(The obit mentions a documentary about Henrietta Boggs titled "First
Lady of the Revolution". I reviewed it in 2017:
https://louisproyect.org/2017/01/01/seven-documentaries/. It's not only
an interesting story about a remarkable woman but explains why Costa
Rica is so different from other Central American countries, starting
with lacking a military. You can rent the film for $4.99 here:
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/firstladyoftherevolution.)
Henrietta Boggs, Southerner Who Spread Her Wings, Dies at 102
Fleeing segregated Alabama, she found revolution in Costa Rica and
married its future president. She then pushed him to grant women and
minorities the right to vote.
Henrietta Boggs in 2016. She was a Southern belle who sought adventure
in Costa Rica and got swept up in revolution as the wife of its leader
and future president, Jose Figueres Ferrer.
Henrietta Boggs in 2016. She was a Southern belle who sought adventure
in Costa Rica and got swept up in revolution as the wife of its leader
and future president, Jose Figueres Ferrer.Credit...John Duran
Katharine Q. Seelye <https://www.nytimes.com/by/katharine-q-seelye>
ByKatharine Q. Seelye <https://www.nytimes.com/by/katharine-q-seelye>
* Sept. 18, 2020
*
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Leer en español
<https://www.nytimes.com/es/2020/09/22/espanol/cultura/Henrietta-Boggs.html>
/This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the
coronavirus pandemic. Read about others//here/
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/obituaries/people-died-coronavirus-obituaries.html>/./
Henrietta Boggs, a young college student from Alabama, stared into a
volcano in Costa Rica as she mulled over a marriage proposal from José
Figueres Ferrer, a coffee farmer with electric blue eyes. He stood
beside her while the wind whipped around them and smoke clouded the air.
“Will marriage to you be like this volcano?” she asked.
“Marriage to me will be much worse,” he answered. “But I can guarantee,
you will never be bored.”
That was all Ms. Boggs needed to hear to cast aside her cosseted
Southern upbringing. The two married in 1941, and after a few years in
exile and then a revolution, he would become president of a governing
junta in Costa Rica. As first lady, she would help win the country’s
female and minority citizens the right to vote.
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Ms. Boggs, whose life spanned more than a century and crossed multiple
cultures, passions and avocations, was 102when she died on Sept. 9 at
her home in Montgomery, Ala.
She had been born during the influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed 50
million people worldwide. She died in the current pandemic: The cause
was the novel coronavirus, according to her daughter, Muni Figueres, a
former Costa Rican ambassador to the United States.
Where Ms. Boggs picked up the virus remains a mystery. “We have traced
everyone who was with her, and they all tested negative,” Ms. Figueres
said in a phone interview. Her mother’s activities on one recent day
were unaccounted for. “But she had not been ill,” Ms. Figueres said, and
she had not gone to the hospital.
Over the course of her long life, Ms. Boggs — a woman with a sharp wit,
an aristocratic bearing and a sense of adventure remarkable for her time
and place — assumed celebrity status in Alabama.
At every turn she challenged the segregated and patriarchal society in
which she was raised. As a youth, she cut church on Sundays and sneaked
off to the drugstore for Cokes and cigarettes. As a young woman
traveling in Latin America, she wrote to her hometown newspaper, The
Birmingham News, with detailed descriptions of the poverty and
deprivation she witnessed.
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As an older divorcée living in a white neighborhood in Montgomery, Ms.
Boggs rented out her guesthouse toBryan Stevenson,
<https://eji.org/bryan-stevenson/>a Black lawyer who was just starting
hisEqual Justice Initiative
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/us/reconstruction-violence-lynchings.html>,
a legal advocacy group, now 31 years old, that works to end mass
incarceration; he later inspired Montgomery’sslavery museum and memorial
to lynching victims
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/us/lynching-memorial-alabama.html>,
which opened in 2018.
“You don’t let things happen,” Ms. Boggs was fond of saying. “You shape
them.”
Her romance with Mr. Figueres, which she described in her memoir,
“Married to a Legend: My Life With Don Pepe” (1992), took place largely
on the back of his Harley-Davidson motorcycle as they roared across
Costa Rica’s volcanic terrain. Her parents were horrified that she
wanted to marry him.
“They thought the only worthwhile people were white, Protestant
Southerners,” Ms. Boggs told the filmmaker Andrea Kalin, who made a
documentary about her called “First Lady of the Revolution
<https://youtu.be/YJdanDExRJE>” (2016).
ImageMs. Boggs and her husband Jose Figueres Ferrer on his
Harley-Davidson in an undated photo. They traveled throughout the
countryside on it.
Ms. Boggs and her husband Jose Figueres Ferrer on his Harley-Davidson in
an undated photo. They traveled throughout the countryside on
it.Credit...via The Figueres Family
The marriage catapulted Ms. Boggs, a prolific writer, into a drama she
could never have scripted. After her husband was exiled from Costa Rica,
they traveled in Latin America and Mexico as an ordinary couple
researching coffee production by day while holding clandestine political
meetings by night. At the same time, they were smuggling arms back to
Costa Rica for its brewing revolution.
