We in Detroit Called it a Rebellion
Grace Lee Boggs in conversation with Bill Moyers, 2007
BILL MOYERS: Let me take you back to that terrible summer of 1967, when Detroit erupted into that awful riot out there.
GRACE LEE BOGGS: I ask you to think about your calling it a riot.
BILL MOYERS: What would you call it?
GRACE LEE BOGGS: We in Detroit called it the rebellion.
BILL MOYERS: The rebellion?
GRACE LEE BOGGS: And because we understand that there was a righteousness about the young people rising up — it was a rising up, it was a standing up, by young people.
BILL MOYERS: Against?
GRACE LEE BOGGS: Against both the police, which they considered an occupying army, and against what they sensed had become their expendability because of high-tech. That what black people had been valued for, for hundreds of years, only for their labor, was now being taken away from them.
BILL MOYERS: And you think that this question of work was at the heart of what happened-- or it was part of what happened in Detroit that summer?
GRACE LEE BOGGS: I don't think it's that they were conscious of it, but I thought-- what I saw happen was that young people who recognized that working in the factory was what had allowed their parents to buy a house, to raise a family, to get married, to send their kids to school, that was eroding. They felt that-- no one cares anymore.
GRACE LEE BOGGS: And what we tried to do is explain that a rebellion is righteous, because it's the protest by a people against injustice, because of an unrighteous situation, but it's not enough. You have to go beyond rebellion. And it was amazing, a turning point in my life, because until that time, I had not made a distinction between a rebellion and revolution. And it forced us to begin thinking, what does a revolution mean? How does it relate to evolution?
From "Bill Moyers Journal" (broadcast on PBS, June 5, 2007):