An Unusual Suspect

Often working behind the scenes, Grace Lee Boggs has intrigued scholars and students with her lifelong mentoring of Black radicals.

By Lydia Lum

Dr. Wang Zheng wastes no words when it comes to discussing the person she most admires, a 91-year-old Chinese-American revolutionary activist whose life’s work Wang includes in her University of Michigan courses.

Wang says she knew very little about Dr. Grace Lee Boggs before the latter participated in an oral history project on campus a few years ago. Wang then read Boggs’ autobiography, and says she was amazed by Boggs’ dealings with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights figures. Wang was also intrigued by the longstanding commitment Boggs and her husband, Jimmy Boggs, had to Detroit’s Black community.

“Grace is my idol,” Wang says. “I have a deep, profound respect for her. I never expected to encounter an Asian American woman like her. She is extraordinarily courageous for having crossed so many boundaries and departed from all the norms. She is a wonderful role model, not just for Chinese-Americans, but for all the younger generations.”

Boggs plays down the adulation and insists she has merely followed her passion. She says such compliments encourage “vertical relationships,” rather than the “horizontal relationships of a participatory democracy” that she advocates.

The daughter of immigrants, she was born Grace Lee in 1915 in Providence, R.I. The family soon moved to New York City, where her father ran a huge Chinese restaurant near Times Square.

The restaurant, which seated nearly 1,000 people, became nationally famous and a de facto hub of Chinese culture. But it was her mother who served as an early model of feminism. Tired of her husband’s patriarchal expectations of female obedience, Boggs’ mother threw him out of their house and bad-mouthed him to the restaurant’s employees. The public display was rare among Chinese-Americans of that era, and considered a great embarrassment to her father. Yet Boggs would later credit her activism to both of her parents, recalling how her father dreamed of modernizing his village back in China.