Jul 22, 2017 Grace Lee Boggs, Jimmy Boggs Reader

98th Birthday – James Boggs May 27, 1919 July 22, 1993

Our comrade friend mentor and fellow Revolutionary Jimmy Boggs Passed Away 24 years ago 1993.

James Boggs (activist)

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For other people with this name, see James Boggs
James Boggs
James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs.jpg

James Boggs and his wife Grace Lee Boggs
Born May 27, 1919
Marion Junction, Alabama[1]
Died July 22, 1993(1993-07-22) (aged 74)
Detroit, Michigan
Occupation political activist
Spouse(s) Annie McKinley (1938)
Grace Lee Boggs (1953–93, his death)[1]

James Boggs (May 27, 1919 – July 22, 1993) was an American political activist, auto worker and author. He was married to philosopher activist Grace Lee Boggs for forty years until his death.

Biography[edit]

Born in 1919 in Marion Junction, Alabama,[1] James “Jimmy” Boggs was an African-American activist, perhaps best known for authoring The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook in 1963. He was also an auto worker at Chrysler from 1940 until 1968.

Boggs was active in the far left organization, Correspondence Publishing Committee, led by C. L. R. James from around the time it left the Trotskyist movement in the early 1950s, until Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs led a split in 1962, breaking with C. L. R. James. When Correspondence Publishing Committee earlier suffered a split in 1955, led by Raya Dunayevskaya, and lost nearly half its membership, James and Grace Lee Boggs remained loyal to Correspondence Publishing Committee. The group was advised by C. L. R. James, who was at that time exiled in Britain. In 1955, James Boggs became the editor of their bi-monthly publication, called Correspondence. However, political differences with C. L. R. James over time would eventually lead Boggs to take control over Correspondence Publishing Committee in 1962 and continue publication independently for a couple of years. James Boggs expressed the reasons for the 1962 split in his 1963 book, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook.

In later years, he would play an influential role in the radical wing of the civil rights movement and interacted with many of the most important civil rights activists of the day including Malcolm X, Ossie Davis and many others.

Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, who were married from 1953 until his death in 1993, “built a durable partnership that was at once marital, intellectual, and political. It was a genuine partnership of equals, remarkable not only for its unique pairing or for its longevity, but also for its capacity to continually generate theoretical reflection and modes of activist engagement.”[2]

Works[edit]

  • The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1963).
  • Book Manifesto for a Black revolutionary party (Philadelphia, Pacesetters Pub. House, 1969).
  • Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970).
  • Lenin Today; Eight essays on the hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s birth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970). (with Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff)
  • The awesome responsibilities of revolutionary leadership (Detroit, Mich: Committee for Political Development, 1970). (with Grace Lee Boggs)
  • But what about the workers? (Detroit: Advocators, 1973). (with James Hocker)
  • Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). (with Grace Lee Boggs)
  • Issues in race and ethnic relations: theory, research, and action (Itasca, Ill: F. E. Peacock Publishers, 1977). (with Jack Rothman)
  • Conversations in Maine: exploring our nation’s future (Boston: South End Press, 1978). (with Grace Lee Boggs, Freddy Paine and Lyman Paine)
  • Towards a new concept of citizenship (Detroit: National Organization for an American Revolution, 1979).
  • Liberation or Revolution? (Detroit: National Organization for an American Revolution, 1980).
  • These are the times that try our souls: the questions we have yet to ask ourselves (Detroit: National Organization for an American Revolution, 1981).(with Grace Lee Boggs and James Hocker)
  • Historical development of our social forces (Detroit: National Organization for an American Revolution, 1982) “Cadre Training School, Dec. 1-5, 1982.”
  • Our American Reality (Detroit: National Organization for an American Revolution, 1982) “Cadre Training School, Dec. 1-5, 1982.”
  • The urgent plea: a call for Black leadership (Philadelphia: National Organization for an American Revolution, 1985).
  • What can we be that our children see? (Detroit: New Life Publishers, 1994).

