But that obscure faction has a fascinating history, for the leaders of the Johnson-Forest Tendency also included Raya Dunayevskaya, a Russian-born Marxist feminist, and Grace Lee Boggs, then known as Grace Lee. The three "inseparable" intellectuals, "a tall, handsome black man flanked by two women, one a somewhat stooped and scholarly Jew and the other a round-faced Asian," as Boggs puts it, make an unlikely combination even today.
Indeed, their close collaboration, which produced, among other things, some of the first English translations of Marx's early works as well as remarkably prescient writing about race in America, suggests a hidden history of multicultural radicalism, just as Boggs's career points to a secret strain of "New York intellectual."
The difficulty of placing her under a familiar rubric--coupled with a thoroughgoing modesty that pervades her new memoir--may help account for why Boggs's life and work are not better known. A Chinese American who has devoted her life to the black liberation struggle, a Ph.D. in philosophy who has soldiered for decades in countless grassroots movements, a New York child of immigrants who has become a self-described "griot" in Detroit's inner city, Boggs defies categorization. Still, Boggs's life echoes themes that '30s-era New York intellectuals like Irving Howe have made commonplace--the "ethnic" as outsider, the vagaries of assimilation, the seductive community of radical movements. In Boggs's case, though, being a woman of color led to an decidedly uncommon trajectory.
Boggs grew up in Jackson Heights, when "we were the only Chinese in the neighborhood." Far from the small Chinese ghetto in Manhattan, Boggs sought community in books. But having earned a doctorate in 1940, she found herself at something of a loss. "I had no plans for the future. It would have been a waste of time for me, a Chinese woman with a Ph.D. in philosophy, to apply to a university for a teaching job."
Instead, Boggs immersed herself in A. Philip Randolph's 1941 March on Washington movement, which, she usefully recalls, "transformed American society" by planting the seeds of the Civil Rights Movement. Soon, she says, "I decided that what I wanted to do with the rest of my life was become a movement activist in the black community."
That decision comes as something of a shock, and Boggs's reflections on the subject are somewhat elliptical, but her memoirs details the ways America's black and white world forced racial negotiations on Asian Americans: "During a layover at the Lexington, Kentucky, airport, I was refused service at the lunch counter and told to go to the back. I can still remember how scared, alone, and confused I felt until I decided to sit down in the space set aside for 'Colored.'" Boggs's identification with the African American struggle would become so total--especially after she married the black auto worker and radical activist James Boggs--that, as she notes approvingly, "in FBI records of that period I am described as Afro-Chinese."
After the March on Washington, however, Boggs drifted into the Trotskyist Workers' Party Her chapters on her sectarian years are the book's liveliest: "We moved about as if we had discovered the secret of the universe. In any gathering you could tell us by the stars in our eyes." But perhaps most interestingly, those chapters produce an alternative account of the New York intellectual's journey through Marxism. Unlike many better-known Soviet-obsessed comrades, who passed through Trotskyism, Boggs had been drawn to the movement by the black struggle. Her subsequent path provides a an instructive comparison to, say, Howe's. While Howe remained a progressive after his Trotskyist years, he developed a cantankerous relationship to the New Left and its black and feminist sympathies. Boggs, on the other hand, threw herself wholeheartedly into the new social movements, and evolved remarkably seamlessly from Old Left to New Left.
The bulk of her autobiography consists of an impressive account of the rise and fall of grassroots movements in Detroit, a kind of catalogue of postwar black radicalism (which, unfortunately, sometimes reads like a catalogue). Throughout, Boggs cuts an extraordinary figure as a matriarch of black liberation. In 1967, after Detroit erupted in flames, six black activists were blamed for the rebellion; Boggs was one of them.
Boggs remains rooted and active in black Detroit, but since the death of her husband in 1993, "new discoveries about my identity as an Asian American" prompted reflection: she sat down to write her memoir after a return to Queens revealed a newly Asian and Latino Jackson Heights.
Some things, however, never change: soon after her Queens trip, Boggs went back to Detroit, found a newspaper strike, and at the age of 81, got herself arrested supporting the strikers.
(Andrew Hsaio's review in the Village Voice of Grace Lee Boggs's "Living for Change," University of Minnesota Press)
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)