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Stephen M. Ward’s Followers (1)
Stephen M. Ward
More books by Stephen M. Ward…
“She told him the origins of the “buck dance,” when “white people would come up and say ‘N____r, dance’, and then start shooting around the feet of blacks so that they would dance like everything.” 45 Big Ma was an important presence in Jimmy’s childhood and adolescence, and he credited her with giving him a unique and powerful sense of historical change. “When she talked about slavery,” he recalled, “she always talked not about how they freed the slaves, but about how [slaveholders] surrendered. There was a big difference. She saw the change as something that had been won by somebody, not something that had been given. She realized that there had been a struggle and that somebody had to lose.” 46 It would not take much for young Jimmy to see a historical connection and a continuity in struggle between these two moments—the buck dance that Big Ma witnessed in her childhood and the marauding Selma sheriff who came to town “shooting and raising Cain to see the colored folks run” during his childhood. Big Ma lived until the mid-1930s, when Jimmy was in his teens. By this time he could see new spaces of struggle emerging from shifts in the region’s economy and black people’s employment patterns. These shifts had impacted his family, specifically through his father’s work opportunities, and would shape his own prospects. Cotton continued to be an important part of the economy, both in the state and in the Black Belt region, but its significance declined relative to Alabama’s growing industrial economy. African Americans saw expanded employment opportunities, as labor shortages, strikes, and union organizing during the first two decades of the century led companies to open up jobs previously unavailable to black workers. The steel industry, which had previously satisfied its need for cheap labor with immigrant workers, came to rely heavily on black labor after World War I. 47”
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“Remarkably, Grace never considered pursuing a career and very rarely sought consistent employment. At no time in her long life was Grace driven by the question of how to make a living. Accordingly, political considerations frequently guided her choices about employment, including where to work, for how long, and even whether to take a job. This set of choices, of course, was available to her because of the relative material security she enjoyed at most stages of her life: her comfortable middle-class upbringing and the family support she continued to enjoy when she returned to New York during the 1940s; her marital union with Jimmy; and the support of her political community, as she sometimes worked as a member of the organization’s (minimally) paid staff and later received financial support from Freddy and Lyman. But that alone does not explain her employment decisions. Grace’s indifference to career and upward mobility reflected her decidedly nonacquisitive personality and a complete disinterest in status or the trappings of any sort of professional life. This was evident in 1940 when Grace earned her Ph.D. Securing an academic job “was never on my mind,” she said decades later, thinking back to her mind-set and priorities while completing the degree. With no aspiration of becoming a professor—“ I had not studied philosophy in order to teach it”—Grace had allowed herself to sink into her studies without regard for where they would lead, intellectually or materially. The need to eventually find employment beyond what she had already been doing “was never in my consciousness. It just never bothered me,” she recalled. “What I knew was that by and large I had been able to make a living because I was a very good typist and I figured, if I needed money I can type.” 84 And that is what she did over the next two decades, taking various secretarial and clerical jobs, most of them short term or temporary and some of them part time.”
― In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs
― In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs
“Activist, poet, and community leader Aneb Gloria House captured that legacy in her poem written on the occasion of Grace’s 100th birthday. House met Jimmy and Grace as a young radical when she moved to Detroit in the late 1960s after organizing in Alabama as a SNCC field secretary. Drawing on these decades of comradeship with the Boggses, House’s poetic tribute to Grace expresses a sentiment that could just as easily be about Grace and Jimmy’s partnership: You gave energy, gesture, laughter, you gave flesh and bone to the idea of revolution. In your steadfastness we witnessed that being a revolutionary requires patience and faith to walk the evolutionary path day by day. 7 To be sure, Grace and Jimmy gave these and more. They gave much to each other, and together they gave much to the movements they joined, struggles they waged, organizations they built, and the many comrades with which they worked, organized, studied, and struggled. SOMETIME IN HER eighth decade, Grace began closing her correspondence with the words “in love and struggle.” It was a particularly fitting expression, as so much of her life—her thinking and writing, her activism, her personal and political relationships—revolved around or in some way grew from her commitment to social and political struggles. Moreover, she embraced struggle not just in opposing a system or external enemy but also as a difficult but necessary internal process—in a movement, an organization, and even oneself—required to resolve contradictions. She shared that embrace of struggle with Jimmy. Indeed, their partnership shaped and deepened this embrace of struggle for each of them. Her phrase, then, is just as fitting for a book that tells their story. These two things, love and struggle, were central to their lives together. Moreover, combining the two words not only indicates the importance that Jimmy and Grace assigned to each but also signals their view that struggle, like love, is an inevitable and enduring part of life. In their jointly authored book Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, Jimmy and Grace concluded that there is no “final struggle” to be waged or “promised land” to be reached, as “humankind will always be engaged in struggle, because struggle is in fact the highest expression of human creativity.”
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