 

REBUILDING DETROIT: AN ALTERNATIVE TO CASINO GAMBLING

By James Boggs

Public Speakout, 1st Unitarian-Universalist Church

Friday, June 24, 1988

Monday night I went to the graduation for one of my grandsons in Ford Auditorium at which Mayor Young was the main speaker. The student who introduced Young said, with a smile, that he was the only Mayor she had ever known. Young then said in the same joking vein that maybe some students should come back in ten years and run for Mayor because by then he would probably have retired. Everyone laughed, but it is no joking matter. The sad truth is that his honor has been Mayor for so long he thinks he owns the town and seems to have forgotten that the people elected him and may one day retire him before his vision of Detroit leads us into even deeper chaos.

Coleman Young was elected Mayor of Detroit fifteen years ago because the city was majority black and the time had come for a black mayor. Also blacks were furious with STRESS, the decoy system that the Gribbs administration had created to catch street criminals. When he was elected, Young had no program for stopping crime. All he could propose in his inaugural speech was that the criminals should hit 8 Mile road. But he did have a dream, the dream that he could get the corporations to stay in Detroit by bribing them with tax abatements.

Today Young’s dream has turned into a nightmare. Crime has not hit 8 Mile road, but industry has. Parke-Davis, Strohs, the Mack Ave. Chrysler plant are all gone. Young promised us 6000 jobs if we allowed him to bulldoze 1500 homes, 600 businesses and 6 churches for a new GM plant in Poletown. Today our taxes are still going to pay for Poletown, but there have never been more than 2500 workers at the Poletown plant and most of those are from GM plants which have been closed down in other parts of the city, creating a wasteland in once thriving communities, especially on the southwest side of the city. At the same time the east side around the Chrysler Jefferson plants has been bulldozed so that it looks like a moonscape. Despite protests small businesses have been forced to leave, as in Poletown.

The reason Coleman Young’s dream has turned into a nightmare is that it was based on the illusion that we can bring back the good old days when Detroit was the auto capital of the world and hundreds of thousands of workers came to the city to do manufacturing jobs at the decent pay which had been won though the organization of the union. But today cars are being built all over the world, not only in Japan and West Germany but in South Korea and Yugoslavia, and multinational corporations have exported manufacturing jobs to the Third World where they can make more profit through cheaper labor. Coleman Young knows, as we all do, that large-scale industry is not coming back to Detroit. That’s why he is now calling casinos gambling an “industry” and trying to force it down our throats, promising us it will bring 50,000 to 80,000 jobs as the auto industry once did.

The workers, who came to Detroit during World War II, particularly from the South, had a lot of hope. They also brought with them a sense of family and a sense of community or of people living in harmony with one another. Working in the plant, they developed a sense of solidarity, at the same time earning enough money to buy homes and raise their families. As a result, Detroit became known as one of the best organized and disciplined cities in the United States, with the highest percent of working class homeowners north of the Mason Dixon line.

Today, however, the great majority of Detroiters no longer have any hope or solidarity with one another. Born and raised in the city, they have no experience of the culture which was second nature to those who had lived close to the land in small Southern communities. At the same time, they can no longer look forward to the well-paying manufacturing jobs which enabled their parents and grandparents to buy their own homes and raise their families. So rather than accept the minimum wage jobs which offer no hope for the future, an increasing number of our youth are attracted to the fast money and big bucks which come from selling dope. The result is that instead of being the auto capital of the world, Detroit has become the murder capital of the world.

However, instead of calling upon Detroiters to embark on a collective reassessment and exploration of how to rebuild Detroit, Young is becoming more arrogant and more stubborn every day. We, the people, he is convinced are too dumb to know what’s good for us. So he set up a commission stacked with his friends and appointees to study casino gambling. Unable to win a majority in the city for casino gambling, he created his own majority.

Today a person has to be really socially-conscious and farsighted to care about the people of Detroit or for that matter the people of any of our big cities. I emphasize this because we are living today in a society where most people only care about the here and now. To rebuild Detroit we need a long-range perspective and not just a quick-fix solution. We need to think of human beings as more than just bodies to be clothed and housed or bellies to be filled. Most of all, we need a philosophy which gives young people the basis for the kind of hope that their grandparents had: the philosophy that people and the relationships between people are more important than material things and instant self-gratification and the confidence that we can create a better tomorrow if we live by this philosophy. We know that the welfare state has failed to give them this perspective. We also know that big industry is not coming back, and that from now on, large-scale industrial jobs will be done in the developing countries or the Third World.

