Archive for March, 2012
Solutionaries
By Grace Lee Boggs
March 31 – April 7, 2012
In the last year a growing number of individuals and groups has been visiting the Boggs Center to learn more about what we’re doing in Detroit to create the world a new and also share the story of their own efforts.
Until recently, these discussions were taking place about once or twice a month. Last weekend, however, we hosted three such meetings in two days.
Last Friday morning Maya Soetero Ng shared with the Boggs Educational Center — a Detroit group of parents and teachers preparing to open a community-based school — the principles and processes she has used for this purpose in New York City and Hawaii. Continue Reading »
Thinking for ourselves
Reading truth
By Shea Howell
March 27, 2012
Amidst all of the pressing issues facing Detroit, it is understandable how the mainstream media missed a very important article about adult literacy published this week by Data Driven Detroit. The article challenges the oft repeated statistic that 47% of Detroit’s adult population is functionally illiterate. The statistic, and the so-called “new study” that produced it, is neither “new” nor true.
The notion that half of the adults in Detroit cannot read swept through the media like a tornado. Local media outlets, CBS, Fox, NPR, and Huffington Post all reported some version of the “alarming new study” that said “nearly half of Detroiters can’t read.” Continue Reading »
Solutionaries
By Grace Lee Boggs
March 31 – April 7, 2012
In the last year a growing number of individuals and groups has been visiting the Boggs Center to learn more about what we’re doing in Detroit to create the world anew and also share the story of their own efforts..
Until recently , these discussions were taking place about once or twice a month. Last weekend, however, we hosted three such meetings in two days.
Last Friday morning Maya Soetero Ng shared with the Boggs Educational Center — a Detroit group of parents and teachers preparing to open a community-based school — the principles and processes she has used for this purpose in New York City and Hawaii. Continue Reading »
Thinking for ourselves
Reading truth
By Shea Howell
March 27, April 31, 2012
Amidst all of the pressing issues facing Detroit, it is understandable how the mainstream media missed a very important article about adult literacy published this week by Data Driven Detroit. The article challenges the oft repeated statistic that 47% of Detroit’s adult population is functionally illiterate. The statistic, and the so-called “new study” that produced it, is not neither “new” nor true.
The notion that half of the adults in Detroit cannot read swept through the media like a tornado. Local media outlets, CBS, Fox, NPR, and Huffington Post all reported some version of the “alarming new study” that said “nearly half of Detroiters can’t read.” Continue Reading »
LFC We’re going to Atlanta
By Grace Lee Boggs
March 24-31, 2012
I’m looking forward to going to Atlanta next week with other members of the Boggs board.
We’ve been invited to speak to Vincent Harding’s Morehouse College class on “The Last Years of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Future of America.”
Dr. Harding created this class in order to introduce Morehouse students and other members of the Atlanta community to the direction that MLK was taking in his post March-on-Washington years, especially his continuing call for “a revolution of values” and the struggle against the “triple evils” of racism, materialism and militarism.
He has invited speakers whom he views as seeking to carry on the unfinished work of King in creating a multiracial democratic American nation.
His guests this semester have included urban planner Emmanuel Pratt and his Sweetwater Foundation co-workers in Milwaukee and Chicago; Bob Moses and his daughter, Maisha, sharing their work with the Algebra Project and the Young Peoples Project; Nelson and Joyce Johnson from the Beloved Community Project in Greensboro, N.C.; Phillip Jackson from the Black Star Project in Chicago; James Douglass, major historian of the assassinations of Gandhi, Malcolm and King;
Robert Franklin, president of Morehouse; Michelle Alexander, author of the New Jim Crow, and Sister Helen Prejean, leading death penalty abolitionist.
They have also included Zoharah Simmons, Harding’s long-time co-worker from SNCC, the American Friends Service Committee and Nation of Islam experience. Zoharah, a SNCC volunteer in the 1960s when she was a teenager, is now a professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, a member of a Sufi Moslem community and a historian of the Freedom Movement.
The class challenges Morehouse students and other Atlanta citizens to consider their role in the creaion of a new future for our nation.
As Detroiters who organized last October’s historic gathering on Re-imagining Work in the Motor City, we will be sharing the Visionary Organizing we have been doing to help Detroit, a majority African American city, become the national and international symbol of a 21st Century post-industrial society.
We will be emphasizing the important role that the new informational technology can play in helping local communities produce for our own needs, thus becoming self-reliant and freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the factory assembly line and globalization.
This is a mode of production whose time has come because it can play a significant role in bringing about the radical revolution of values advocated by MLK .
