not nearly what I expected based on my experience in 1995 at Barnard ) but 3 or 4 came up to ask me to sign their books and to ask me about Asian American Studies.
Barnard and Bryn Mawr have had women presidents since the early 20th Century, but Smith didnít select its first woman president, Jil Ker Conway, until 1975. Conway, who has described her life in several wonderful books, served from 1975-1995 and was succeeded by Ruth Simmons, a black woman, who moved on to become Brown University president in 2000.
Smith is located in scenic Pioneer Valley where there are still tobacco farms. Nearby are several other well-known, relatively small colleges, Mt. Holyoke, Amherst, and Hampshire (where Jimmy, Shea and I attended the first Committees of Correspondence gathering of 1500 in 1987). In the same area there is also the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which was an agricultural college as late as 1950. Bill Strickland has been teaching Political Science at U Mass for years and I decided to email him the day before I arrived, suggesting that we get together. He in turn notified John Bracey, they both came to my talk at Smith, and that evening Sherri-Ann and I had dinner with them and a few students and faculty who wanted to meet me.
At the dinner I sold a few copies of the video and the celebration edition of The American Revolution and could have sold more had I been able to carry more.
The dinner turned out to be an interesting affair with implications, I believe, for our upcoming 40th Anniversary Celebration of Freedom Schooling and RETC.
Bill was the director of the Northern Student Movement in the 1960s and in that capacity worked closely with Frank Joyce and other members of People Against Racism (which included Larry Hutchison). In the 1970s he worked with Vincent Harding, Howard Dodson and Bobby Hill at IBW . In October 1993 he came with Vincent and Bobby to Jimmyís Memorial and in his remarks in the Memorial booklet he refers to "Field St. University". He had just returned from LA. where he had arranged a speaking engagement so that he could celebrate Bobby's 60th birthday party with him.
I had told Bill that among the reasons I wanted to meet with him was to discuss issuing a Call from veterans of the 60s for a different kind of celebration of MLKís birthday this coming January - a celebration stressing the radical revolution in values and concept of global citizenship advocated by MLK in the last two years of his life, that we would ask others to replicate or sign on to. (The Jan-Feb. 2003 issue of THE OTHER SIDE, includes an article by Vincent and one by me (From Marx to Malcolm and Martin) on this theme and the magazine continues to promote this issue) Bill asked about involving Coretta Scott King and/or Jesse Jackson in the Call, and I said that that is exactly what I would not like to see. I think the
initiative ought to come from Vincent (who has been mainly responsible for keeping this side of MLK idea alive, e.g. The Inconvenient Hero) and other less celebrated veterans of the 1960s. He said he would talk to Vincent about it.
John Bracey was in Chicago in the 1960s and remembers an Organization for Black Power meeting (with Jimmy, Larry Landry, Nahazz Rogers,and Julius Hobson) in 1965. In 1969 he said, he had arranged the appointment for CLRJ at Northwestern University so that he could stay in the country. CLR taught at Northwestern for two years, enjoying weekly dinners with John and his family. So Bracey knows CLR and his strengths and weaknesses fairly well. My sense is that John is mainly interested in the literature of the Movement. Not long ago, when he was in Detroit for a League of Revolutionary Black Workers conference, he told me about his
involvement in arranging to microfilm a lot of things from the 1960s (including Max Stanford's materials) which is now a huge, heavily funded project (I think it's called Lexus Nexus). He also told me that he considers three books the most important memoirs of the Movement: Jim Forman's The Making of Black Revolutionaries, my Living for Change, and Ready for Revolution (Stokeleyís autobiography completed by Mike Thelwell and just published). He is anxious to get The American Revolution, Racism and the Class Struggle, and RETC back into print, and asked me for permission to discuss it with Beacon Press (in Boston) where he knows the Acquisitions Editor. He also said that we can arrange with KINKOs to do reprints (course packs that they will sell them to students) with royalties to us.
As the dinner was coming to an end, we went around the table so that those present could briefly described their interests. In response I found myself giving 1) a 6-7 minute talk about the insights that my relationship to three important black leaders, Nkrumah, CLRJ and Jimmy Boggs, has given me into critical questions of 20th and 21st century revolutions (I'd never done that before and I wish it had been taped); and (2) calling attention to Freedom Schooling as the way by which the younger people at the table, especially, can provide leadership in the crisis of
those whom we called ìthe street forceî in the Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party. (For Bill S. at the time it was the chief contribution of the Manifesto).
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