Historically, capitalism has always made sure that the people on the bottom get the leavings, and in this day and age the large-scale industrial jobs are the leavings and the people in the Third World are at the bottom. We also know that a free marketplace economy only serves the interests of the capitalists and that the capitalists are in business not to serve the human needs of working people but to make profit. Therefore when we think about rebuilding Detroit, we have to think of a new model of production which is based upon serving human needs and the needs of the community and not any get-rich-quick schemes.

The question which Detroit and other industrial cities are now facing is “What is the purpose of a city?” Up to now, because it has been our historical experience for the last 75 years, most Americans have thought of the city as a place to which you go for a job after you have been driven off the land by mechanization. But now we know that the large industrial corporations are not going to provide those jobs in our cities.

What then is going to happen to the one million people who still live in Detroit, half of them on some form of public assistance; not only blacks but Chicanos, Arab-Americans, Asian and poor whites? For most of them, Detroit is the end of the rainbow. They can’t go back to the farms from which their parents and grandparents came because these have been wiped out by agribusiness. There are no new industries coming for Detroiters. So if we are going to create hope especially for our young people, we are going to have to break with most of the ideas about cities that we have accepted in the past and start with new basic principles.

To begin with, we have to stop seeing the city as just a place to which you come to get a job or to make a living, and start seeing it as the place where the humanity of people is enriched because they have the opportunity to live with people of many different ethnic and social backgrounds. In other words, we have to see that our capital is in the people and not see people as existing to make capital for production or dependent on capital to live.

The foundation of our city has to be people living in communities who realize that their human identity or their love and respect for self is based on love and respect for others and who have also learned from experiences that they can no longer leave the decision as to their present and their future to the market place, to corporations or to capitalist politicians, regardless of ethnic background. We, the people, have to see ourselves as responsible for our city and for each other, and especially for making sure that our children are raised to place more value on social ties than on material wealth.

We have to get rid of the myth that there is something sacred about large-scale production for the national and international market. Actually, our experiences over the last 75 years has demonstrated that large-scale production, because it is based on a huge separation between production and consumption, makes both producer and consumer into faceless masses who are alienated from one another and at the mercy of economic forces and the mass media. Instead, we have to begin thinking of creating small enterprises which produce food, goods, and services for the local market, that is, for our communities and for our city. Instead of destroying the skills of workers, which is what large-scale industry does, these small enterprises will combine craftsmanship, or the preservation and enhancement of human skills, with the new technologies which make possible flexible production and constant readjustment to serve the needs of local consumers.

In order to create these new enterprises, we need a view of our city which takes into consideration both the resources of our area and the existing and potential skills of Detroiters.

Detroit itself is in the Great Lakes region, so we should think of how we can take advantage of this resource. We can start by developing a fishing fleet. This would mean training young people to fish for a living as they do in New England and along the West and East coasts. It would also mean building docks and cleaning facilities along the river bank in order to supply fresh fish for the whole area.

Michigan also has the best sand in the world. In the past this sand has been used mostly in foundries. We can use it to produce glass; glass to replace the broken windows that we see all around us; glass for the storm windows which will enable us to save energy and use the sun to heat our homes and our water. We can also use glass for greenhouses all over the city, so that we can grow vegetables for the local market all year round. During the spring and the summer we should “Green Detroit” by planting gardens in the thousands of vacant lots all over the city.

Every day on the expressway we see hundreds of trucks and vans equipped with ladder, electrical tools and lumber, bringing carpenters electricians and other skilled workers into Detroit to do the work of repairing Detroit homes. Meanwhile, inner city youth, black and white, stand around doing nothing and waiting for the dope man. Our community colleges should be organizing crash programs to train our youth to use their hands and heads so that they can be doing this work to improve our communities and our city instead of depending on suburbanites.

