Preface from 28 October 2015
I wrote the text pasted below a few days after the encounter took place. As a remembrance of Grace’s life and impact, I post it here. The backstory: I belong to an affinity group called Compass made up of about fifteen artist activists. Since 2008 we have been circulating around the Midwest in different combinations, researching various histories and environmental conditions, and contributing to social movements and campaigns. Wanting to understand the city and see by extension some very profound truths about deindustrializations all over the Midwest and around the world, some of us started making trips to Detroit. A group of us attended the Allied Media Conference of 2009, an event that ended with a birthday celebration for Grace.
That fall I mailed Grace copies of our first Compass publication, a little book A Call to Farms. I included a letter of introduction explaining my political education and activist history, said that I grew up in Saginaw in a restaurant family, and offered a few thoughts on what I and my friends saw as the neoliberal globalization of the Midwest. Grace returned a lovely letter validating our ideas and encouraging us to come to Detroit the next year, around the time of the US Social Forum. She and I exchanged a few communications and consequently set up a meeting at the Boggs Center. For me it was an exciting and surreal moment. Though influenced by Michigan counterculture as a young person, I left the state in 1986 at age eighteen. I never knew about Grace and Jimmy until well into the 2000s. And yet the long pathways of life had brought me to a formal intersection with Boggs Center folks, including Grace, somebody who to me might feel like a long-lost elder relative simply because of our parallel backgrounds.
After this encounter I never again wrote Grace. I saw how full her days were and did not want to steal time from her. I saw her once more about a year later and we had a hearty greeting but no time to talk. For me it was this one winter afternoon—that was all the time with Grace that I needed.
First Encounter at the Boggs Center
I wanted to know, who is this person Grace Lee Boggs? After having attended her big 94th birthday party last summer in Detroit, which followed the close of the Allied Media Conference and brought many of the visiting media activists into contact with longtime Detroit civil rights, labor, environmental, social justice, and other activists, I must say, I had only curiosity and a desire to get closer. That event was held on a hot midsummer day, in a hot crowded room, teeming with love, wonderful food, and too-warm bodies of all age, shape, and color. Invincible rapped her way to my and everybody else’s heart and mind. Danny Glover supplied a little Hollywood to the afternoon. It was a birthday party in Detroit, in the midwest radical culture corridor.
Seven months later, a cold and snowy winter’s afternoon. The often empty streets of Detroit, forlorn but beautiful, sleeping through a winter much like the ones I remember from my Michigan childhood in the Seventies. We drove into the East Detroit neighborhood of Grace’s home, the Boggs Center, coming in on Mack from downtown. We passed out of the shrunken neoliberal stronghold of Midtown and into the neighborhoods, sparse, ghostly and regal residential Detroit. Where and how does the awakening happen?
The Boggs Center is one of the pulsing hearts, keeping the hibernating dragon warm until the days lengthen. We came as visitors, hoping to find our own sustenance. By the first half hour of our three hour encounter, we’d been assured that our presence was a gift to them. Grace testified to the significance of the Call To Farms book, the way it brought the strands of culture, economics, and place together. The generosity of gratitude was heart-stopping, and almost embarrassing. As so often has been the case, I was grateful for the presence of Mike Wolf, collaborator and traveling companion. Here, we could be a little embarrassed together.
Rich Feldman directed the seating arrangement, putting Mike and I directly across from Grace, on the short side of the long table. Grace opened the meeting with a masterful performance—how meetings has this woman sat through in her decades of life and work, my goodness? “We are in a special moment on the clock of the world. America is in decline.” From there, the spirit in the room took off, and I didn’t know where it would land.
Our introductions were brief. We had Grace as the elder, and Andrew as the younger, and many points occupying the seventy years in between the two. Shea Howell came out as doer, a thinker and seer whose brain works through action. Rich Feldman drew lines in the sand, gently but firmly, and each time Mike and I wanted to take his side of the line. Together, it seemed that all in the room recognized in one another, the recognition that old models of thinking cannot be all that there are. The elusive, fictional Recovery, that is the consensus goal of the political class. “An economic recovery, back to how things ‘should be.’ Which is, basically, imperialism.” Bam.
It was a peaceful, loving room, and the falling snows muffled the ambient noise to a hushed level. But the echoes ringing inside my head were deafening. A Job Is Not The Answer—that is what Jimmy Boggs was saying at least as early as 1981. Where had I heard that before? In the pages of the Fifth Estate. They probably learned that from Jimmy and Grace. No stretch to imagine so, since Rich delivered to us a greeting from Peter Werbe upon our arrival. Grace, one minute relating her (still-fresh!) frustrations when in attendance at the Second World Congress of the Fourth International in Paris in 1948, then in the next moment bringing affects and biopolitics into the conversation, and casually mentioning that she’d just finished Commonwealth by Hardt and Negri, and oh, by the way, that we really should read it!!! When Shea said that she thinks it would be great to have a session or USSF event organized around place-based politics, she spoke about the notions of bioregionalism from the Seventies, half countercultural, half environmental ethics, being mostly abstract a generation ago. She said she perceived those ideas now emerging as a reality. Yes, I concur. We now have an existential element informing our ideas of bioregionalism, making the notion both concretely material as a lived thing but also more profoundly spiritual. Grace remained both analyst and organizer throughout, oscillating between theoretical observations and elegantly motivational speech. “We are the leaders we have been waiting for” is the mantra—in the context of that conversation, the message was, do not wait for approvals from the USSF organizers or anybody else. Just make your work happen. Bring it to Detroit, help make the conversation.
The resonant thoughts, analyses, and visions went on and on. Larry’s contributions to the conversations were few but intense, with a restrained anger underneath, and I loved them. Barb was a presence of quiet and warm determination, informed by her working as an outsider in Southeast Asian communities. By the time we’d gotten to sharing our visions for the summer, I felt that this was indeed a special moment. Not speaking about historical moments and big blocks of time only, but right there, in that room, two groups of human beings found each other, and what’s more, found that we are on the same road. The Road to Detroit, the Road to Our Shared Future. In the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor. Grace gave us books, including Yusef Bunchy Shakur’s Window 2 My Soul.
We parted in a tired but uplifted mood, hitting the road through fading light and heavy, gorgeous post-industrial flakes. Mike and I were received by Compass comrades in Urbana, Illinois, the next day, ready to tell the story.
Dan S. Wang
11 January 2010
Epilogue from Fall 2010
Mike, myself and other Compass friends did go back for the Social Forum. We organized a mapping workshop at the forum and a day later staged an open neighborhood cook-out on the lawn of the King Solomon Baptist Church, under the twinkling shade of an Adrian Blackwell-designed sun tent. Activists who had traveled in for the Social Forum mixed with residents from the block, a couple of whom brought out their own grills to help with the cooking. Detroiter Rashaun Harris took people on an impromptu tour of the nearby Hush House. A group of justice workers from LA found their way out, joining for hotdogs. There were political artists and media makers—Scott Berzofsky, Sabine Gruffat, the late Dara Greenwald.
We packed things up as the lingering Michigan sunset closed down the event, opposite our position in relation to the sun when Mike and I visited the Boggs Center in January. Grace made a hundred of these turns, enough to touch thousands of lives. Perhaps political revolution is not so unlike planetary revolution, after all. We float on our path, doing laps—growing, becoming, transforming all the while, under the variable warmth of a sun we have no choice but to share.