Detroit: Space and Place to Begin Anew
By Grace Lee Boggs
Series on Urban Revitalization
University of Michigan, October 23, 2006
I'm delighted to be part of this series on Urban Revitalization and I'd like to thank Professors Kurashige and Ward for putting it together. I wish I could attend all the sessions.
Seventy years ago, when I was a student in my teens and early 20s, I never imagined that one day I would become so active in the Black Power movement in Detroit that FBI records would suggest that I might be Afro-Chinese. Or that my twilight years would center around rebuilding, redefining and respiriting Detroit or "urban revitalization."
When I left academia in 1940, as you will be doing one of these days, my life began to change drastically because the world was changing and confronting me with choices that I had never anticipated.
I was born on top of my father's Chinese American restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island 91 years ago. My parents were immigrants from Toisan in Guangdong Province which was where most Çhinese immigrants came from in those days. My mother , who was my father's second wife (he was still married to his first), never learned to read and write because there were no schools for females in her little village.
When we moved to New York in 1924, my father had to buy the land for our house in the name of his Irish contractor because of restricted covenants denying land ownership to people of color. Today the residents of that Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens are mostly Latino and Korean, and just up the street is one of the liveliest South Asian commercial centers in the U.S.
When I was an undergraduate at Barnard from 1931-35 there were only three students of color on campus - myself, another Chinese American and a Japanese American. Today Asian Americans make up 30% of the Barnard student body. When I was a graduate student at Bryn Mawr from 1935-40, the only blacks on campus were the maids in crisp grey uniforms who cleaned our rooms and served our meals.
In college and graduate school I studied philosophy because I was trying to figure out the meaning of my own life. I wasn't concerned with how or whether it would help me make a living. The result is that when I got my Ph.D. in 1940, I hadn't the vaguest notion what I should do. There wasn't any chance of my getting a university job teaching philosophy. 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, had taught and was lucky enough to get a part-time job in the University of Chicago Philosophy Library paying $10 a week.
Even though the cost of living was very low in those days (5c would get you a ride on the trolley or a glass of beer ), $10 a week didn't go very far. So I jumped at the offer from a little Jewish woman to live rent-free in the basement of a house not far from the university. The only problem was that to get into the basement I had to face down a barricade of rats. This led me to the South Side Tenants Organization, a group organized by the Workers Party to fight rat-infested housing in the black community. It was my first contact with a black community. As a result, I soon heard about the March on Washington Movement, led by A. Philip Randolph, which was mobilizing so many tens of thousands of blacks to March on Washington to demand jobs in the defense industry that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was forced to issue Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in defense plants.
The March on Washington was my first experience with a grassroots movement and it was so inspiring that I decided that becoming a Movement activist in the black community was the most meaningful thing I could do with my life.
In those days intellectuals who committed themselves to the struggle to change the system embraced (in one form or another) the socialist ideas that Karl Marx had developed in the middle of the 19th century (the springtime of industrial capitalism ) that the "working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united and organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production, would burst through the capitalist integument which had been a fetter on the mode of production and transform capitalist private property into socialist property."
So, like Richard Wright and others, I became a Marxist, joining the Workers Party and organizing the kinds of protest demonstrations that radicals still organize, but also working closely with C.L.R. James, the West Indian Marxist, in the little group inside the party known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency. As "Johnsonites" we studied the writings of Marx to emphasize his humanism. For example, I did the first English translation (from the German) of Marx's 1843-44 Economic Philosophical manuscripts in which the young Marx (he was in his early 20s) wrote a lot about alienation. My favorite passage from the Communist Manifesto (written when Marx was 29) was and still is the one which reads:
"Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his conditions of life and his relations with his kind."
I also studied Lenin's 1915 Notes on Hegel which deal a lot with the importance of vision.
Studying Marx and Lenin was exciting but it was also too much like what I had been doing in the university. I wanted to be part of a community in struggle. So I was delighted when in the early 1950s, we heard that black workers in Detroit like Jimmy Boggs, having been radicalized by their experiences in the plant during World War II, were looking for new forms of struggle going beyond the union. In response we created a newsletter called CORRESPONDENCE, to report the activities of blacks, rank and file workers, women and youth (whom we had identified as the new revolutionary social forces); and in 1953 I moved to Detroit to work on Correspondence for which Jimmy Boggs was already writing.
