Film Review: “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs”

By Yi Chen

Washington, DC – Chinese American philosopher and social activist Grace Lee Boggs is the subject of Korean American filmmaker Grace Lee’s latest documentary “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs.” The documentary won the Audience Award at the 2013 Los Angeles Film Festival and premiered at the AFI Docs in Silver Spring for its east coast release.

The fact that both filmmaker and subject share the same name may appear to be just a confusing coincidence, but it’s actually a story of serendipity. Thirteen years ago, the 31-year old Lee met the 85-year old Boggs when she was making “The Grace Lee Project,” a feature documentary that explores Asian American stereotypes and model minority myth through many different women named Grace Lee.

Boggs does not fit in the stereotype of Asian American women: reserved, dutiful, piano-playing overachievers. Instead, she is a fiery activist, committed to the black community. Boggs was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Her father owned the “Chin Lee” restaurant on Broadway & 49th Street in New York City. Boggs studied at Barnard College where she took a philosophy class and was influenced by German philosopher Hegel’s dialectic thinking. It changed her way of thinking and stayed with her for years.

“I read Hegel’s readings as if I was listening to music,” said Boggs. After she received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1940, Boggs was unable to find jobs in the academic world because she was oriental. So she moved to Chicago and took a job at the University of Chicago Philosophy Library for $10 a week.

Boggs was aware that black workers were suffering but to her it was nothing more than a statistic. In Chicago she was able to see black workers and get to know them first hand. In 1941, the March on Washington made Boggs realize that “if you mobilize a mass action, you can change the word.” This would be the beginning of her life long activism. “If a movement can achieve that, that’s what I want to do for the rest of my life,” she said.

In the 1940s Boggs was a faithful student of Marx and Hegel in the 1940s. She joined the Socialist Workers Party and her Party name was Rita Stone. Boggs met her husband James Boggs, an African American autoworker and political activist, in Detroit where she edited the newsletter for the Correspondence Publishing Committee led by C.L.R. James. The couple married in 1953 and Boggs has been living in Detroit ever since.

The story of Boggs embodies almost a century of American history, from labor to civil rights, to Black Power, feminism, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, the 1967 rebellions, the Asian American and environmental justices movements and beyond. At the age of 98, conversation is now Boggs’ main form of activism. She says to a group of young students in a classroom, “You don’t choose the time you live in, but you do choose who you want to be, and how you want to think.”

When Boggs invited actor Danny Glover into her home, she gave him six books to read after their conversation about quality education. Detroit’s young hip-hop activist Ilana Weaver spends her birthday with Boggs over a one-on-one conversation every year. A conversation with Boggs is never just a chat. She pushes people to evolve their ideas. “Ideas have their power because they are not fixed,” Boggs said.

The documentary American Revolutionary explores the power of ideas and the necessity of expansive, imaginative thinking, as well as ongoing dialectical conversation, to propel social change. Just being angry, resentful or outraged, Boggs says, does not constitute revolution. “So many institutions of our society need reinventing. The time has come for new dreams. That’s what being a revolutionary is,” says Boggs, who has devoted her life to an evolving revolution.

Check out our video interview with filmmaker Grace Lee here.

For more information on future screenings, visit the documentary’s official website www.americanrevolutionaryfilm.com.

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