In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs

by Stephen M. Ward

Overview

James Boggs (1919-1993) and Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015) were two largely unsung but critically important figures in the black freedom struggle. Born and raised in Alabama, James Boggs came to Detroit during the Great Migration, becoming an automobile worker and a union activist. Grace Lee was a Chinese American scholar who studied Hegel, worked with Caribbean political theorist C. L. R. James, and moved to Detroit to work toward a new American revolution. As husband and wife, the couple was influential in the early stages of what would become the Black Power movement, laying the intellectual foundation for racial and urban struggles during one of the most active social movement periods in recent U.S. history.
 
Stephen Ward details both the personal and the political dimensions of the Boggses' lives, highlighting the vital contributions these two figures made to black activist thinking. At once a dual biography of two crucial figures and a vivid portrait of Detroit as a center of activism, Ward's book restores the Boggses, and the intellectual strain of black radicalism they shaped, to their rightful place in postwar American history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469659237
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	02/01/2020
Series:	Justice, Power, and Politics
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	830,433
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.03(d)

About the Author

Stephen M. Ward is associate professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African studies and the Residential College at the University of Michigan.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Stephen Ward's highly anticipated biography of James and Grace Lee Boggs lives up to its promise, and then some. Set largely in Detroit, the center of black working-class insurgency, In Love and Struggle tells the compelling story of what happens when two of America's most original thinkers dedicate their lives to acting in the world. Jimmy and Grace insisted on the urgency of philosophy, on constantly questioning, and on staying grounded in community. With absolute clarity and care, Ward traces the couple's evolution toward revolution, engages the prodigious body of work they left behind, constructs a new history of U.S. radical movements, and opens a window onto an unfinished future.—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Grace Lee and James Boggs shared a passionate commitment to global social justice movements alongside a deep solidarity with the Detroit black working class. Stephen Ward brilliantly captures the arc of their lives from Marxist theorizing to making the Black Revolution to building vital social movements at the grassroots. Ward has written the definitive biography of this extraordinary partnership.—Martha Biondi, author of The Black Revolution on Campus and To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City

In Love and Struggle is the perfect title for this powerful book, which offers new insights into the 40-year partnership of two unlikely lovers and comrades. Grace Lee and Jimmy Boggs, Detroit-based radicals, were intellectual heavy weights and big-hearted revolutionaries. Their thinking about Black struggle evolved over the decades, as did their definition of revolution itself. Stephen Ward's wonderful new book is both a political tribute to his two subjects, as well as an important scholarly contribution to the historiography of the Black Left.—Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision

Editorial Reviews

Fills a gaping hole not just in the history of the lives of two extraordinary activists, but in the history of the 20th century U.S. Left, and the history of Detroit. People interested in any of the above should read this book.—
Against the Current

Will intrigue readers interested in the history of Detroit, black radicalism, civil rights, antidiscrimination efforts, social justice work, and urban activism.—Library Journal

Examines the intersections among Marxism, socialism, communism, Pan Africanism, labor activism, and civil rights in the 20th century. Recommended.—Choice

Ward's painstaking attention to the ideas of both James and Grace Lee Boggs helps to illuminate the rigor of their revolutionary thought, and he elegantly traces their shift from workers' liberation to black liberation.—Michigan Historical Review

A fascinating exploration of the labyrinthine world of mid-20th century American Marxist factionalism.—Labour/ Le Travail

Historian Stephen M. Ward's long-anticipated biography of the Detroit-based radical activist couple James and Grace Lee Boggs was well worth the wait. Beautifully written and thoroughly researched, the book weaves together the story of the couple's forty-year intellectual and romantic partnership with the history of black working-class insurgency in Detroit and the US black freedom movement.—Journal of African American History

From the Publisher