TOWARDS A NEW CONCEPT OF ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP

By Grace Lee Boggs

The Ava Helen & Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture on World Peace

Oregon State University

November 1, 2007

I'd like to thank Professor Clinton and the Committee for inviting me to give this year's Pauling Memorial Lecture and to all of you for coming tonight. It is a great honor and a great challenge.

I have decided to meet this challenge by telling you the story of the personal and political journey by which I have arrived at the conviction that in this period, because of the coincidence of the planetary crisis caused by our economic overdevelopment and overconsumption, and the constitutional crisis caused by the imperial presidency, we, the people of the United States, have an unprecedented opportunity and responsibility to create a new concept of active citizenship that will be as much a beacon in the 21st century as the concept of citizenship created by the Declaration of Independence, the revolutionary war and the Constitutional Convention was in the 19th and 20th centuries.

My ancestors and the ancestors of most of us living in the United States today were not among the few million who founded this nation 200 years ago and established the economic, political and social patterns that have brought us to our present crisis. If they were here, their class, race or gender probably excluded them from participating.

Today, however, because of the great identity movements of the 20th century - of workers, blacks, women, chicanos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, gays and lesbians, and to include the disabled - everyone in this country, in all walks of life, whatever our class, race, sexual identity, abilities or disabilities - can contribute to creating the new concept of active citizenship demanded by melting icecaps, species extinction, tsunamis, hurricanes, droughts, floods, megafires, water and food shortages, and by 911 and the Bush administration's exploitation of the horrific events of 911 to mislead us into the illegal war in Iraq.

Over the years my concept of citizenship has been constantly expanding.

I was born 92 years ago above my father's Chinese restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island. When I cried, the waiters used to say "Leave her on the hillside to die. She's only a girl baby."

Eight years later when we moved to New York City, my father had to buy the land for our house in the name of his Irish contractor because of restrictive covenants.

These childhood experiences taught me early on that huge changes were needed in our world, especially in relationship to women, but I never saw myself making them. When I was growing up, the American Dream was still very much alive and Chinese Americans were so few and far between that most people didn't even view us as U.S. citizens. For example, I was always being asked "What is your nationality?" and when I replied that I was born here, people would still wonder why someone with slant eyes spoke such good English.

It was only after I left the university with a Ph. D. in philosophy in June 1940 that the opportunity to live for change opened up for me. In those days even department stores would come right out and say "We don't hire Orientals!" So I decided to go to Chicago where George Herbert Mead, the social philosopher on whom I had written my dissertation, used to teach. Soon after I arrived, I was lucky, first, to get a part-time job in the Philosophy Library of the University of Chicago for $10 a week, and then to meet a woman near the university who said that I could stay in her basement rent free. The only problem, I soon discovered, was that I had to stare down a barricade of rats to enter the basement from the back alley. But this turned out to be a blessing because it led me to a tenants group in the black community created by the Workers Party to struggle against rat-infested housing.

As a result, I learned about and began to participate in the March on Washington movement led by A. Philip Randolph who had issued a call to "loyal Negro American citizens" to march on Washington to "demand the right to work and fight for our country. " Because such a march would have made the whole world aware of the racism in this country at a time when President Roosevelt was getting the nation ready for a war against Nazi Germany, FDR was forced to issue Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in the booming defense plants.

The March on Washington movement changed life in this country. For the first time in 400 years black men and women were able to work on jobs paying enough money and with enough seniority so that they could look forward to buying homes and raising families. At the same time, encouraged by the success of the March on Washington movement, blacks began viewing themselves as active citizens, struggling throughout World War II for Democracy both at home and abroad.

My life was also transformed by the March on Washington movement. When I saw how the organized power of active citizens could redress wrongs, I decided that what I wanted to do with my life was to become a movement activist in the black community. Towards that goal I joined the Workers Party and began working closely with C.L.R. James, the West Indian Marxist and historian, who introduced me to Marxism and what was at that time called "the Negro question", emphasized the need to combine practical struggles with continuing exploration of profound philosophical questions, and helped me to view revolution as a great leap forward in the evolution of the human race,

However, it was not until I moved to Detroit in 1953 and married Jimmy Boggs that I began to appreciate what active citizenship requires both practically and philosophically.

Jimmy was an African American auto worker who had been born and raised in Marion Junction, Alabama, a little town of about 400 people and as many cows, where people had survived down through the years by making a way out of no way. After graduating from high school, he had come north on a freight train and had been working on the line at Chrysler since the beginning of World War II.

