Zuky

In Honor of Grace Lee Boggs' 94th Birthday

Over at A Book Without A Cover, Adele has put up a post announcing the upcoming celebration of Grace Lee Boggs' 94th birthday. In honor of this prodigious Detroit icon and her ongoing legacy of tireless social activism, I'm reposting a Zuky piece I wrote upon reading her autobiography a couple of years ago. Happy Birthday, Grace!

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[ Originally posted on March 6, 2007 ]

Grace Lee Boggs — Living for Change

In the landscape of Asian American activism, Grace Lee Boggs is a giant, a legend, an icon.

Recently I've been re-reading her 1998 autobiography, Living for Change. As I see it, this is must-read anti-racist history.

Born in 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island, Grace Lee Chin was the Chinese American daughter of middle-class restaurant owners. Grace spent the Great Depression studying philosophy, undergrad at Barnard College and doctoral at Bwyn Mawr College. After which, she dove into radical politics with a full head of steam, joining the Socialist Workers Party, where she took on the pen name of Ria Stone.

In 1939, the Socialist Workers Party split in half over the question of whether or not to continue to be loyal to the Soviet Union (following the invasion of Finland and the Stalin-Hitler pact). A majority followed Trotsky in maintaining the need to support the Soviet Union despite its degenerate state ("bureaucratic collectivism"). A minority broke away and formed the Workers Party, led by Max Schachtman, Marty Abern, and C.L.R. James. Grace fell in with this latter crowd. She writes of this period:

Despite my growing suspicions that my new comrades represented the past rather than the future, the Workers Party's decision to oppose World War II reassured me that I was in the right organization. My main reason for remaining in the party, however, was that I had met C.L.R. James when he stopped in Chicago to talk to the comrades on his way back from organizing sharecroppers in southeast Missouri. Tall, black, and strikingly handsome, C.L.R. was everything that the Chicago branch was not. He was bursting with enthusiasm about the potential for an American revolution inherent in the emergence of the labor movement and the escalating militancy of blacks. When together with another comrade I met him at the train station, he was carrying two thick books, volume 1 of Marx's Capital and Hegel's Science of Logic, both heavily underlined. When he discovered that I had studied Hegel and knew German, we withdrew to my basement room where we spent hours sitting on my old red couch comparing passages in Marx and Hegel, checking the English against the original German. It was the beginning of a theoretical and practical collaberation that lasted twenty years, until we went our separate ways in 1962. [...]

To study Marx and Lenin and to work with C.L.R. I moved back to New York after the Workers Party convention. For a while I lived in my mother's house in Jackson Heights. Later, when she began renting out rooms, I rented apartments in different parts of the city. In the 1940s you could live in New York for very little money.  [ Pictured, from left: Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R. James, and Grace, in the 1940s.]

Living in New York and working with the Johnson-Forest Tendency inside the Workers Party opened me up to a whole new world of people, ideas, and activity.  I visited the Schomburg Collection in Harlem and read Amy Garvey's compilation of her husband's philosophy and opinions. It was exciting to discover that Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement had been inspired in part by the Russian Revolution. Lenin, said Garvey, had seized the opportunity of the crisis of the Western powers caused by World War I to make the October Revolution. People of African descent scattered all over the world, he thought, should follow Lenin's example and exploit the postwar crisis to recover Africa for themselves. The Workers Party had organized Interracial Club with an office on 125th Street in Harlem where we held regular forums. They were chaired by Lyman Paine, who took the name of Tom Brown. After meetings we would go to the Apollo Theater, the Savoy (where I heard Count Basie one night), or Small's Paradise. Connie Williams, a West Indian friend of CLR's, owned a calypso restaurant in the Village where James Baldwin and Richard Wright hung out. [...] Katharine Dunham, one of the founders of the ethnic dance movement, invited me to give a class in philosophy to her dance company. But my own ideas where changing so rapidly in my new milieu that I couldn't imagine myself teaching anybody anything.

Grace's work with C.L.R. brought her many interesting opportunities. In 1954 she collaborated with Mbiyu Koinange on a booklet entitled The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves. She worked with Kwame Nkrumah, author of Towards Colonial Freedom, who eventually made a triumphant return to the Gold Coast. Through her activism, she also met Jimmy Boggs, a factory worker from Detroit whom she eventually married and worked alongside until his death in 1992.

