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Books by James
Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs
Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century
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The
American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's
Notebook
Living for Change: An Autobiography
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Conversations in Maine: Exploring Our Nation's Future
Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party /
Racism and the Class Struggle
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Give
Detroit Schools a Fresh Start
By Grace Lee Boggs
Recently, I enjoyed talking with Tonya Myers
who is running for the School Board in District 1. This
includes downtown, northeast Detroit, and parts of southeast
Detroit and the west side.
Tonya is not just repeating the buzzwords of
“smaller classes,” “parent involvement,” “certified
teachers.” She is boldly tackling the critical issue of
inner school dropouts, proposing substantive but at the same
time do-able changes.
Åt 28, she is young enough to remember her
experiences as a student in Detroit’s public schools.
But since then she has graduated from college and law school, worked
for a living and reflected on the changes in our world.
Inner city schools, she has concluded, are organized on
the factory model. Students are trained to take in and
regurgitate information, to do assignments and fill out work
sheets so that they will be ready to take orders after they
graduate. This factory model worked as long as there were
enough factory jobs.
But since globalization, inner city
students need the kind of preparation in critical
thinking, leadership and thinking about the future that suburban
students take for granted Our young people, she says,
are as smart as suburban students. But they drop out because at
a gut level they recognize the class differences between their
factory-oriented "training" and the empowering
education of the middle and upper class youth...
If we gave our kids more responsibility, if the
curriculum were more engaging, and empowering, there would be
fewer dropouts (40,000 since the state takeover five years
ago!!) and parents wouldn¹t be withdrawing their children from
public schools and putting them in charter and suburban schools.
Towards this goal, Tonya proposes:
More hands-on learning by doing. We should
work with our children more to show them how the sum of the
parts relates to the whole, and how the material presented in
the classroom relates to them personally, to their community,
and to the world around them.
We need a stronger civic involvement in our public schools.
Children should be meeting with city and state government
department heads. They should play a role in the
democratic process.
Community-service, only a minimal requirement at this
time, needs to be made more meaningful.. Our children need
opportunities to do more positive things and to help
create beautiful things. For example, community gardening (which
Tonya did with Triedstone Baptist church after graduating from
the University of Michigan) is a wonderful way of bringing
people together, City children don¹t get enough
opportunities to watch things grow.
Raise MEAP scores by actually engaging students in learning and
leadership, not in preparing for tests.
Bring elders into the classroom. Many elders look on youth with
disdain or are simply afraid of them. Young people often
treat the elders as if they are irrelevant. Neither really
understands the other. One of the programs Tonya helped
organize with the Rosa & Raymond Parks Institute was called
"The Civil Rights Generation v. The Hip-Hop
Generation."
Increase the international focus of public school education.. .
Our world is changing So our children need
more exposure to different cultures and other ways of doing
things. They need more opportunities to go abroad. A lot of our
kids don¹t even get outside the city, let alone outside the
country.
Give our kids the sense that "you can do anything you want
to do, go anywhere you want to." For more on empowering our children, read FREEDOM
SCHOOLING; BRINGING THE NEIGHBOR BACK INTO THE HOOD, a Boggs
Center pamphlet, $7 +$1 SH.
Source: Michigan Citizen, July 17-23, 2005 /
Living for Change: An Autobiography by Grace Lee Boggs
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Grace Lee Boggs is an activist, writer,
and speaker whose sixty years of political involvement encompass
the major U.S. social movements of this century: Labor,
Civil Rights, Black Power, Asian American, Women's and
Environmental Justice. Born in Providence, R.I. of Chinese immigrant
parents in l915, Grace received her B.A. from Barnard College in
l935 and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in l940.
In the l940s and l950s she worked with West
Indian Marxist historian C.L.R.James and in l953 she came
to Detroit where she married James Boggs, African American
labor activist, writer and strategist. Working together in
grassroots groups and projects, they were partners for over 40
years until James' death in July l993. |
Their
book,
Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century,
was published by Monthly Review Press in l974. In l992, with James Boggs and others, she
founded DETROIT SUMMER, a multi-cultural, intergenerational
youth program to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the
ground up which completed its ninth season in June 2000.
Currently she is active in the Detroit Agricultural Network, the
Committee for the Political Resurrection of Detroit, writes for
the weekly Michigan Citizen, and does a monthly
commentary on WORT (Madison, Wisconsin).
Her
Living for Change: An Autobiography published
by the University of Minnesota Press in March l998, now in its second printing, is widely used in university
classes on social movements and autobiography writing. -- http://www.boggscenter.org/
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Privatizing Education: The Neoliberal Project
Black Education and Afro-Pessimism /
The Collapse of Urban Public
Schooling / The Myth of Charter
Schools
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Zippety Doo Dah, Zippety-Ay: How Satisfactch'll Is Education
Today? Toward a New Song of the South
Dr. Joyce E. King on Black Education
and New Paradigms
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest / Black World
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Enjoy!
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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update12 January 2012
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