Detroit has raised many talented clothes designers, but they have all left for New York or California because we have only been able to think in terms of large-scale industry and haven’t recognized that Detroit could become a clothes-producing center for the state of Michigan.

Over the years Detroiters have become locked into the mentality that a party store is the only small business that the average person can create and that shopping malls in the suburbs are where you go to buy most things. We need to be creating all kinds of locally-owned stores in our communities so that we can not only buy our necessities locally but so that our young people can see stores not just as places where you spend money to buy what you want but as places where people are working to meet the needs of the community. In every neighborhood there should be a bakery where families can purchase freshly baked bread and children can stop by after school to buy their sweets. In every neighborhood there should also be food shops where working people can purchase whole meals to take home to eat together, instead of living off McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken. This has been a common practice in other countries.

We also need a fundamental change in our concept of schools. Since the World War II our schools have been transformed into custodial institutions where our children are warehoused for 12 years, with no function except to study and get good grades so that they can win the certificate that will enable them to get a job. What kids learn from books in school has little if any relationship to their daily lives. While they are growing up, they are like parasites doing no socially useful work, spending their time playing and watching TV. Then when they become teenagers, we blame them because they have no sense of social responsibility. We have to create schools which are an integral part of the community, in which young people naturally and normally do social necessary and meaningful work for the community, for example, keeping the school grounds and the neighborhood clean and attractive, taking care of younger children, growing gardens which provide food for the community, etc. etc. Connections should be created between schools and local enterprises so that young people see these as an integral part of their present and future. Our goal should be to make Detroit the first city in the nation to use our schools to support the community rather than as places where our young people are upgraded to leave the community.

Because of our declining population many school buildings in Detroit have been abandoned or are about to be abandoned. These schools can be turned into day care centers to care for the children of working mothers and fathers. They can be developed into political and cultural centers for the community; the place for town meetings or for a local museum where the arts and crafts are proudly exhibited.

These are only a few examples of the kinds of things we can do to rebuild Detroit once we realize that we can no longer depend upon the corporations or the politicians to save us and begin thinking for ourselves about what we can do and must do. At this point, what we need to do is to begin discussing how we are going to rebuild our city, in every block club, every church, every school, every organization and every home –because for the rest of this century and most of the next, the major question in this country is going to be “How will we live in the city?” Up to now we have come to the city expecting somebody else, meaning the corporation, to provide us with a livelihood. Now we are stuck here and we can’t run or hide anymore. We can’t go back to the farms, we can’t keep running from city to city. We must put down our roots where we are and put our hearts, imagination, minds and hands to work, so that we can empower ourselves and one another to create an alternative to casino gambling. Coleman Young’s crisis is our opportunity. Let us start the discussion here tonight.

 

Jul 20, 2017 Grace Lee Boggs

Living for Change: If Not Now, When? – 2010 – Grace Lee Boggs

Published on Monday, August 23, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Living for Change: If Not Now, When?

by Grace Lee Boggs

 I won’t be marching with Jesse Jackson in the March called by the UAW and the NAACP to commemorate the August 28, 1963 March on Washington.

That’s not only because at 95 my marching days are over.

As early as 1963, Malcolm X called the “I have a Dream” March a “Farce on Washington” because John Lewis had been forced to delete from his speech any references to Revolution and Power by the MOW’s “Big 6” organizers: A. Philip Randolph, Dr. King/SCLC, Roy Wilkins/ NAACP, James Farmer/CORE, Whitney Young/Urban League, John Lewis/SNCC.

Marchers were also instructed to carry only official signs and allowed to sing only one song ‘We shall overcome,’ (see p. 127, Living for Change).

Malcolm never put lipstick on a pig. Malcolm thought outside the box. If he were alive NOW, he would be telling us that we should no longer be marching. We should no longer be protesting. We should no longer be dreaming. We should no longer be encouraging democratic illusions.