As should be obvious by now, Living for Change captures a series of personal and political snapshots of leftist political development from a unique front-row perspective. From World War II on the home front, through the Civil Rights era and the Black Power movement, through the 80s and her "return" to China to come to terms with her own roots, all the way up to her latest philosophical reflections as she looks back on all her years in politics, Grace Lee Boggs has given us something invaluable: a genuine piece of herself, a piece of her beating heart and soul, a high-minded clear-eyed telling of a revolutionary tale.

Grace is still at it, too. As recently as 2003, Grace was the keynote speaker for the MLK Day Symposium at the University of Michigan. See also this excellent 2005 interview.

I'll leave you with this passage from the introduction of Living for Change:

I consider myself blessed to have been born a Chinese American female with two first names: Grace and Jade Peace. [...] Had I not been born female and Chinese American, I would not have realized from early on that fundamental changes were necessary in our society. Had I not been born female and Chinese American, I might have ended up teaching philosophy at a university, an observer rather than an active participant in the humanity-stretching movements that have defined the last half of the twentieth century. [ Pictured: Grace at 18.]

I never thought I'd be writing my autobiography. As late as the spring of 1994, when Shirley Cloyes of Lawrence Hill Books suggested it, my response was that I would rather continue my movement-building activities.

At that time Jimmy had been dead for less than a year and I was still trying to figure out what I was going to do on my own or, indeed, whether there was any "my own." That is what often happens when you lose the person with whom you have lived and worked closely for decades. Especially if you are a woman, you need time to re-create yourself, to discover who you are. In my case this need was even more acute because for the most of the forty years that I was married to Jimmy, the black movement was the most important movement in the country. So I borrowed a lot of my identity from him—to such a degree that some FBI records describe me as probably Afro-Chinese. [...]

When we first met in 1952, I was a city girl from a middle-class Chinese American family. Despite the fact that I had already been involved in the radical movement for more than a decade and had even worked in a defense plant during World War II, I was still essentially a product of Ivy League women's colleges, a New York intellectual whose understanding of revolutionary struggle came mainly from books. Jimmy had been born and raised in a small town in Alabama where there were only a couple of stores on the main street. [...] I was a Chinese American, an ethnic minority so small as to be almost invisible. He was an African American who was very conscious that the blood and sweat of his ancestors had made possible the rapid economic development of this country and who had already embarked on the struggle to ensure that his people would be among those deciding its economic and political future. 

Ten years after our marriage Jimmy's first book, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook, was published.  [ Pictured, from left: Jimmy Boggs, Grace Lee Boggs, Ted Griffin, in 1957. ] To our amazement it brought a letter of congratulations from the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, initiating a correspondence during which Jimmy did not hesitate to lecture Russell, who was at the time probably the West's best-known philosopher, respectfully but firmly pointing out his ignorance of the ongoing struggle in the United States. As he wrote in the introduction to The American Revolution, "I am a factory worker but I know more than just factory work. I know the difference between what would sound right if one lived in a society of logical people and what is right when you live in a society of real people with real differences."

I believe that the story of how Jimmy and I, coming from such different backgrounds, were able to enjoy such a productive life together can be instructive to other Americans, especially in light of the rapidly changing ethnic composition of this country. [...] With this situation will inevitably come new stresses and strains. If the new immigrants are viewed as a threat, these tensions can explode as they did in South Central Los Angeles in 1992. On the other hand, if older migrants — and except for Native Americans, we have all migrated to this country, by choice or in chains — can see the new arrivals as people on whose backs we have prospered and whom we now need to make ourselves whole, we can embark together on the struggles necessary to make the United States of America what it was meant to be — a country that all of us, regardless of national or ethnic origin, will be proud to call our own.

In the landscape of Asian American activism, Grace Lee Boggs is a giant, a legend, an icon.

Recently I've been re-reading her 1998 autobiography, Living for Change. As I see it, this is must-read anti-racist history.

Born in 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island, Grace Lee Chin was the Chinese American daughter of middle-class restaurant owners. Grace spent the Great Depression studying philosophy, undergrad at Barnard College and doctoral at Bwyn Mawr College. After which, she dove into radical politics with a full head of steam, joining the Socialist Workers Party, where she took on the pen name of Ria Stone.