Both in the plant where he worked and in the mostly black community where he lived, Jimmy was a very active citizen. As a child he had been called upon to write letters for his mostly illiterate community. So he became the writer of the leaflets calling on his fellow workers to struggle against speedup, an activist in anti-racist struggles in both the plant and the city, and he also began writing occasional Letters to the Editor of the Detroit Free Press on city-wide issues.

However, the most amazing thing about Jimmy, which is what moved me to say "Yes" when he asked me to marry him on our first date, was the sense that he had of himself as an integral part of the evolution of the human race. Having been part of an agrarian society in the South, then of the industrial era in Detroit, he felt that as a worker and a thinker it was now his responsibility to provide the kind of revolutionary analysis and strategy for the age of automation, or what we now call the post-industrial epoch, that Karl Marx had provided in the 19th century for the industrial epoch.

I had studied Hegelian dialectics in graduate school but it was only after I met Jimmy and became involved in ongoing struggles in Detroit that I recognized the practical and political importance of never forgetting that reality is constantly changing and that every struggle creates new contradictions, challenging us to keep struggling to resolve these new contradictions so that we can continue our evolution into more creative and more socially responsible human beings.

From Jimmy I also discovered the increasingly important distinction between Nationalism and Patriotism. Jimmy was very conscious of the role that African Americans had played in making possible the rapid economic development of this country and therefore their right and responsibility to provide the leadership necessary to bring about fundamental changes. So. while other radicals said they hated this country because it had enslaved blacks, stolen the land from Native Americans, and continued to discriminate against people of color and women, Jimmy used to say "I love this country not only because my ancestors' blood is in the soil but for its potential, what I believe it can become. " Patriots, unlike nationalists or nativists, I learned, are visionaries who love this country enough to change it. In other words, they are actively engaged in the struggle to make this country one that all of us, regardless of race, class, sexual identity, religion or national origin, can be proud to call our own.

From my marriage to Jimmy and our struggles in Detroit I also discovered that active citizenship requires being rooted in and feeling responsible for a place - a community, a city, and/or a country. As a Chinese American growing up in a mainly Caucasian neighborhood with restrictive covenants, I had never felt that I belonged anywhere. Now, as a result of my marriage to Jimmy who loved and felt responsible for his community, his city and his country, I was ready to become an active citizen in Detroit. It was a great time to take on that role.

In the 1950s black Americans were becoming increasingly radical. Emboldened by the cold war with the Soviet Union, which had forced President Truman to desegregate the armed services, black World War II veterans and young people in the American South were refusing to go to the back of the bus, while Coleman Young's defiant statement before the House UnAmerican Committee ("If being for human rights makes me a Communist, then I'm a Communist") summed up the new mood in the North.

The murder of 14 year old Emmett Till in September 1955 brought this growing militancy to a head. In response, on December 1, 1955 tens of thousands of Alabama blacks began their year-long. non-violent, highly disciplined Montgomery Bus Boycott. Inspired by the 26 year old Martin Luther King Jr., a people who had been treated as less than human struggled against their dehumanization not as angry victims or rebels but as new men and women, representatives of a new more human society. Using methods, like their own transportation system, that transformed themselves and increased the good rather than the evil in the world, always bearing in mind that their goal was not only desegregating the buses but the beloved community, they inspired the human identity movements which over the last 40 years have been creating a new civil society in this country.

The 1950s were very heady years for black Americans. In 1955 representatives from all over the Third World met in Bandung. In 1957 Ghana won independence from Great Britain. In 1959 the Cuban Revolution, led by Fidel Castro, overthrew the U.S. sponsored Batista regime. Blacks in Detroit were jubilant. They were beginning to see themselves as a part of a world revolution and of a world majority of people of color, and wondering how to bring the struggle home.

It was under these circumstances that the Black Power movement emerged in Detroit in the early 1960s as a struggle for black political power in a city that was still run almost exclusively by whites even though one in every four whites had left for the suburbs by the newly-built freeways.

Jimmy was very active in the Black Power movement, not only as an organizer but as a writer and speaker, trying to encourage those seeking to replace white power with black power to enlarge their vision by including the need to transform all the structures of our society, grappling especially with the issue of how we would make our livings in the new era of automation.

By the early 1960s having been married to Jimmy and having lived in the Detroit black community for almost a decade, I was also able to become so actively involved in the Black Power movement that FBI records suggested I might be Afro Asian. For example, I was one of the main organizers of the Grassroots Leadership Conference at which Malcolm gave his famous speech on November 10, 1963, making the distinction between house Negroes and field Negroes and linking the black revolution with the Cuban and other revolutions, and I was also the coordinator of the Michigan Freedom Now Party which ran a full slate in the 1964 election.

