http://www.boggscenter.org/

http://conversationsthatyouwillneverfinish.wordpress.com/

LIVING FOR CHANGE

SEEING DETROIT WITH YOUR HEART

By Grace Lee Boggs

Michigan Citizen, June 15-21, 2008

Recently the Boggs Center hosted a tour of doctoral students participating in a social,justice/community-building weekend seminar at Wayne State University. The tour began with a welcome by me. We also showed Shapeshifters, the exciting new album featuring rappers Invincible and Finale.*

Sixty years ago, I told the students, Detroit was a national and international symbol of the miracles of industrialization. Then it became an example of devastation by de-industrialization,. Now it is in the process of creating the kind of self-sustaining city needed in the present period of planetary meltdown, soaring food and fuel prices, and a sinking economy.

The following is from an essay by one of the students:

”When I found out that this seminar was being held in Detroit I was thoroughly disappointed. "Why does this have to be in Detroit? Why can't it be somewhere nice?’

“But then I heard Grace Lee Boggs say two things that I will never forget. The first was that ‘we don't see with our eyes, we see with our minds and our hearts.’

“As I moved through the city that day, I began to see a different Detroit. My eyes still saw poverty and devastation, and I am not ashamed to say I felt fear for my safety as we moved through parts of the inner city. But I pushed myself to see Detroit as Grace does, with my mind and my heart. And my heart saw gardens, community vegetable gardens on those abandoned lots where buildings no longer stood. My mind saw the work and effort put into growing food for a community. With food prices soaring and not a single major grocery store chain in the entire city of Detroit, these gardens are part of a movement to create a community not dependent on the globalized food market. A community that feeds itself, sustains itself and makes itself healthier through a relationship with the each other and the earth.

“As we continued, my heart saw a school for pregnant and parenting teens that looks like the farms I see in the South. A farm? In the middle of Detroit! Complete with vegetable gardens, horses, goats, and a barn built entirely by those teenage mothers. My mind saw a school where a condition of graduation is acceptance to college, a school where caring for animals and the earth and growing your own food teaches lessons about caring for your child, yourself and your community.

“Then we stopped for a while at one block not far from Grace's home. My eyes saw more poverty, devastation, and I felt fear. But my mind saw a man named Mike. A brilliant storyteller who showed my heart this block of Detroit where he, as a licensed contractor, is helping his community build. They're building a space for peace where members of the community come to work out their differences without violence and where they are symbolically burying hate, racism, sexism, and classism.

A place where they are planting trees and vegetables, where they offer technology and graphic art opportunities to the community. A place where they have built benches and signs for people to write down their troubles and fears and wait for other community members to later sit on that same bench and write down suggestions and possible solutions. A place where Mike says he is working just one small block at a time to rebuild and reclaim the spaces of his community that have been abandoned by the city planners and the state and federal governments.

“Our group moved on to Heidelberg St. where local (and now internationally known) artist Tyree Guyton takes the abandoned and the seemingly worthless to create art installations on his block and throughout Detroit. If I see these items and installations with my eyes, I see trash. But when I see with my heart and my mind I see the beauty of hope and of reusing that which has been abandoned. When our eyes are on Detroit, we see trash, but when we see with our hearts and minds we can see Tyree Guyton's Detroit, one of beauty and art.

“Back on the bus my mind turned back to Grace. In an interview on PBS last year, she told Bill Moyers that ‘positive changes, leaps forward in the evolution of humankind, do not start with governments.’ And in her talk Grace told us the second thing that I will never forget, ‘We are the leaders we are looking for.’ My heart and mind saw leaders that day in the most unlikely of places. Leaders that are not waiting for a government official or a presidential candidate to save their community; leaders that are creating gardens and creating community. Leaders that love their city and have stayed to save it.”