Grace Lee Boggs (born June 27, 1915) is a Detroit activist and political thinker. She has been involved in nearly every major activist movement of the past fifty years, including labor, civil rights, black power, women’s rights, and environmental justice.
In 1992, with James Boggs, Shea Howell, and others, she co-founded Detroit Summer, which intended to "rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up" by organizing youth.
She has come to embrace Martin Luther King’s vision of the “beloved community,” and has called on Detroiters to expand their humanity, working together to create a more humane, democratic, and meaningful way of life. Many have heeded the call, creating groups like Avalon Bakery, the Hub, and the Live Arts Media Project. She is an advocate of resilient communities that build their own local networks of support instead of relying on damaging, unpredictable global models of production and distribution.