  • WHEN millions of Americans do not have meaningful work,
  • WHEN as a result of our obsession with economic growth, wildfires in Russia burn dangerously close to nuclear plants and millions drown from floods and mudslides in Pakistan, China and Iowa,
  • WHEN Congress decides to cut back food stamps for the poor and hungry in order to provide paychecks for public employees because trillions are being thrown away on unwinnable wars in the Middle East and military bases around the world,
  • WHEN our cities are dying because corporations are exporting jobs oversea to make bigger profits,
  • WHEN our prison population is the highest in the world because our schools structured in the factory age have become pipelines to prison,

IT IS TIME TO STOP DREAMING AND PROTESTING.

Instead in every community and city we should be discussing how to make the “Radical Revolution of Values” not only against Racism but against Materialism and Militarism that Dr. King called for in his 1967 anti-Vietnam war speech.

King’s call for this “Radical Revolution” came only four years after his 1963 “I have a Dream” speech. But in those few years, youth in Watts, California and other cities had risen in Rebellion. In Chicago King and anti-racist marchers had experienced the raw ugliness of Northern racism. The genocidal war in Vietnam had exposed our country as the world’s worst purveyor of violence and on the wrong side of the world revolution.

That is why in 1967 King decided that the time had come to warn the American people that unless we make a Radical Revolution in Values, we face spiritual death.

In 2010, 42 years later, we are experiencing massive physical and spiritual death.

Why are we STILL marching and dreaming?

Why are we not making a “radical revolution in values”?

Why are we STILL obsessed with economic growth?

Why are we STILL allowing corporations to deprive us of jobs by replacing human beings on the line with robots and by exporting jobs overseas to make greater profits?

Why are we STILL accepting the dictatorship of technology and of corporations?

THE TIME HAS COME to

  • slow down global warming by building sustainable local economies and by living more simply.
  • reject the dictatorship of technology so that it is no longer normal and natural to replace human beings with robots.
  • stop corporations from exporting jobs overseas.
  • end factory-type schooling and start engaging schoolchildren in local community rebuilding.

LET’S START THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX!

IF NOT NOW, WHEN?

Grace Lee Boggs has been an activist for more than 60 years and is the author of the autobiography Living for Change.

 

Jul 03, 2017 Grace Lee Boggs, Uncategorized

Boggs Center – July 3rd, 2017 – Living For Change News letter

Jimmy and Grace  

We are the Children of Martin and Malcolm…

We are the children of Martin and Malcolm,           Black, brown, red and white, Our birthright is to be creators of history, Our Right, Our Duty           

To shake the world with          

A new dream!

.
Living for Change News
July 3rd, 2017
Thinking for Ourselves
Commonplace Cruelty
Shea Howell

Much of the media coverage this week focused on Donald Trump’s feud with journalists. In what can only be characterized as a scathing editorial, the New York Times described Trumps behavior as coarse, vengeful, embarrassing, nasty, creepy, denigrating, awkward, vulgar and repugnant.

These same descriptions apply to his attacks on immigrants. The recent Supreme Court decision to uphold part of the executive travel ban has allowed the administration to aggressively target people for exclusion. Freed from judicial oversight, the White House renewed senseless travel restrictions and its attacks on Muslims and people from Arabic countries.

While the Supreme Court will review the case in the fall, it restored much of the original executive intent to limit immigration. The administration moving quickly with renewed aggressiveness.

“It remains clear that President Trump’s purpose is to disparage and condemn Muslims,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, adding that the government’s new ban on entry “does not comport with the Supreme Court’s order, is arbitrary and is not tied to any legitimate government purpose.”

The punitive, vengeful and nasty nature of this effort by the administration was underscored by other actions taken by House Republicans at Trump’s urging. In the midst of the crisis on health care and tweets about journalists, GOP forces found time to crack down on undocumented people and those who support them.

The House introduced two separate bills that, while certain to meet resistance in the Senate and across the country, demonstrate the level of cruelty now commonplace in the GOP. The first bill is an effort to increase prison sentences for people who re-enter the country without proper documentation. The second renews attacks on sanctuary cities and promises to cut federal funds. The Secretary of Homeland Security, John Kelly, made a rare appearance at the Capitol to make a special assault on cities that declare concern for all the people who call them home. In an effort to obscure reality, Kelly said these new anti-sanctuary laws would prevent local officials from prioritizing “criminals over public and law enforcement officer safety.”