About 30 young men are registered in Dr. Harding’s class but we will be speaking to a larger and more diverse audience because he has opened the class up to interested members of the Atlanta community as well as to students and faculty from other institution. The setting will be interactive and dialogical. .
Invincible is coming with us to convey, as only a rap artist can, the excitement of a city in {r} evolution.
Early this month we were in the Bay Area. Last weekend Detroiters participated in the New Left Forum meeting in New York City.
In April we’ll be in New York again, speaking at Cooper Union and the New School.
Thus, step by step, we’re sharing what Detroit is contributing to the Next American Revolution and also getting a sense of what is taking place in other regions of our country .
Thinking for ourselves
State of siege
By Shea Howell
March 20, 2012
Detroit is under siege. Slowly but surely the right wing forces in the state are tightening their grip. Whatever the outcome of negotiations among the Mayor, City Council and the State over the next few weeks, it is clear that Lansing politicians intend to run the city. They intend to eliminate the political power of Detroit residents. They intend to transfer public resources into private hands. They intend to destroy unions. They intend for their consultant friends and contributors to make money in the process.
Most Detroiters know that the use of the emergency financial manager law has nothing to do with concern for the financial health of the city. It is a legalized power grab to disempower citizens and take public resources.
People in Lansing and around the state rub their hands with glee as they claim the financial crisis of Detroit is proof we are incapable of running our own city. They refuse to look at the structural problems they have helped create, or to acknowledge their debt to the city. Nor have they acknowledged that Emergency Managers have yet to solve any of the problems that justified their creation.
In a recent article in the New York Times, David Firestone, removed from the Detroit bashing of Lansing, observed, “Muscling the city aside would clearly be undemocratic, and it is not even clear how effective it would be. The state took over Detroit’s schools in 2009, and has little to show for it yet except for more closed schools and a continuing exodus of students and teachers.”
Firestone concluded the article noting, “The solution may be in the suburbs that have siphoned off Detroit’s money and jobs and talent for decades. A true emergency manager, as many people here have suggested, would have the power to begin merging the tax base of the city with that of suburban counties in hopes of saving the region.”
Any Consent Agreement that does not include the power tax the surrounding suburbs is a sham.
We need to support every effort to challenge this law. We need to encourage the Mayor and the Council to insist on their authority to make decisions. If the state is unwilling to protect the elected officials, we encourage the city to declare bankruptcy. Such a process would not be pleasant, but over the last few years, the court system has proven more sensitive to the democratic right of the citizens of the city than has Lansing.
The thoughts of putting Detroit in its place and getting their hands on all of our assets are blinding the powers in Lansing to the very real rage that is smoldering in the city. As they narrow the political space that Detroiters have to redress our grievances, to come together to resolve our problems and to discuss our own future, the right wing forces in Lansing are pushing people toward more and more desperate measures.
This assault on our basic rights and dignity is especially evident to Detroiters who are engaging in real democratic actions all over the city. As Wayne Curtis of Feedem Freedom Growers said this weekend in New York City at the Left Forum, “Growing our gardens is about making decisions that matter. It is a process that challenges our marginalization and gives us control over our lives.” All across Detroit, people are recreating a new kind of direct democracy, making decisions about planting gardens, protecting parks, running churches, establishing peace zones, creating activities for children, supporting elders, and finding ways to recreate communities ties.
Lansing is playing a dangerous, losing game. Most Detroiters know that the world is changing, challenging those who abuse people and use power for their own gain. The long, deep struggle to control our own lives on principles that value ourselves and one another will not be taken over or given up.
THIS WEEK’S LIVING FOR CHANGE
Changing Concepts of Revolution
By Grace Lee Boggs
In 1941, inspired by the success of the March on Washington movement led by black labor leader A.Philip Randolph, I decided to join the radical movement.
At the time the concept (or paradigm) of revolution generally accepted inside and outside the radical movement came from the 1917 Revolution in Russia. Not only the oppressed but millions of others around the world had been inspired when the Bolshevik Party, led by Lenin, had been able to take state power because it had mobilized the workers and the peasants and organized them into Soviets around the demand for “Bread, Peace and Land.”
Thinking for ourselves
State of our city
By Shea Howell
March 13, 2012
Mayor Dave Bing gave his third State of the City Address last week amidst one of the most difficult moments in Detroit history. A looming financial crisis threatens local control of the city. An emergency manager or a consent agreement forced by the state may strip the city of elected government, set aside union contracts, and sell off public assets. Violence has increased the feelings vulnerability of people on the streets and in our homes. The tragic killings of children has caused everyone to mourn the
senseless loss of life that is becoming all too common. Basic services
continue to erode, breakdown and close down. Continue Reading »
BCNCL visits the Bay Area
By Grace Lee Boggs
I’ve just returned from an amazing visit to the Bay Area with four other members of the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership board: Shea Howell, Scott Kurashige, Ron Scott, and Kim Sherobbi.
