Grace Lee Boggs, a philosopher and activist who relentlessly fought for civil rights, feminism, and labor, with an optimism for social change that struck a chord across the world, died on Monday at her home in Detroit. She was 100.  Since the 1930s, Boggs was politically active across the country, helping organize marches in Washington for revolutionaries like A Phillip Randolph and later in Detroit for Martin Luther King. After she married James Boggs in 1953, the pair worked closely to advance their vision of revolution centered on community organizing.  Her death was confirmed by Alice Jennings, a longtime Detroit attorney and trustee of Boggs, and one of her closest friends.  “She is a visionary,” Jennings told the Guardian. “She encouraged us all to find the best in ourselves.”  Toward the end of her life, Jennings said, Boggs focused on the idea of a new economy “where people could work in their communities, improve their communities, and support their communities.”  It was a topic Boggs touched on in the 2014 documentary American Revolution: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs.  In the film, she encouraged people to “not get stuck in old ideas”.  “Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change,” Boggs said.  Born in Rhode Island in 1915 to Chinese immigrants, Boggs spent her early years in New York City, before moving west to Pennsylvania, to earn a doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College and later, in 1940, in Chicago, to work at the University of Chicago’s philosophy library.  Boggs moved back to New York to work with socialist theorist CLR James, helping create an offshoot of the Socialist Workers party that focused on race and poverty.  She moved to Detroit in the 1950s to write for a socialist newspaper, and met James Boggs, who would become her husband and collaborator. In the 1960s, the couple became involved in the black power movement and were known to offer Malcolm X a place to stay when he visited Detroit.  The FBI was known to keep a hefty file on Boggs and monitor her and James Boggs’s activities, a point she highlighted in a 1998 autobiography.  While radicals she associated with were “shaken up” by visits from the FBI, Boggs wrote that her husband treated agents like “backward children”.  “When they arrived at our door periodically to inquire about black militants like Max Stanford or Robert Williams, the Monroe, North Carolina, leader who had spearheaded armed resistance to the KKK in defense of his black community, Jimmy would first of all make clear that he was not an informant,” she wrote.  “Then he would chide the agents for allowing themselves to be pushed around by J Edgar Hoover and invite them to his next public meeting to learn how to struggle against their own oppression.”  With James, the couple helped organize several coalitions of activists, including Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice and Saves our Sons and Daughters, the latter of which connected Jennings and Boggs in 1986 – a time when “many people were being shot and killed in Detroit’s streets by each other,” Jennings said.  The Boggses also focused their work on improving life for Detroit’s residents and neighborhoods, chiefly with Detroit Summer, a program for young people to work on community projects, as well as through the James and Grace Lee Boggs School. The school was a place where students were intimately connected with the issues plaguing their communities, Jennings said.  Boggs and her husband had no children, and no immediate family members survive. But Boggs was joined by close friends through every waking moment in recent months, said Jennings.  “She didn’t have a minute where there wasn’t someone with her, or close by her,” she said. “And that appealed to her sense of humanity.” On Monday, Boggs woke in “good spirits”, then “went back to sleep, even before her breakfast”, Jenning said.  “It was very peaceful; never a day of hospitalization. Never any serious medical concern. She just gently left us.”  A memorial is currently being planned for 31 Octoner, with additional details expected to be released later this week.  In a statement released by the White House, Barack Obama said Boggs learned early that “the world needed changing, and she overcame barriers to do just that”.  “Grace dedicated her life to serving and advocating for the rights of others – from her community activism in Detroit, to her leadership in the civil rights movement, to her ideas that challenged us all to lead meaningful lives,” the president said.  Jennings echoed this statement, saying her longtime friend cherished every opportunity she had to converse with anyone.  “She was humble,” Jenning said. “If it was the cleaning person, if it was the cook, she always sought that person out to understand where they were on the clock of the world at the time.”
Boggs and her late husband James were involved in advocacy for decades, notably helping organize a 1963 march in Detroit by Martin Luther King Jr