Named “No Sanctuary for Criminals Act,” the bill expands the amount of money a city could lose if it does not cooperate with federal immigration officials and it would also prevent people from filing lawsuits against federal authorities who detain immigrants. Even without these laws, the administration has been targeting people for deportation.

Two weeks ago, more than 100 people in metro-Detroit were rounded up and processed for deportation. Most were Chaldean. Most have lived peacefully and lawfully here for many years, building full lives after escaping persecution in Iraq. As Christians they have long been a targeted minority there. Almost all of them had committed minor violations of the law, and paid for them. Now grandparents, brothers, sons and husbands are being characterized as hardened criminals and given what could well amount to death sentences if they are sent to Iraq.

Immigration officials invaded homes and workplaces arresting people without notice or any sense of due process. People were transported out of state, leaving families with little understanding of what is happening to them.

This ugliness is just beginning. Our mayor needs to do much more to support all of the people in our city. Our faith communities, schools, universities and civic organizations have a responsibility to extend sanctuary to all who seek it.

At a moment when those in authority are clearly coarse, vengeful, embarrassing, nasty, creepy, denigrating, awkward, vulgar and repugnant, we the people have to develop ways to protect, support and care for one another. It was never more obvious that what is legal is not the same thing as what is right.

Bill Wyle-Kellerman’s last sermon

Death Has No Dominion

WATCH IT HERE

writing a poem for kellermann again again: 
you would think we were married

Jim Perkinson 
(written upon Rev. Kellerman’s retirement from St. Peters Church)

there is a man
who is really a tree
sitting at a table
which is really a city
looking into a rectangular-shaped
crystal ball called
william stringfellow
(this is a postmodern legend;
things get weird names
and strange shapes)
the man grins, searches through
the tipped over stack of books
on his floor which is really the
entrance ramp to the belle isle bridge
follows the words from book to book
straight across the strait until he
get interdicted by the last book
which is actually not a book at all, but the
case file folder of his homrich 9 trial
puts his hearing aid in so he can hear
the voices floating up off the pages better
which are really not voices but red admiral
butterflies that seek to perch in the mustache
hairs over his lip which are really tree leaves
dangling over the flowing river (except he
doesn’t know it—he thinks he’s really
a human). the butterflies land and the water
suddenly roils with sturgeon coming to the surface
to check out the red and black kaleidoscope
flickering above the ceiling of their world
which, if you asked the man, he would assure you
is just the reflection of the dark dirt under his nails
from weeding his backyard garden mirrored in the side of his glass of cabernet sauvignon as he tips the
trader joe’s elixir into the little knot-hole that appears under the leaves of one of the branches to water the stiff old roots gnarling their way into the summer-hardened soil which he thinks is a basketball court he will one day once again float over like a quicksilver otter finding openings between the rocks of legs of what he imagines are prosecutors trying to keep him from scoring points with the box of jurors presiding at the half-court line.he is confused.

thinking he has just won a minor skirmish in a global war about faucet flows in poor houses but actually he is a willow tree on an island seducing the river to climb his veins and come out his bark
as shoots to feed the deer and give the cicadas something to keen about and they do, in sharp trilling cadences all over socially mediated screens of lightning flashes that he thinks are just i-phone and android pulses rather than songs to the moon about the prognosis of the sun’s growing fever, and little cricket cheers that at least the possums under the porch and blossoms on the iris don’t yet have to abandon this world of rising floods of education vouchers and shutoff notices and lead leeches and incinerator belches that he, like some don quixote in front of a decrepit windmill, lumps together in a single perception as a foul wind-machine monster called an emergency manager (or otherwise named
“mayor” or “governor”).   