Scott Kurashige, who co-authored The Next American Revolution, arranged and micromanaged our awesome schedule.
- Thursday afternoon I spoke to a group of young people at a Stanford University meeting convened by Jeff Chang and Greg Palumbo-Liu .
There to welcome me was Ayodele Thomas who is a Stanford dean . Her parents were active in the civil rights movement in Kentucky and I have known her since she was two.
Friday afternoon Angela Davis and I engaged in a conversation ‘’On Revolution” at the University of California-Berkeley Student Union. Shea Howell’s column this week provides an account of this warm and memorable event .
Saturday afternoon Scott and I spoke at the Cultural Center in San Francisco’s Chinatown at a celebration sponsored by a number of organizations, including Asian Law Caucus, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Center for Political Education, Chinese for Affirmative Action, Chinatown Community Development Center, Movement Strategy Center, OPEIU Local 3,SEIU Local 1021, Silicon Valley Independent Living Center.
Pam Tau Lee mc’d the celebration which included an exciting performance by young activists of the Lion Dance and the proclamation of March 3, 2012 as Grace Lee Boggs Day by the City and County of San Francisco.
Thinking for ourselves
City honors
By Shea Howell
March 6, 2012
I looked forward to hearing Angela Davis and Grace Lee Boggs discuss philosophy and revolution last week at the Empowering Women of Color Conference hosted by the University of California-Berkeley. It was because of Angela Davis that I came to Detroit and because of Grace and James Boggs that I stayed.
In the early 1970’s I came to Detroit with the National Alliance Against Racism and Political Oppression for a convention. Angela Davis gave the welcome speech. Before she spoke, Congressmen John Conyers and Charles Diggs, Mayor Coleman Young and the entire Detroit City Council presented her with the keys to the city, honoring her courage, commitment, and sacrifice for the Black Freedom Movement. John Conyers, especially, had played an important role in bringing national attention to the horrible prison conditions she endured while being held for trial on charges of murder relating to the Soledad Brothers.
I thought then that any city that was willing to so boldly honor a woman who had been on the FBI most wanted list for years, who had challenged the racism and militarism of this country so forcefully, must be special place. In honoring Angela Davis, Detroit, newly emerging as a city forged by Black political leadership, began to redefine itself by claiming a tradition of justice, political struggle and values that were very different than those of much of America.
Now, more than 35 years later, Dr. Davis began the conversation with Grace Lee Boggs saying she wanted to talk some about that tradition noting, “the Black Radical tradition is recognized all over the world. There are two struggles that have international stature, the anti apartheid movement and the black freedom movement. No one on the planet has not heard the name Nelson Mandela and very few who do not know Martin Luther King.” She concluded, “The Black struggle for freedom here in the Americas has had profound implications for people struggling for freedom everywhere.”
Dr. Davis paused to acknowledge the “absolutely formative role” that Grace and James Boggs played in the evolution of that tradition and then went on to talk about revolution.
She said, “Revolutionary approaches require us to open up and make our ideas and our movement more capacious so that what is revolutionary is not narrow and exclusive but broad and inclusive and the linkages and connections that we must make as we move toward revolutionary struggle are of the sort that are evoked by women of color feminism.”
Grace Lee Boggs began her part of the conversation talking about the importance of philosophy and challenging how we think. Born before the Russian Revolution and participating in virtually every movement for change since the 1930’s, Dr. Boggs she has “learned that how we change the world, and how we think about changing the world, has to change.” She quoted Einstein saying, “’Splitting the atom changed everything but the human mind, and thus we drift toward catastrophe.’ And he also said ‘imagination is more important than education.’ The time has come to reimagine everything.”
Boggs encouraged the audience to engage in “visionary organizing” that went beyond protest to creating alternative ways of working, living, teaching, learning, caring for one another and for the earth.
Dr Boggs invited everyone to come to Detroit where new ways of living are emerging in the midst of the city, long abandoned by capital. Here, in Detroit, she said, people have responded to the crisis we face as not just as a danger, but also as an opportunity. An opportunity to “grow our souls” and to “create the world anew.”
The next day, on March 3 2012, the Mayor of San Francisco and the Board of Supervisors declared Grace Lee Boggs Day, honoring her work for justice, reminding all of us that cities are essential in redefining what America will be.
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