I found Jimmy very attractive. He was more rooted in his community and more secure in his identity as a human being than any man I had ever met. He was also completely different from me in almost every respect. I had grown up in the Big Apple. He had been born and raised in a little town called Marion Junction, Alabama, with only two stores on the main street. My knowledge had come mostly from books. He had never been to college - although he was full of ideas. As Ruby Dee put it recently, he was "born with a Ph.D." He loved to write and had viewed himself as a writer ever since as a little boy he wrote the letters for his mostly illiterate community. I had never been part of a community. He was the person in the Chrysler-Jefferson plant and in his Detroit community to whom everyone came for advice on matters of personal and political concerns. So when he asked me to marry him on our first date in 1953, I didn't hesitate for a minute.
During the first few years of our marriage I mainly listened and learned from Jimmy and his friends. It was a period when huge changes were taking place in the country , in Detroit and in the world. At the Bandung Conference in April 1955 Asian and African leaders had informed the world that the struggle against colonialism and for political independence was unstoppable. The lynching of 14-year old Emmet Till in Mississippi in September 1955 had created a new readiness for struggle in blacks all over the country. A few months later, in December 1955 blacks began the year-long non-violent highly disciplined bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala. launching the civil rights movement under the leadership of 26-year old Martin Luther King Jr.
Meanwhile, Detroit was also undergoing historic changes. The work force in the auto plants was shrinking instead of expanding, both because of Hi-Tech and because corporations were moving their plants to non-union Southern states. At the same time the white population of Detroit was declining relative to blacks because the construction of the Lodge freeway on the west side and of the Chrysler freeway on the east side, plus FHA mortgages , had made it possible for hundreds of thousands of whites to flee to the suburbs. The result was that blacks were beginning to question why all institutions, including the city government , the police force and public schools, were still being run exclusively by whites.
It was out of these very real conditions that the Black Power movement emerged in Detroit in the early 1960s Energized by the civil rights movement in the South, middle class blacks, like Rev. Cleage, Milton and Richard Henry, Russell Brown, Ed Vaughn, Reginald Wilson, seized on Black Power as an achievable goal. Young blacks like General Baker, John Watson, Charles Johnson and Charles Simmons, who were then in their early 20s, were also being inspired, especially by the African struggle for UHURU or Freedom, to think more in terms of power than of rights.
By 1960 I had been living in Detroit and married to Jimmy for seven years. So even though I was not black, I felt pretty comfortable going to meetings and demonstrations. It was a very exciting time. We picketed places like the Apprentice Training School where only a limited number of blacks were admitted to be trained for skilled jobs. On June 23, 1963, we organized a Freedom March down Woodward Ave. which mobilized 250,000 people from all over the State of Michigan. Two days after that march, when we picketed supermarkets demanding management jobs for blacks, we won immediate concessions. In the summer of 1963, after Cynthia Scott was killed by a white cop, 5000 of us marched round and round Police Headquarters chanting "STOP KILLER COPS!" while the cops, armed to the teeth, huddled behind locked doors and windows wondering whether or when we might rush the building. To avoid a massacre we diverted the demonstrators to the corner where Cynthia Scott had been killed. Later, I was told by one of the demonstrators that even though she might have been killed she was sorry we had not allowed tempers to keep rising.
A few months later, in the fall of 1963 I was one of the main organizers for the Grassroots Leadership Conference at which Malcolm made his famous speech distinguishing between "Field Negroes" and "House Negroes" and linking the black revolution with the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. After Malcolm broke with the Nation of Islam in 1964, Max Stanford, William Worthy, Pat Robinson, Jimmy and I met with him in a Harlem sandwich shop to discuss whether he should come to Detroit to work with us. In February 1965 (six months before Watts erupted) he was gunned down.
A few months after Malcolm's assassination we founded the Organization for Black Power at our house with Black Power activists from Chicago, D.C., Philadelphia and Cleveland and Detroit. In 1966 we organized the Inner City Organizing Committee which created a Parents Organization, a Student Organization and a Black Teachers Group to struggle for Community Control of Schools in Detroit.
Jimmy was involved in this Black Power organizing but he was also writing and speaking in an effort to get Black Power activists to understand the depth of the crisis that had been created by Hi-Tech and therefore the need for Blacks to go beyond Black Nationalism or just replacing white power with black power. For example, in The Åmerican Revolution: Pages from a Negro Workers Notebook, published in 1963, he pointed out how Marx's concept of Scientific Socialism had been developed in an era when the working class was expanding and when the challenge was to increase productivity. Now, however, technology had advanced to the point where productivity was increasing by leaps and bounds while the working class was declining in numbers. So that our challenge was no longer to increase productivity but to develop more responsible relationships with one another. That meant going beyond Dialectical Materialism to Dialectical Humanism.
