Grace Lee Boggs at the Packard Plant. (PBS photo)
Detroit activist, philosopher, author and feminist Grace Lee Boggs died Monday morning at her Detroit home at age 100, reports Democracy Now!.
“She left this life as she lived it: surrounded by books, politics, people and ideas,” said her friends and caretakers Shay Howell and Alice Jennings, Democracy Now! reported.
Boggs, who was born above her father's Chinese restaurant in Providence, R.I., was involved with the civil rights, Black Power, labor, environmental justice, and feminist movements over the past seven decade, Democracy Now! reported.
In 1992, she co-founded the Detroit Summer youth program.
Her husband, Jimmy Boggs, died in 1993. In 1995, she founded the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership in Detroit and a Detroit charter school bearing her name opened in 2013.
This is posted on her Facebook page:
Grace Lee Boggs died peacefully in her sleep at her home on Field Street in Detroit this morning. She had recently celebrated her 100th birthday at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.
Grace was an internationally known philosopher activist for justice. She had been politically active since the 1930’s working with A. Phillip Randolph’s first march on Washington and later C.L.R. James. For more than 40 years she worked closely with her late James Boggs in advancing ideas of revolution and evolution for the 20th and 21st Centuries.
She helped organize the 1963 March down Woodward Avenue with Dr. Martin Luther King and the Message from the Grassroots conference with Malcolm X. Grace Lee Boggs was active in Labor, Civil Rights, Black Power, women and environmental justice movements. Later, with her husband James, she helped organize SOSAD, WePros, Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, Gardening Angels and Detroit Summer. Grace was a founding member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership and was a strong advocate for place based education and supported the James and Grace Lee Boggs School.
A memorial celebrating her life will be announced later.
