Learning about the work of Grace Lee Boggs

Last month, I attended a digital reading group facilitated by writer and photographer Shaira Chaer and Collective Resistance, a group of Black Bronx artists created in 2019 by Dominican storyteller and activist P! 

The two-part session, of which I attended only the second, focused on Grace Lee Boggs's work, particularly “What Time is it on the Clock of the World,” from Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century, written by Boggs and her husband, James Boggs, in 1974. 

Boggs was an author, philosopher, and community activist, born in Rhode Island. She worked with C.L.R. James, author of The Black Jacobins. She married and collaborated with author and organizer James Boggs; together, they wrote and organized for 40 years.

Her writing includes George Herbert Mead: Philosopher of the Social Individual; The Invading Socialist Society; State Capitalism and World Revolution; Facing Reality; and Women and the Movement to Build a New America. 

In Revolution and Evolution, Boggs and her husband wrote about the differences between rebellion and revolution, describing revolutionary organizing as new to human history. They wrote that “only in the last two hundred years have people believed that the oppressed could not only rise against their oppressors but go on to create a new, more advanced society.” 

I had never read Boggs’s work or known anything about her life and organizing, and for 2024, I want to learn and read more about her life. I want to think more deeply about this question of time and human resistance history and what it means to re-imagine one’s relationship to time, writing, community, and resistance.

I am grateful for Chaer’s facilitation and the questions they raise about Boggs’s work in the newsletter, “Un Comunicado:” 

This question was an invitation to imagine our collective human history as a clock; as time changes, our conditions change, and so should our strategies – how do we resist? What organizing tactics do we use? How do our previous experiences and collective histories inform where we are on the clock? How does this translate to strategy? What, if anything, needs to be built from scratch?

In solidarity,

-Olga