Does anyone subscribe to Harper's Magazine?
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/0081594
A friend forwarded this excerpt:
"... inside that stockade of racial divide and urban decay are
visionaries,
and their visions are tender, hopeful, and green. Grace Lee Boggs, at
ninety-one, has been political active in the city for more than half a
century. Born in Providence to Chinese immigrant parents, she got
a Ph.D.
in philosophy from Bryn Mawr in 1940 and was a classical Marxist
when she
married the labor organizer Jimmy Boggs, in 1953. That an Asian woman
married to a Black man could become a powerful force was just another
wrinkle in the racial politics of Detroit. Indeed, her thinking
evolved
along with the radical politics of the city itself. During the 1960s,
the Boggses were dismissive of Martin Luther King Jr. and ardent about
Black Power, but as Grace acknowledged when we sat down together in
her
big shady house in the central city, ``The Black Power movement,
which was
very powerful here, concentrated only on power and had no concept
of the
challenges that would face a Black-powered administration.'' When
Coleman
Young took over City Hall, she said, he could start fixing racism
in the
Police department and the Fire department, "but when it came time
to do
something about Henry Ford and General Motors, he was helpless. We
thought that all we had to do was transform the system, that all the
problems were on the other side."
...
When she and Jimmy crusaded against Young's plans to rebuild the city
around casinos, they realized they had to come up with real
alternatives,
and they began to think about what a local, sustainable economy would
look like.
They had already begun to realize that Detroit's lack of
participation in
the mainstream offered an opportunity to do everything differently
-- that
instead of retreating back to a better relationship to Capitalism, to
industry, and to the mainstream, the city could move forward, turn its
liabilities into assets, and create an economy entirely apart from the
trans-national webs of corporations and petroleum.
Jimmy Boggs described his alternative vision in a 1988 speech at the
First Unitarian-Universalist Church of Detroit. "We have to get
rid of
the myth that there is something sacred about large-scale
production for
the national and international market," he said. "We have to begin
thinking of creating small enterprises which produce food, goods, and
services for the local market, that is, for our communities and for
our
city ... In order to create these new enterprises, we need a view
of our
city which takes into consideration both the natural resources of our
area and the existing and potential skills and talents of Detroiters."
That was the vision, and it is only just starting to become a reality.
``Now a lot of what you see is vacant lots,'' Grace told me. ``Most
people see only disaster and the end of the world. On the other hand,
artists in particular see the potential, the possibility of bringing
the country back into the city, which is what we really need."
- Greg