In 1939, the Socialist Workers Party split in half over the question of whether or not to continue to be loyal to the Soviet Union (following the invasion of Finland and the Stalin-Hitler pact). A majority followed Trotsky in maintaining the need to support the Soviet Union despite its degenerate state ("bureaucratic collectivism"). A minority broke away and formed the Workers Party, led by Max Schachtman, Marty Abern, and C.L.R. James. Grace fell in with this latter crowd. She writes of this period:

Despite my growing suspicions that my new comrades represented the past rather than the future, the Workers Party's decision to oppose World War II reassured me that I was in the right organization. My main reason for remaining in the party, however, was that I had met C.L.R. James when he stopped in Chicago to talk to the comrades on his way back from organizing sharecroppers in southeast Missouri. Tall, black, and strikingly handsome, C.L.R. was everything that the Chicago branch was not. He was bursting with enthusiasm about the potential for an American revolution inherent in the emergence of the labor movement and the escalating militancy of blacks. When together with another comrade I met him at the train station, he was carrying two thick books, volume 1 of Marx's Capital and Hegel's Science of Logic, both heavily underlined. When he discovered that I had studied Hegel and knew German, we withdrew to my basement room where we spent hours sitting on my old red couch comparing passages in Marx and Hegel, checking the English against the original German. It was the beginning of a theoretical and practical collaberation that lasted twenty years, until we went our separate ways in 1962. [...]

To study Marx and Lenin and to work with C.L.R. I moved back to New York after the Workers Party convention. For a while I lived in my mother's house in Jackson Heights. Later, when she began renting out rooms, I rented apartments in different parts of the city. In the 1940s you could live in New York for very little money.  [ Pictured, from left: Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R. James, and Grace, in the 1940s.]

Living in New York and working with the Johnson-Forest Tendency inside the Workers Party opened me up to a whole new world of people, ideas, and activity.  I visited the Schomburg Collection in Harlem and read Amy Garvey's compilation of her husband's philosophy and opinions. It was exciting to discover that Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement had been inspired in part by the Russian Revolution. Lenin, said Garvey, had seized the opportunity of the crisis of the Western powers caused by World War I to make the October Revolution. People of African descent scattered all over the world, he thought, should follow Lenin's example and exploit the postwar crisis to recover Africa for themselves. The Workers Party had organized Interracial Club with an office on 125th Street in Harlem where we held regular forums. They were chaired by Lyman Paine, who took the name of Tom Brown. After meetings we would go to the Apollo Theater, the Savoy (where I heard Count Basie one night), or Small's Paradise. Connie Williams, a West Indian friend of CLR's, owned a calypso restaurant in the Village where James Baldwin and Richard Wright hung out. [...] Katharine Dunham, one of the founders of the ethnic dance movement, invited me to give a class in philosophy to her dance company. But my own ideas where changing so rapidly in my new milieu that I couldn't imagine myself teaching anybody anything.

Grace's work with C.L.R. brought her many interesting opportunities. In 1954 she collaborated with Mbiyu Koinange on a booklet entitled The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves. She worked with Kwame Nkrumah, author of Towards Colonial Freedom, who eventually made a triumphant return to the Gold Coast. Through her activism, she also met Jimmy Boggs, a factory worker from Detroit whom she eventually married and worked alongside until his death in 1992.

As should be obvious by now, Living for Change captures a series of personal and political snapshots of leftist political development from a unique front-row perspective. From World War II on the home front, through the Civil Rights era and the Black Power movement, through the 80s and her "return" to China to come to terms with her own roots, all the way up to her latest philosophical reflections as she looks back on all her years in politics, Grace Lee Boggs has given us something invaluable: a genuine piece of herself, a piece of her beating heart and soul, a high-minded clear-eyed telling of a revolutionary tale.

Grace is still at it, too. As recently as 2003, Grace was the keynote speaker for the MLK Day Symposium at the University of Michigan. See also this excellent 2005 interview.

I'll leave you with this passage from the introduction of Living for Change:

I consider myself blessed to have been born a Chinese American female with two first names: Grace and Jade Peace. [...] Had I not been born female and Chinese American, I would not have realized from early on that fundamental changes were necessary in our society. Had I not been born female and Chinese American, I might have ended up teaching philosophy at a university, an observer rather than an active participant in the humanity-stretching movements that have defined the last half of the twentieth century. [ Pictured: Grace at 18.]

I never thought I'd be writing my autobiography. As late as the spring of 1994, when Shirley Cloyes of Lawrence Hill Books suggested it, my response was that I would rather continue my movement-building activities.

At that time Jimmy had been dead for less than a year and I was still trying to figure out what I was going to do on my own or, indeed, whether there was any "my own." That is what often happens when you lose the person with whom you have lived and worked closely for decades. Especially if you are a woman, you need time to re-create yourself, to discover who you are. In my case this need was even more acute because for the most of the forty years that I was married to Jimmy, the black movement was the most important movement in the country. So I borrowed a lot of my identity from him—to such a degree that some FBI records describe me as probably Afro-Chinese. [...]

