Grace Lee Boggs Who 'Struggled To Change This Country' For 7 Decades Dies At 100
A 100 years of graceful service later, Grace Lee Boggs, the legendary civil rights activist from Detroit, passed away on Monday morning, Oct. 5.
She was an agent of change. President Barack Obama said about her: "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."
Her life has been eclectic and diverse. She concentrated on "civil rights, labor, feminism and black power". Daughter of Chinese immigrants in Rhode Island, she lived an eventful life in New York City and later moved to Detroit in the 1950s to pen her articles for a socialist newspaper, according to The Associated Press.
The Detroit years were colourful, when the author and philosopher nurtured gardens in empty plots, started community organizations and political movements, took out marches opposed to racism, gave wide lectures on human rights and wrote widely on her "evolving vision of a revolution in America", according to The New York Times.
She took part in the campaign spearheaded by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. With her husband, James Boggs, she gave Malcolm X a place to stay in Detroit.
Her husband died in 1993. They had no children or other immediate family members.
She has been the author of a number of books, but in her last one, "The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century" (2011, with Scott Kurashige), she felt a kindred spirit with revolutionaries such as Thoreau, Gandhi and Dr. King. "We are not subversives," she wrote. "We are struggling to change this country because we love it."
And finally, her death was peaceful but reflective. "Grace died as she lived: surrounded by books, politics, people and ideas," two of her trustees said, according to The Huffington Post.