Then, suddenly, on a steamy night in July 1967, Black Detroiters responded to a police raid on an after hours joint with what the media and authorities called a "riot," because it was a breakdown of law and order, but what Detroiters called a "rebellion" because they viewed it as a righteous uprising against a predominantly white police occupation army, routinely stopping blacks just walking down the street.

The Detroit Rebellion was one of the most massive and violent eruptions in the history of this country. Before peace was restored by the National Guard and U. S Army paratroopers, more than 1,000 buildings had burned to the ground, 7000 people had been arrested, 43 people killed and 1189 wounded, mostly shot by police and National Guardsmen for alleged looting, sniping, and curfew violations.

The Detroit rebellion was only one of more than a hundred urban explosions in the late 1960s, beginning with the 1965 uprising in Watts, California and reaching their peak following King's assassination in April 1968. In the wake of these rebellions, which warned the Establishment that white political power could no longer maintain law and order, blacks came to political power in many cities and state legislatures.

However, these blacks, who have been enjoying political power in many cities over the last 30- 40 years, have been unwilling or unable to address the reality that the economic, political and cultural institutions created for the industrial age have become obsolete, thus challenging all of us to become active citizens in creating new economic, political and cultural institutions.

This challenge has been especially acute in Detroit which had once been the national and international symbol of the miracles of industrialization. With the increase in HiTech and the outsourcing of jobs, young people were no longer able to drop out of school in the 9th grade and get a job in the factory making enough money to get married and raise a family. Every year, especially after the coming of crack to the city in the mid-80s, the violence, despair and incarceration of black youth because their labor was no longer needed, grew so relentlessly that in 1988 Coleman Young, our first black mayor, proposed a gaming industry to provide the jobs no longer supplied by the auto industry. When we organized a broad coalition to defeat the proposal, Young called us"naysayers and demanded to know "What is your alternative?"

Jimmy responded with a speech outlining the responsibilities of active citizenship in this period " If we are going to create hope especially for our young people," he said, "we have to stop seeing the city as just a place to which you come for a job and start seeing it as a place where the humanity of people is enriched because they have the opportunity to live with people of many different ethnic and social backgrounds. " We, the People," he continued, "have to see ourselves as responsible for our city and each other, and especially for making sure that our children are raised to place more value on social ties than on material wealth.."

"We have to get rid of the myth that there is something sacred about large scale production for the national and international market and begin thinking of creating small businesses which produce food, goods and services for the local market for our young people. We have to create schools which are an integral part of the community, in which young people naturally and normally do socially necessary and meaningful work for the community."

To seed these ideas, in 1992 we founded Detroit Summer , a multicultural intergenerational youth program to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up, planting community gardens to reconnect young people with the earth and painting public murals to reclaim public space. The sight of urban youth planting and weeding was so novel and inspiring that it added impetus to the community gardening movement in Detroit which was already under way because elders who had been raised in the South were planting community gardens on vacant lots all over the city not only to produce healthy food but to provide youth with the sense of process absent in a society of fast food and cell phones. As a result, over the last 20 years, community gardening in Detroit has created what some people call "a quiet revolution," reducing neighborhood blight and providing a community base for building the local sustainable economies that we now urgently need to slow down global warming and to resist the commodification by global capitalism of all our human relationships and all life.

In the last few years Detroit Summer has morphed into the Detroit Summer Collective, led by veterans of Detroit Summer now in their mid and late 20s, who organize youth-led media arts projects, community-wide potlucks, and workshops of teenagers who educate one another by devising and discussing positive solutions to the problems facing today's young people.

Jimmy died in 1993, before 911. But 30 years before 911 he had written "The revolution to be made in the United States 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 that takes place, "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."

After Jimmy's death in 1993, our friends and associates founded the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. The goal of the Center is to help community activists develop themselves into visionary leaders and critical thinkers in order to develop strategies to transform our communities and cities into communities and cities of hope, especially by exploring the new roles of Work, Education and Cities in this period of great transformation in our relations with one another, to the Earth and to the rest of the world, and in our concepts of ourselves and of our rights and responsibilities as human beings and as active citizens who, as Martin Luther King put it, must develop a concept of global citizenship or a loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in our own society.

Anniversaries can play an important role in the development of active citizens because they provide an opportunity to evaluate the past in the light of the future.