anyway, this strange crystal ball vision of a fellow-ship of stringy possibilities that is really the rest of us causes him to sit back and muse not realizing he is actually slumped forward and snoring into his own bared belly button (it is hot out so he has his t-shirt pulled up) which receives his breath as if it were the brief flight of a swallow seeking shelter in a nest hidden in slender grasses waving on a hill of well-fed dreams and he dreams, drooling a little bit onto his own knees (you ask how i know this
—probably i am projecting)

but he dreams with his naked toes curled around the pages of all of his past writings gathered at his feet

under the table like the growing horde of grandkids who also love to go on treasure hunts there, and the words climb his legs like tendrils of vine circling the trunk he really is, finding purchase for their little bright fruits in all the crevices of the bark which do
not lessen as they ascend and then at a certain altitude those words suddenly conceive themselves birds of multiple kinds, flying off in maelstroms of delight in liberation, careening in virtuoso
inebriation of insight, finches of laughter flitting like snorts from the limb of his nose, prayer cardinals of ritual regally clutching the top edge of his ear, bluejays screeching when an orange-headed
dust-storm of toxins suddenly threatens the national horizon, woodpeckers of conviction trying to wake the head, a tiny hummingbird of harry potter inspiration riding the rhythm of sonority coming from the flap of the mouth, topped off by crows of augury vigiling for apocalypse in the spreading savannah on the crown . . .

—a man, as a tree, dozing
in the sun, bearing fruit, giving truth wings,
and hosting waters of repose for the desperate, rooted at the strait, bending the gale, enduring the leaf-blight and the ice fall and the locust swarm of gentrifying, bleach-featured “saviors,” and
marathon truck grit and quicken loan buzz saws and marauding snipes from the towers of finance
(not to mention jail cells)

—a tree, who thinks he is a man, giving life, like mustard become cedar, to every manner of little one
and creature needing shelter.

may he blaze with color in this new autumnal season as it rises with kisses and augury in its touch.

WHAT WE’RE READING

Ruminations on Rust

Adrienne Marie Brown

art21

IMG_2287
(By Ash Arder)

I am, and have long been, an anticapitalist: for me, the built structures being swallowed up by nature and rust were beautiful promises, indicative that this moment of bottomless consumption was not eternal, that everything humans make, even oppressive structures that deny nature, is temporary.— when I moved to Detroit, I was enthralled by its ruins, even though I now point and laugh at White urban explorers drawn here for the same reasons. I think the finding of a spiritual home by Black folks is different from the privileged spelunking by White folks, and that’s what my first impressions of Detroit held solid beautiful Blackness; obvious survival. I thought, “I can grow here; my Blackness will be held here.”

— I preferred Detroit’s train station, with all the windows blown out, to any other building I’d seen in this country, dressed as it was in the graffiti of brave artists, proof that someone had transgressed the fences and risked the darkness and stood there unseen, leaving traces of themselves in the surface of the city.

KEEP READING

The Worst is Yet To Come

Naomi Klein on Democracy Now!

The James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership

.

3061 Field Street
Detroit, Michigan 48214
US
Jun 21, 2017 Get Involved, Grace Lee Boggs, Organizing for Change, Uncategorized

River Wise – Saturday, June 24, 2017 at the Feedom Freedom – Community Conversation

Riverwise6-24-17Invite_feedom_freedom
 In the interest of expanding the traditional role of a community publication,
Riverwise magazine is continuing its series of ‘community conversations’ in various
neighborhoods throughout the city. We hope to support the wide range of visionary activism
taking place in Detroit by providing not only the story content, but a forum for further
engagement through careful dialogue.
Our next gathering will take place Saturday, June 24, 2017 at the Feedom Freedom
urban garden from 1-3pm. The emphasis that Feedom Freedom has placed on community
empowerment provides a suitable setting in which to discuss the past, present and future of
Riverwise magazine and the people that support it. Feedom Freedom’s motto, “Grow a garden,
grow a community,” falls right in line with the mission of Riverwise magazine to grow the
community by telling our own stories with our own voices.
Feedom Freedom is located at 866 Manistique, Detroit, Michigan, 48215. For more
information, call 313-247-4771.
With the recent publication of our second edition, the Riverwise Collective urges our
readers to join us to discuss the potential to expand our political consciousness and social
responsibility through storytelling. Please join us to reflect on the direction of the magazine,
story ideas for upcoming issues and a viable future based on evolving ideas.
In love and struggle,
Eric T. Campbell
Project Manager
Riverwise Magazine
Mar 30, 2017 Grace Lee Boggs

Confronting Our Own Contradictions by Grace Lee Boggs

CONFRONTING OUR OWN CONTRADICTIONS

By Grace Lee Boggs

Michigan Citizen, Oct. 29-Nov.4, 2006

I hope this reflection by an activist in her late 20s will encourage reflection and discussion by other activists.