“They had a keen intellectual synergy,” Ms. Kalin said in a telephone
interview. “Henrietta was a force.”
Remembering Coronavirus Victims: Tell Us About People You Knew.
April 1, 2020
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/obituaries/coronavirus-victims.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article>
Mr. Figueres led the opposition forces during the country’s four-year
civil war, and Ms. Boggs was often on the run with their two young
children. One particularly harrowing passage had them escaping flying
bullets as they made their way across the Cerro de la Muerte, the
“Mountain of Death.”
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Mr. Figueres led the victorious ruling provisional junta for 18 months,
from 1948 to 1949. With Ms. Boggs as his full intellectual partner, he
established a democracy and enacted economic reforms modeled on those of
Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression. Under pressure from his
wife, he granted women and Afro-Costa Ricans the right to vote.
“I remember repeatedly yapping at my husband, ‘How can we call ourselves
a democracy if we don’t allow half the population to vote?’” she
recalled. He gave in, she said, just to get her off his back.
Image
Ms. Boggs and her children, Muni and José Martí. During the Costa Rican
revolution they dodged bullets.
Ms. Boggs and her children, Muni and José Martí. During the Costa Rican
revolution they dodged bullets.Credit...via The Figueres Family
Image
Ms. Boggs in the 1940s. There are two kinds of people, she said — those
who are content where they are, and those who say, “Let’s go and see
what’s on the other side of the hill.”
Ms. Boggs in the 1940s. There are two kinds of people, she said — those
who are content where they are, and those who say, “Let’s go and see
what’s on the other side of the hill.”Credit...via The Figueres Family
But 10 years in, the marriage waned. “Increasingly I felt that I was
being marginalized,” she said in the documentary, “and no matter what
happened, nothing would absorb him as much as politics.”
She divorced Mr. Figueres in 1951, moved with their children briefly to
Birmingham, then relocated to New York City, where she worked for the
Costa Rican Mission to the United Nations.
Ms. Boggs was drawn back to Alabama temporarily in 1956 to support
theMontgomery bus
boycott,<https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/montgomery-bus-boycott>the
Black-led protest against segregated seating. She was one of many
volunteers who drove protesters to their jobs so that they could
continue to avoid using the buses. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately
struck down segregated seating, an early victory for the civil rights
movement.
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Ms. Boggs moved back to New York and spent time intermittently in Paris,
where her daughter was studying. She then received a letter from an old
friend from high school, Hugh C. MacGuire, a prominent surgeon in
Montgomery. He suggested that she look him up when she came back to the
states. In 1965 she did, and they married the same year.
Dr. MacGuire was also a pilot, and when he needed a co-pilot, his wife
took flying lessons and earned her license.
She often said that there were two kinds of people in the world (making
clear which group she belonged to) — those who are content where they
are, and those who say, “Let’s go and see what’s on the other side of
the hill.”
Henrietta Longstreet Boggs was born on May 6, 1918, in Spartanburg,
S.C., the oldest of five children. Her father, Ralph E. Boggs, was a
civil engineer. Her mother, Mary Esther (Long) Boggs, was a homemaker.
Her father thought his job prospects were better in Birmingham, then a
booming steel town, and in 1923 he moved the family to Alabama and
started a construction business.
Image
Ms. Boggs in 2017, when Birmingham-Southern College awarded her an
honorary doctor of humanities degree acknowledging her lifelong
promotion of social change and equality.
Ms. Boggs in 2017, when Birmingham-Southern College awarded her an
honorary doctor of humanities degree acknowledging her lifelong
promotion of social change and equality.Credit...Jaysen Michael/Secret
Playground Photography, via Spark Media
Henrietta attended Birmingham-Southern College and studied English. But
she saw her world as narrow and intolerant, she said in the documentary,
with a code of unwritten rules: “Do not question. Do not doubt. Close
your mind. And believe what you’re supposed to believe. The Southern way
of life was something sacred.”
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That restlessness led her to Costa Rica. An aunt and uncle had retired
there and bought a coffee farm, and in 1940, after her junior year, Ms.
Boggs left college to visit them. There she met Mr. Figueres, who was
doing business with her uncle. Invited to lunch to discuss a coffee
deal, by her account he fell for her at first sight.
After his provisional presidency, Mr. Figueres was elected president
twice more, in the 1950s and the ’70s.He died
<https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/09/obituaries/jose-figueres-ferrer-is-dead-at-83-led-costa-ricans-to-democracy.html>in
1990.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Boggs is survived by her sister, Lucy
Boggs Dustheimer, as well as 10 grandchildren and 15
great-grandchildren. Her son, Jose Marti Figueres, died in 2019. She and
Dr. MacGuire divorced in 1985.
Still going strong in her late 70s, Ms. Boggs co-founded a magazine
called Montgomery Living in 1996. Though she sold it (it is now
calledALMetro360 <https://almetro360.com/>), she continued to write for
it. Her last article is to be published posthumously.
And she did volunteer work for numerous civic, nonprofit and charitable
organizations.
“She was committed to women’s rights, to combating racism and promoting
social and humanitarian justice,” her daughter said. “To the end, she
fought for all of those things.”
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