Before the speeches, before the manifestos, before the books, the movement houses, the pan-African conferences – James Boggs was just a Black man with grease under his nails showing up for a shift at Chrysler.

A poet with a punch card, a theorist with a timecard. 

He didn’t talk about revolution from a podium – he lived it right on the shop floors of Detroit.

The segregated Deep South was what brought James Boggs to life.

He was Black, working-class, and poor – what America in the 1920s called disposable – yet he managed to get by on a burning curiosity alone. 

In the 1940s, he came to Detroit on the back of the great Migration and worked as a maintenance man at Chrysler, another cog in the wartime machine.

In its industrial heyday, Detroit represented a contradiction: full of possibility, yet rife with inequality.

And here James Boggs was, watching it all unfold from behind safety goggles and steel toe boots.

He saw more than just an economy.

He saw an organism that was sick, productive, hungry, and alive.

So he reacted the only way he could:

He picked up a pen and wrote about it. 

Boggs was not an academic. 

He was not a polished Marxist pamphleteer.

He was a worker trying to understand the machine.

Boggs joined the Correspondence Publishing Committee in the 1950s, led by C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya. 

Though many in the movement quoted Lenin, Boggs quoted his coworkers. 

While others debated dialectics in Brooklyn brownstones, Boggs was in Detroit break rooms listening, testing, observing.

His seminal work appeared in 1963:

“The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook.”

It was radical in both content and form. 

Here we had a Black autoworker writing about the automation crisis, how the Left had not come to terms with race and class as intertwined, and how revolution needed a radical rethinking.

He predicted what most Marxists missed:

That work was changing

That the factory would not be forever.

And that this would destabilize class in new, unforseen ways.

In the 1950s, James met Grace Lee, a Chinese American philosopher with a PhD from Columbia and an intellect comparable to his own. 

They formed a partnership that became a movement, a Black-Asian alliance of radical imagination that defied convention.

They built concepts, not careers. 

They organized in neighborhoods, not lecture halls.

The two would go on to form Detroit’s Black Power movement, work with Malcolm X, and later depart from traditional leftist frameworks to see revolution as a human, ethical evolution, not just a regime change.

As many revolutionaries fled the inner city during the 1970s and 1980s, James and Grace dug their feet in even deeper. 

This devotion led to the founding of Detroit Summer in 1992 – a transgenerational, multicultural movement to rebuild Detroit from the inside out. 

Boggs and Lee believed in:

• Youth leadership
• Education through activism
• Communities transforming themselves without permission.

And through it all, James never stopped writing, always challenging the idea that revolution means grabbing state power.

Instead, he and Lee proved that revolution is nothing more than a new beginning. 

It is a call to build, not to destroy.

James Boggs died in 1993 but left behind an intellectual garden that would bloom for decades. 

Grace continued to carry the torch until her death in 2015, often referring to their home at 3061 Field Street (now the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center) as more than just a house, but a movement hub.

Today, the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center nurtures community leadership in Detroit, standing as a living testament to the belief that change happens through the people, not just politicians.

James Boggs did not write from the ivory tower. 

He wrote from the belly of America’s industrial beast, always believing that the next revolution wouldn’t be televised – but that it would rise from the beaten hands of workers, the minds of dreamers, and the dignity of those who should have given up, but didn’t.

In short, he was a man who dared to imagine a Detroit completely rebuilt by the very people it could have easily destroyed.

Victoria Jackson (Editor In Chief)

Victoria Jackson is a lifelong student and sharp-eyed documentarian of all things Detroit, from its rich musical roots and cultural icons to its shifting neighborhoods, storied architecture, and underground legends. With her finger firmly on the pulse of both the city’s vibrant past and its rapidly unfolding future, she brings a deeply personal, historically grounded lens to every piece she writes.

Published on: June 26, 2025