Because this year, 2007, is the 40th anniversary both of Martin Luther King anti-Vietnam War speech in April 1967 and of the Detroit rebellion in July 1967 , the Boggs Center, in cooperation with other community organizations, decided In January to launch a Detroit-City of Hope campaign with two events, one in April and one in July. At the April event, we remembered the many victims of violence and explored how to "Transform Grief into Hope." At the July event we asked - Where do we go from here? How do we go beyond rebellion? At both events we reminded participants that in the last three years of his life Dr. King, struggling for an answer to the anger and desperation exploding in the urban rebellions and recognizing the need to go beyond protest, called for a radical revolution of values against the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism. As a result of our one-sided pursuit of economic and technological expansion, he said, we have come to value things more than people. Our technological development has outrun our spiritual development. We have lost our sense of community and participation. In "our dying cities," he said, we need direct action projects that enable our young people to transform themselves and their environment at the same time.

At the July meeting so many people wanted to talk about what they were doing or what we need to be doing to create new infrastructures that we scheduled a meeting in early October. At the October meeting, which I describe in this column, WE WILL BE THE CHANGE, an amazing diversity of Detroiters created task forces to build these new infrastructures, including Neighborhood Peace and Safety Zones, a Community Business Plan to encourage local economic enterpreneurship, and Restorative Justice programs to keep non-violent offenders in the community instead of being sent off to prison.

From the energy and enthusiasm at this and subsequent Detroit City of Hope meetings, I believe that in Detroit we are in the early stages of a new movement of citizens accepting responsibility over an extended period for rebuilding, redefining and respiriting our communities. So for the next few years we will be organizing periodic events to help us evaluate progress, hoping that in five years or so the new infrastructures will empower us to write a new city charter or constitution that recognizes community activists as citizens playing an active role in city government.

What we are doing in Detroit is only one example of what local groupings all over the country and the world are doing in order to regain control over our own lives and to keep our communities and our environment from being destroyed by corporate globalization. One estimate (by Paul Hawken, (author of Blessed Unrest) is that there may be as many as half a million of these self-healing civic groups, most of them small and barely visible, in every country around the world.

Many of these groups are inspired by a philosophy which replaces the scientific and reductive rationalism of Descartes and Bacon with the ways of knowing of indigenous peoples which includes the perceptions of trees and animals and /or the feminine ways of knowing based on intimate connections with Nature and on healing and caring which were part of European village culture prior to the 16th and 17th century witchhunts.

In two widely-read books, Empire and Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri emphasize the diversity of these groups. They do not fuse into some unity like "the people" or the "workers of the world" and are not connected in centralized organizations like the 2nd`or 3rd Internationals, as in the Marxist-Leninist era. What they have in common is that they are each imagining and creating the new human identities, the new political subjects, that will take the place of the cogs and consumers to which global capitalism is seeking to reduce us.

Each in its own way is developing practices at the local level that humanize some important aspect of our daily lives. That is how change takes place in living systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously.

In the process of creating these new social identities a new form of Democracy is being created which is much more participatory, deliberative, cooperative, consensual, more rooted in community and less hierarchical than the representative democracies that were struggled for and achieved within 19th and 20th century nation-states.

Meanwhile, the crisis of the Iraq occupation and of the imperial presidency of George W. Bush call for impeaching a president and vice-president who have been systematically subverting the U.S. constitution by expanding the powers of of the executive and also violating international laws, the sovereignty of other nations and the sanctity of individual rights and liberties.

In the coming year impeaching Bush and Cheney is the single most important step we can take as a nation to begin to restore a sense of active citizenship and living democracy all across our country. According to the polls, this is an action favored by 54% of American adults.

By practicing active citizenship on these two fronts - building the movement to impeach Bush and Cheney while taking protracted responsibility for rebuilding our local communities - we can discover the power within each of us to create the world anew.

The challenge before us is to link the two struggles.

To do this we can take advantage of important anniversaries that will be coming up in 2008. For example, Cindy Sheehan has called for a Peace Summit in San Francisco on the weekend of Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday "to bring the leaders of the movement together so we can find ways to support each other to our common goals of peace, sustainability and accountability and to plan for relevant and effective actions."

At meetings like these, as contrasted with countless mass rallies where most of us are only warm bodies, listening to charismatic speakers, carrying placards and shouting slogans at politicians who, Democrat or Republican, are beholden to their corporate funders, we can all become the leaders we have been looking for. Putting together our hearts, heads, and hands, we can explore together the great transformation that our world is undergoing and we must each undergo. Together we can figure out how to live more simply so that others can simply live and discover how becoming active American and global citizens is the best way to free ourselves and our families, neighbors and workmates from the fears that since 9ll have enabled Bush and Cheney to control us.

These are the times to grow our souls!