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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
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Racism and the Class Struggle
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Organizing Comes Before Mobilizing
By Grace Lee Boggs
Last week veteran
Detroit activist and TV producer Ron Scott shared his
thoughts on the recent massive demonstrations in support
of the Jena 6. Emphasizing the distinction between
organizing and mobilizing, he reminded us that the
Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began fifty-two years ago
on December 1, 1955 and lasted more than a year, was the
culmination of years of organizing by local activists
like NAACP stalwarts E.D.Nixon and Rosa Parks.
“Had the people of Montgomery merely come out for one
day and gone home, we would have nothing to write about
today.”
This distinction between organizing and mobilizing is
especially important in this period when in Detroit and
other parts of the country and the world, we are in the
very early stages of building a 21st century movement to
rebuild our communities and our cities, while also
addressing the interconnected issues of planetary
emergency, the imperial presidency and the calamity of
the invasion of Iraq.
To help us think about the distinction with the
seriousness it deserves, I recommend reading and
discussing the chapter on “Slow and Respectful Work” in
Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The
Organizing Struggle and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle
(University of California Press, 1995). Many Minds, One
Heart, a recent book by Virginia State University
Professor Wesley C. Hogan, also emphasizes the
importance of patient one-on-one organizing, although,
surprisingly, Ms. Hogan makes no reference to Payne’s
groundbreaking book.
The civil rights movement had such an enormous impact on
this country and the world because prior to mobilizing
huge marches and demonstrations, members of the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (mostly black, mostly
southern, mostly from working class backgrounds), not
only had a vision of “beloved community” but were ready
to spend a lot of time doing the spadework of building
relationships with people in the black community.
Convinced that there are individuals in every community
whom others look to because they have an unconquerable
faith in their own humanity, refuse to see themselves
only as victims and take pride in thinking for
themselves, the members of SNCC set out to find these
natural leaders.
The method they used was simple. They talked with people
and got to know them by listening patiently, in
conversations at the post office, the market, at
meetings and church services. At the same time they gave
people in the community daily opportunities to get to
know them as individuals who were respectful to women
and the elderly, who kept their word and lived up to
values respected in the community.
It was only after the legitimacy of the “movement” had
been established by this kind of “slow and respectful”
organizing in the community that they began to mobilize
large numbers in marches and demonstrations.
Today few people understand or appreciate the role of
this patient, beneath the radar community organizing
because we know the civil rights movement only in its
later period when it had begun to attract the attention
of the national media, So we think of the movement
mainly as mobilization: as marches, demonstrations,
violent events and personalities or charismatic
leaders.
The Detroit City of Hope campaign is today in the
community organizing stage. In 2007 we hosted two events
to commemorate the 40th anniversary of MLK’s
anti-Vietnam war speech and the 1967 Detroit rebellion.
Through these events, endorsed by 32 very diverse
community organizations, we made the community aware of
our intent to mount a campaign to rebuild, redefine and
respirit Detroit from the ground up.
Now our challenge is to help the individuals and groups
already engaged in this work or eager to embark on it
create ways and means to connect with, learn from and
support one another.
LIVING FOR
CHANGE –If you appreciate receiving these weekly
emails, we hope you’ll send a tax-deductible donation to
the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership.
www.boggscenter.org Thank you. Grace & Shea
Source: Michigan Citizen, Dec. 25, 2007
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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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John Henrik Clarke—A Great and Mighty Walk
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
Basil Davidson's "Africa Series"
Different
But Equal /
Mastering A Continent /
Caravans
of Gold /
The King and the City /
The Bible and The Gun
African Slave Trade: Precolonial History,
1450-1850
By Basil Davidson
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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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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
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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
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update
22 January 2012
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