Then on July 20, 1967, while Jimmy and I were on vacation in California, Detroit cops raided a blind pig on 12th St., now Rosa Parks Boulevard, and all hell broke loose. Thousands of young people, poured into the streets and began looting stores and setting large sections of the city on fire. Before it was over the National Guard had been called in and 42 people had been killed. The media called it a riot but Detroiters called it a "Rebellion" because , as Thomas Sugrue points out in Roots of the Urban Crisis, it was an understandable response by young people to the mostly white police force which they regarded as an occupation army and also to their growing sense that they were being made expendable by Hi-Tech.
More than any picketing or marching or organizing that we did, it was the spontaneous explosion of young Detroiters which ensured the election of Detroit's first black mayor in 1973 because it told the Establishment that white political power could no longer maintain law and order in the city.
Upon assuming the office of Mayor, Coleman Young, could do a lot to eliminate racism in Detroit by appointing blacks to the administration and by changing the racial composition of the police and fire departments. But even though Coleman was one of this country's brightest and most skilful politicians (some people say that if he had not been black, he would have been elected president), he was helpless in the face of the de-industrialization and outsourcing which were gaining momentum in the 1970s.
Young tried valiantly to reverse the tide of deindustrialization. For example, in 1980, with the cooperation of the UAW and over the resistance of residents, he bulldozed 1500 houses, 600 businesses and six churches in Poletown to provide GM with the land for a plant that it promised would provide 6000 jobs (it has never provided more than 3000). But jobs continued to disappear, and when crack came to Detroit in 1985 young people started saying, "Why stay in school with the idea that one day you can get a good job and make a lot of money when you can make a lot of money right now rollin?" So by the thousands they began dropping out of high school , creating a drug economy which brought with it escalating crime and violence.
Faced with this deteriorating situation, Coleman became increasingly desperate, and in 1988 he proposed a casino industry to provide the jobs that the auto industry no longer provided. We joined a very broad coalition of Detroiters called DETROITERS UNITING and were able to defeat his proposal. But during the struggle, he called us a bunch of naysayers and demanded to know "What is your alternative?"
It was a very good question helping, indeed, forcing us to recognize that we were at one of the great turning points in history. Detroit's de-industrialization, devastation and depopulation had turned the city into a wasteland but it had also created the space and place where there was not only the necessity but the possibility of creating a city based not on expanding production but on new values of sustainability and community. Instead of Detroiters investing our hopes in GM, Ford and Chrysler and becoming increasingly alienated from the Earth and from each other, we had been granted an opportunity to begin a new chapter in the evolution of the human race, a chapter which global warming and corporate globalization had made increasingly necessary. In its dying Detroit could also be the birthplace of a new kind of city.
As Detroiters we were very conscious of our city as a "movement city." In the first half of the 20th century it had pioneered mass production. In the 1930s it spearheaded the labor movement. During World War II it had been the arsenal of democracy. Now it could be known the world over as the city where out of the ashes of industrialization, a 21st century city was being built, a city which is both rural and urban and which attracts people from all over the world because it understands the fundamental need of human beings at this stage in our evolution to relate more responsibly to one another and to the Earth.
So in November 1991 we convened a group of community organizations in a PEOPLES FESTIVAL to create a Multigenerational, Multicultural Celebration of Detroiters putting our hearts, minds, hands and imaginations together to redefine and recreate a city of Community, Compassion, Cooperation, Participation and Enterprise, in harmony with the Earth.
A few months later, in June 1992 we founded Detroit Summer, an intergenerational multicultural youth program that would model a new kind of schooling in which school children would be engaged in rebuilding their communities as a natural and normal part of the curriculum from K-12 rather than only in classwork that prepares them to take their places in the existing system.
Recalling how the Freedom Schools of Misssissippi Freedom Summer had engaged children in the civil rights movement, we asked Detroiters to just imagine how much safer and livelier our neighborhoods would be almost overnight if we reorganized education along the lines of Detroit Summer; if instead of trying to keep our children isolated in classrooms for 12 years and more, we engaged them in community-building activities with the same audacity with which the civil rights movement engaged them in desegregation activities 40 years ago: planting community gardens, recycling waste, organizing neighborhood arts and health festivals, rehabbing houses, painting public murals. By giving our children and young people a better reason to learn than just the individualistic one of getting a job or making more money, by encouraging them to make a difference in their neighborhoods, we would get their cognitive juices flowing. Learning would come from practice which has always been the best way to learn.