When we first met in 1952, I was a city girl from a middle-class Chinese American family. Despite the fact that I had already been involved in the radical movement for more than a decade and had even worked in a defense plant during World War II, I was still essentially a product of Ivy League women's colleges, a New York intellectual whose understanding of revolutionary struggle came mainly from books. Jimmy had been born and raised in a small town in Alabama where there were only a couple of stores on the main street. [...] I was a Chinese American, an ethnic minority so small as to be almost invisible. He was an African American who was very conscious that the blood and sweat of his ancestors had made possible the rapid economic development of this country and who had already embarked on the struggle to ensure that his people would be among those deciding its economic and political future. 

Ten years after our marriage Jimmy's first book, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook, was published.  [ Pictured, from left: Jimmy Boggs, Grace Lee Boggs, Ted Griffin, in 1957. ] To our amazement it brought a letter of congratulations from the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, initiating a correspondence during which Jimmy did not hesitate to lecture Russell, who was at the time probably the West's best-known philosopher, respectfully but firmly pointing out his ignorance of the ongoing struggle in the United States. As he wrote in the introduction to The American Revolution, "I am a factory worker but I know more than just factory work. I know the difference between what would sound right if one lived in a society of logical people and what is right when you live in a society of real people with real differences."

I believe that the story of how Jimmy and I, coming from such different backgrounds, were able to enjoy such a productive life together can be instructive to other Americans, especially in light of the rapidly changing ethnic composition of this country. [...] With this situation will inevitably come new stresses and strains. If the new immigrants are viewed as a threat, these tensions can explode as they did in South Central Los Angeles in 1992. On the other hand, if older migrants — and except for Native Americans, we have all migrated to this country, by choice or in chains — can see the new arrivals as people on whose backs we have prospered and whom we now need to make ourselves whole, we can embark together on the struggles necessary to make the United States of America what it was meant to be — a country that all of us, regardless of national or ethnic origin, will be proud to call our own.

Michael Jackson (1958-2009)

Two Sisters

Unfortunately I've been forced to concede defeat to my squirrel-nemesis in my attempts to grow corn. Every corn stalk I've grown has gotten dug up. It's been a slaughter. So today I switched gears and planted spinach and peppers where the corn used to be. We'll see if my nemesis continues to taunt me. In the meantime, the two remaining sisters are doing quite well. Below you see a juicy-looking bean pod and a couple of zucchini flowers.

 

From Vincent Chin to Luis Ramirez

On this day in 1982, Chinese American immigrant Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat, at his own bachelor party, by racist white auto workers in Detroit who blamed Japan for layoffs in the US auto industry. The murderers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, were convicted of manslaughter. They served no jail time, were given three years probation, fined $3,000 and ordered to pay $780 in court costs. Wayne County Circuit Judge Charles Kaufman said, "These weren't the kind of men you send to jail."

On July 14, 2008, Mexican immigrant Luis Ramirez was beaten to death by racist white teens shouting anti-Mexican epithets, in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. The murderers, Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak, were convicted of simple assault. Two days ago, they were respectively sentenced to 6 and 7 months in county jail. Piekarsky's lawyer Frederick Fanelli said, "You would be proud to have any of these kids in your classroom, and any of them as your children."

The Neo-Classical Mysticism of Sa Dingding

She grew up living the migratory nomadic life of the Mongolian plateau, with mixed Han-Mongolian ancestry, deeply influenced by the rhythms of nature and the iconography of Central Asian Buddhism. She learned Sanskrit and Tibetan in order to further her understanding of Buddhism, and developed her own singing "language" which she says relies only on the vibrations of syllables rather than syntactical meanings. She has been criticized in the West for "marketing" her culture and for not advocating on behalf of the "Free Tibet" anti-communist movement (which is roughly equivalent to a US singer being criticized in China for not supporting the secession of Texas). She designs her own costumes, which bring a bold fashion flair to traditional design elements. Her music combines a distinctly Central Asian folk singing style and an almost incantatory mystical quality with an exciting modern textural soundscape. Check out Sa Dingding:

Green Things

After traveling for a week, I was eager to check upon my little garden patch when I got home. Apparently I've been sucked into some kind of covert war with a local raccoon or squirrel who likes to dig up a certain area of my planting bed; many young corn stalks have been lost to this conflict; though I have to admit that the critters were here first. Anyway, the good news is that everything else is looking strong and lively. The first pic shows a squash leaf bigger than my hand; and if you follow my fingers straight to the right, you can see my first bean pod hanging out all casual; as well as some beets in the background, on both sides. The second pic shows strawberries, which my neighbor Jose planted two years ago and which have come back this season looking very lush. It's all quite exciting.