“In the Black Political Study for Social Change, a group of grassroots activists, we discussed the slogan ‘Change yourself to change the world.’ Diehard militant and black nationalist that I believed myself to be at the time, my response was ‘We ain’t the problem. It’s capitalist oppression that creates chaos and insanity in our lives. ‘

It’s obvious that this chaos is directly attributable to capitalism which places profit seeking above the welfare of humanity. It’s also obvious that we must ultimately confront the social and political forces maintaining the current order if we are to usher in a new order. As James and Grace Lee Boggs put it, this is our “awesome task.”

What do we need to do to prepare ourselves for this task? The answer is simple, yet easier said than done. We have to confront our own issues. It is one thing to understand the role that oppression plays in separating us from our humanity. It is another to use this understanding to justify remaining on that level.

Those of us genuinely interested in social change have a responsibility to struggle with ourselves and those around us to confront the myriad of backwards, inhuman, anti-social behaviors that are impeding our ability to struggle.

How can we, as a leadership force, struggle with people to confront the status quo in a contest for power without first asking them to confront the contradictions in themselves? In their communities? How can we ask people to struggle for a just social and economic order when their consciousness has been abused and warped enough to accept the most gross injustices?

Teaching in an urban public school has allowed me to see firsthand just how far we have sunk.

One of my students brought a video to school. It was a series of live, amateur footage of extremely violent scenes in black neighborhoods. It showed black women smashing each other’s heads into car windshields and black men choking, stabbing and robbing each other. In one scene a young black man pours a container of gasoline on a homeless black man lying on the ground, then takes off the man’s shoes and stuffs them down the sewer. When the homeless man gets up, the young dude stabs his feet with the point of an umbrella, laughing as the man yells out in pain.

In another scene a group of young black men beat a black man within inches of his life, and then speculate on whether he is still alive as blood gushes from his mouth. Completely unnerved by the whole thing, I demanded that the student who brought in the video turn it off. Yet most students cheered and laughed, while the few who voiced some concern limited it to ‘that’s messed up.’

Where are we? Can a people so separated from basic human dignity effectively struggle for a social order in which human dignity is placed above economic gain? Malcolm X, who often chided the black masses, dealt with this question. James and Grace Lee Boggs caution against excusing backwards, anti-social behavior simply because the person is oppressed.

This tendency is rooted in Marx’s assertion that workers, when politicized, will rise to the occasion and carry out their revolutionary task of seizing governing power. In our movement, identifying the black working class as the social force most equipped to engage in a struggle for justice, has translated into a tendency to ignore or explain away serious contradictions in our social lives. pI have begun to see that there is nothing inherently glorious about us. This is as true of working people as it is of black ‘leadership.’ Being a worker, especially in the U.S., doesn’t automatically mean that you are capable of struggling for social change. It doesn’t mean that you are automatically prepared to accept the task of changing society or that you even unite with it. And being a self-avowed “leader” or “activist” doesn’t automatically mean that you are worth a damn.

Anyone can claim an idea. But how many are really willing to apply such high ideals in every sphere of their lives? Not just standing in front of a group of people yelling about what capitalism is doing to us, but what we are doing to ourselves.

So it goes right back to changing ourselves first. Before we can fight for humanity, we have to understand and embrace our own humanity and that of people around us. Before we can fully embrace high principles on how society should be organized and governed, we have to embrace principle in our own lives. It’s a simultaneous process.

At this point I am 100% committed to the struggle to put governing power in the hands of the masses. I am also 100% committed to doing what is necessary to prepare the masses to assume governing power.”

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