Instead of trying to bully young people to remain in classrooms structured to prepare them to become cogs in the existing economic system, the time had come, we said, to recognize that the reason why so many young people drop out from inner city schools is because they are voting with their feet against a system which sorts, tracks, tests, and rejects or certifies them like products of a factory. They are crying out for another kind of education that values them as human beings and gives them opportunities to exercise their Soul Power.
Detroit Summer began in 1992 and since then has been an ongoing and developing program. In the last two years it is being organized by a multi-racial collective of 20-something young people who have been a part of past Detroit Summers. The Collective engages young people and artists in addressing city's educational and drop-out crisis. (This is the CD which they have created out of their interviews with young people). On the second Thursday of every month, they sponsor a Potluck using food, music and poetry to bring different generations of Detroit youth together.
Detroit Summer is part of a loose and growing network of groups that have been emerging in the last 15 years to rebuild and redefine Detroit. This network includes
The Detroit Agricultural Network (DAN) made up of the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a public high school not far from downtown Detroit where teenage mothers have built their own barn, plant a community garden and raise farm animals; the 4H Community Center; FARM , a community program developing agricultural resources in the North Woodward area.
Earthworks, a garden and apiary on the east side of Detroit, sponsored by the Çapuchin Monastery, which supplies produce for the monastery's food kitchen and the WOMAN'S INFANT AND CHILDREN WIC supplementary nutrition program.
Back Alley Bikes, a project which makes used bikes available to neighborhood youngsters to repair and own.
The Greening of Detroit which plants trees and builds environmental stewardship through community programs.
Avalon Bakery which attracts people to the Cass Corridor from all over the city by its international breads and pastries, baked with organic flour and local ingredients.
These groups are local examples of the thousands of individuals and groups coming together in this country and all over the world to create new ways of living to resist the destructiveness of global capitalism and redefine what it means to be human in the 21st century. One estimate (by Paul Hawken, environmental activist and author) 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.
One of the most exciting things about these groups is that in order to get started they do not need big leaders or huge funds. All that is needed are a few people who are motivated by a desire to humanize some important aspect of their daily lives.
In the course of creating these groups, all kinds of people are engaged in creating a new form of Democracy which is much more participatory, deliberative, cooperative, consensual and (like the cosmos) more rooted in community and more horizontal than the representative democracies that were struggled for and achieved within 19th and 20th century nation-states but are now increasingly ineffective.
In two widely-discussed books, Empire and Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri emphasize the singularity or diversity of these groups and how they connect through networks rather than fusing into some unity like "the people" or the "workers of the world," as imagined by the radicals of the early 20th century or joining centralized organizations like the 2nd`or 3rd Internationals. What they have in common are their values of social and environmental justice, each imagining and creating the new social identities, the new political subjects that will take the place of the cogs and consumers to which global capitalism is seeking to reduce us.
That is how I visualize revolution emerging in the 21st century, not by concentrating on the seizure of political power as we projected it in the early 20th century but by re-creating our selves.
As organizational consultant Margaret Wheatley puts it, "That is how change takes place in living systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously, from people working where they are, with problems that we can get our arms around."
"From a Newtonian perspective," she writes in Leadership and Modern Science, "our efforts often seem too small, and we doubt that our actions will contribute incrementally to large-scale change. Step by step, system by system, we aspire to develop enough mass or force to alter the larger system.
"But a quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently.
"Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective. However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. I have learned that in this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass.' It's always about critical connections."
Together, it seems to me, these groups are creating answers to the questions that become increasingly urgent every day. How do we begin living more simply for our own survival, the survival of planet earth, and so that others may simply live? How are we to achieve reconciliation with the two-thirds of the world that increasingly resents our economic, military and cultural domination? Can we accept their anger as a challenge rather than a threat? Out of our new vulnerability can we recognize that our safety now depends on our loving and caring for the peoples of the world and for the Earth as we love and care for our own families, i.e., developing "a new concept of global citizenship" or a "loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best " in our society?
These questions are inseparably intertwined with the question of urban revitalization - although you wouldn't suspect it if the only people you talked to were Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and the members of the Detroit City Council.