Grace Lee Boggs, Ph.D. '40, Brings a Lifetime of Activism to Bryn Mawr Campus

Grace Lee Boggs, who embarked upon a life of political activism after earning a Ph.D. in philosophy at Bryn Mawr in 1940, will return to the College on Sunday, Feb. 11. At 3 p.m., she will attend a screening of "Women of Summer," a documentary film about the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, which was held at Bryn Mawr from 1921 to 1938. Following the screening at 4 p.m., she will give a talk titled "Another World is Possible," focusing on the transformational potential of education and the development of urban youth. The program is to take place at Aelwyd House on Cambrian Row.

Boggs is a first-generation Chinese American who crossed race and class barriers to become a central figure in the black liberation struggle and the labor, women's, Asian-American and environmental-justice movements. In a career of more than 60 years, Boggs has worked closely with activists such as Malcolm X, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Kwame Nkrumah and Stokely Carmichael.

She and her husband, African-American auto worker, labor organizer and political theorist James Boggs, wrote and edited scores of publications, including the book Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century. The couple collaborated closely in the Workers' Party with the Trinidadian Marxist theoretician C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of the Marxist-Humanist movement in the United States. Grace Lee Boggs translated many of Marx's Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844 into English for the first time.

She is the author of an autobiography titled Living for Change, published in 1998 by the University of Minnesota Press. In 1992, she helped found Detroit Summer, a multicultural, intergenerational youth program to designed to "rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up." Currently she is active in Detroit Summer and with the Freedom Scholars, and writes for the weekly Michigan Citizen.

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