Civil rights & activism / Labor / Literature
James Boggs
1919–1993 · autoworker, activist, author
Alabama-born Chrysler worker and radical thinker who, with his wife Grace Lee Boggs, spent five decades organizing for change on Detroit's east side.
- Born
Marion Junction, Alabama- Died
Detroit, Michigan
aged 74- Also known as
- Jimmy Boggs
- Detroit years
- 1938–1993
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
James Boggs left rural Alabama during the Depression, rode freight trains north and reached Detroit in 1938. He found work on the assembly line at Chrysler's Jefferson Avenue plant and stayed for nearly three decades, becoming active in the United Auto Workers and in small Marxist study groups. In 1953 he married the Chinese American philosopher Grace Lee, and the couple made their home on the city's east side, where they would live and work together for 40 years. His 1963 book The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook, written from the shop floor, predicted that automation would push Black workers out of industry and made him a respected voice of the Black Power era. In later decades the Boggses turned to rebuilding neighborhoods from the ground up, working with groups such as Save Our Sons and Daughters and helping to launch Detroit Summer, a youth program, in 1992. He died in Detroit in 1993; the Boggs Center and a charter school carry on the couple's ideas.
Highlights
- Worked on the line at Chrysler's Jefferson Avenue plant for nearly 30 years
- Wrote The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook (1963)
- Partner in activism of Grace Lee Boggs from 1953 until his death
- Co-founded the youth program Detroit Summer in 1992