 

 

Three Sisters and Many Cousins

These are the survivors, doing their thing on the little plot of dirt I've been given permission to use this gardening season. Actually, it's almost pure clay; so the first task was preparing the planting bed with heavy amendments of soil, sand, and compost. Two vicious cold snaps in the first weeks of spring killed off four-fifths of my seedlings, so those that remain are made of hardy stuff. I've also get a second planting bed going (in the top right corner of the photo) where I've seeded tomatoes, chili peppers, and spinach. This whole project is a big experiment and I have no idea how it will turn out, but hey it's fun and I'm learning.

Meanwhile, my neighbor Jose, who grew up on his grandfather's farm in Ecuador, is tending to the rest of the garden, and as you can see from the photo below, he's done this before (my little plot is in the top right corner). To be blunt, he puts me to shame. He did most of the plantings you see here in two afternoons of automatic, methodical, fast handiwork. He's a generous guy too, so he insists that he's going to share his harvest with me. I'm looking forward to some very fresh salads and soups!

The Hariyama Bridge

Over at Nippon Cinema, a story that I believe many US folks will find intriguing, at the intersection of African American and Japanese culture and history:

In the film, Daniel Holder (Ben Guillory) travels to Japan to claim some of the possessions left behind by his recently-deceased son Mickey. Mickey had moved to Kochi to teach English, and Ben’s prejudices brought on by his father’s death in World War II fighting Japanese cause a rift to form between them. His hatred for Japan is only made stronger by his son’s death occurring there, but when Ben meets the people who had become important to Mickey in Kochi, he’s forced to re-examine his feelings toward Japan.

The film, which was executive produced by Danny Glover, will be released in Japan on June 6th. Distributor Eleven Arts recently made it available for world sales.

Marching Behind Banners

[ Here's a short video I finally got around to cobbling together from the footage I shot at this year's May Day march in Manhattan, starting in Union Square. Nothing fancy, shaky handheld zoom and all, just a glimpse of the sights, sounds, and general vibe of that day, beginning with the heavy downpour which drenched us all but didn't prevent a strong energetic turnout, ending with the march. Mamita Mala and La Mapu make cameo appearances. Hats off to the guy selling empanadas during the march, very nice move for all parties involved. ]

[ Cross-posted at The Sanctuary ]

The Sanctuary Honored By New America Media Award

Nezua speaks for all of us over at The Sanctuary:

We are happy to announce that The Sanctuary (ProMigrant.Org) will be receiving an award that, in 2006, Hillary Rodham Clinton described as "the equivalent of the “Pulitzer Prize" for journalism (including New Media of course) in ethnic media! I leave it to politicians wielding impressive phraseology for various reasons to convince you that the award is quite that important, but nonetheless. We are very proud to be recognized for the work we do at our little human rights agenda community.

I will be in Atlanta, Georgia for the NAM National Ethnic Media Expo & Awards event June 3 -5 to receive this award on behalf of my compas and separately, to do some talking on New Media as I've learned to use it and think of it.

Music — Sa Dingding

The Luis Ramirez Murder: A Logical Step in the Process of Establishing a Subhuman Class

[ Over at The Sanctuary, we've been working on a joint editorial position piece about the Luis Ramirez murder since last week. We posted it this morning. Please go over there to read the full post. ]

Three things immediately shock the conscious soul upon learning about the murder of Luis Ramirez. The simple manner in which he died is the first of those.

Ramirez, a father of three, was beaten to death in the streets of Pennsylvania by as many as seven young men who were at the end of a night of drinking. The motive? Judging by the slurs heaped upon him along with the many blows to his body: apparently nothing more than being out at night while Mexican. The teens who ganged up on Ramirez came upon him walking with a young woman, reportedly his girlfriend's sister. Obviously bringing threat, they asked him what he was doing out at that time of day. Then they set upon him. In the end it was a final hard kick to the skull which left the 25-year-old father convulsing on the concrete with fatal brain damage.

The police arrived shortly after the attack but rather than jump into hot pursuit of the white criminals, they chose instead to search Latino eyewitnesses for weapons, claiming that following the guilty parties simply wasn't their "priority." Ramirez's attackers weren't arrested for another two weeks, even though eyewitnesses at the scene knew who they were without a doubt.

[ Read the whole thing ]

Music — Angela Aki, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"

Monakewego

[ aka Greenwich Point ]

Photos — Onset of Spring