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Grace Lee Boggs's Life As A Social Activist

Satisfactory Essays

Christian Tan
Nisha Simama
Freedom Fighters
12/15/15

Grace Lee Boggs Biography

Grace Lee Boggs was born in Providence, R.I., to Chinese immigrants in 1915, Boggs studied at Barnard College and went on to earn her Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College. For years, she pored over the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Polanyi and Karl Marx, and even translated three of Marx's essays from German to English. She was fascinated by the process and challenge of thinking through complicated ideas. She developed a passion for marxism and other people of those beliefs in college. She was also very hardworking. Her dedication and inspiration for the complicated ideas from these famous people were building blocks for her development as a great writer. After finishing grad school, Boggs struggled to find work — any work, she told a group of students in 2012. "Even department stores would say, 'We don't hire Orientals,' " she recalled. So she moved to the Midwest, where she found a job with the University of Chicago's philosophy library. It paid only $10 a week, a stipend so low she was forced to find free housing in a rat-filled basement. But even the rats had an upside. One day, as Boggs was walking through her neighborhood, she came across a group of people …show more content…

he would often bring down the house," Boggs wrote in 1998 in her autobiography, Living For Change. They married in 1953. Together, the couple became two of the city's most noted activists, tackling issues related to labor and civil rights, feminism, Black Power, Asian Americans and the environment. In 1974, they wrote Revolution And Evolution In The Twentieth Century; in 1998, she published an autobiography, Living For Change; and in 2011, she co-wrote The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism For The Twenty-First Century with Scott Kurashige, a professor and

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