Democracy Now! and the Metro Times are reporting that one of Detroit’s most well-known and best-loved activists, Grace Lee Boggs, has passed away at age 100.
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In a statement from Alice Jennings and Shea Howell, Boggs’ trustees, Boggs “died as she lived surrounded by books, politics, people and ideas”.
Grace Lee Boggs died peacefully in her sleep at her home on Field Street in Detroit this morning.
Boggs came to Detroit in the early 1950s to write for The Correspondence, a socialist newspaper. And her longtime home on the city’s east side has been transformed into the nonprofit Boggs Center.
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.
In 1992, Grace co-founded the Detroit Summer youth program to help rebuild collapsed neighborhoods. She inspired generations of leaders in the world of social justice activism.
She was featured in the 2013 PBS documentary, “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs”, in which she said reality is always changing, and people need to change their ideas along with it.
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Boggs was born in 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island, the child of Chinese immigrants, but grew up in New York City, where her father owned a Chinese restaurant on Broadway, the Detroit Free Press reported.
