In Love and Struggle Quotes

“Jimmy may well have read the front-page banner in late August exhorting readers to “Go and Register.” The accompanying article extolled the dual power of the franchise: “When we register and go to the polls in large numbers … we not only perform thereby a duty which is obligatory upon good citizens, but our votes make public officials more obligated to give us the recognition and consideration to which we are entitled.” 109 This paper and others sought to whip up excitement about the recent passage of a civil rights bill championed by Democratic state senator Charles C. Diggs. Declaring with some hyperbole that the bill would be the “New Emancipation,” the black Democratic organization Michigan Federated Democratic Clubs sought to use the bill to both galvanize the community and shore up support for Diggs with the “First Annual Emancipation Picnic and Dance” in his honor on August 1, 1937. Attendees received “a small pocket-size souvenir-copy of Senator Diggs Civil Rights Bill” along with “a statement of what to do if the Bill is violated.” 110 More than a decade later, Jimmy would be among a group of activists associated with the Detroit NAACP and the United Auto Workers (UAW) who mounted an effort to enforce this law by “breaking down” restaurants that discriminated against African Americans. By that time, black Detroiters had made important inroads into the UAW, and a strong coalition emerged between labor and civil rights organizations.”
― Stephen M. Ward, In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs

“Walking north along Hastings, Jimmy would have come to the future site of the Brewster Homes, one of the first two federally funded—and segregated—housing projects in the city. The project’s opening was a year away, but it had already been two years since the city began clearing the project site—designated by the Detroit City Plan Commission as the “East Side Blighted Area”—displacing hundreds of families (the vast majority of them African American) and several businesses. The project was part of the city’s racially coded slum clearance plan, which reinforced residential segregation and did little to ameliorate the city’s housing crisis. 100 The cleared site was in effect an expression of one of black Detroit’s major struggles—access to housing—anticipating the extreme wartime tensions around race and housing that exploded five years later with the controversy and mini-riot at the Sojourner Truth Homes.”
― Stephen M. Ward, In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs

“Corporate interests raised a nearly unified voice heralding automation as a certain and universal beneficial advancement. However, some observers saw the new technology as a cause for concern and cautioned that the final word on automation would depend on the choices that industry and the nation made in the face of difficult questions regarding the pace of automation’s implementation, the uses of the new productivity, and the fate of displaced workers as well as depleted or eliminated job classifications, communities, and even industries. Norbert Wiener, for example, a prominent MIT mathematician and pioneer in the science of cybernetics, emphasized the potentially calamitous economic and social consequences of the new production technology. Wiener had begun to express concerns about the impacts of automation on labor and the entire society during World War II, and he authored two books in the immediate Cold War years warning that potentially disastrous unemployment and related social problems may come from industry’s drive toward automation. He characterized automation and computer controls in the production process as the “modern” or “second” industrial revolution, which even more than the first held “unbounded possibilities for good and evil.” 104 In particular, Wiener feared that the larger impact of the changes caused by automation would be a massive displacement of workers, compounded by the profit-driven indifference of industry. “The automatic machine … will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke.” 105”
― Stephen M. Ward, In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs

“The fascination with automation in part reflected the country’s mood in the immediate postwar period, including a solid ideological commitment to technological progress. Representatives of industry (along with their counterparts in science and engineering) captured this mood by championing automation as the next step in the development of new production machinery and American industrial prowess. These boosters quickly built up automation into “a new gospel of postwar economics,” lauding it as “a universal ideal” that would “revolutionize every area of industry.” 98 For example, the November 1946 issue of Fortune magazine focused on the prospects for “The Automatic Factory.” The issue included an article titled “Machines without Men” that envisioned a completely automated factory where virtually no human labor would be needed. 99 With visions of “transforming the entire manufacturing sector into a virtually labor-free enterprise,” factory owners in a range of industries began to introduce automation in the postwar period. 100 The auto industry moved with particular haste. After the massive wave of strikes in 1945–46, automakers seized on automation as a way to replace workers with machines. 101 As they converted back to civilian auto production after World War II, they took the opportunity to install new labor-saving automatic production equipment. The two largest automakers, Ford and General Motors, set the pace. General Motors introduced the first successful automated transfer line at its Buick engine plant in Flint in 1946 (shortly after a 113-day strike, the longest in the industry’s history). The next year Ford established an automation department (a Ford executive, Del S. Harder, is credited with coining the word “automation”). By October 1948 the department had approved $ 3 million in spending on 500 automated devices, with early company estimates predicting that these devices would result in a 20 percent productivity increase and the elimination of 1,000 jobs. Through the late 1940s and 1950s Ford led the way in what became known as “Detroit automation,” undertaking an expensive automation program, which it carried out in concert with the company’s plans to decentralize operations away from the city. A major component of this effort was the Ford plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park, a $ 2 billion engine-making complex that attracted visitors from government, industry, and labor and became a national symbol of automation in the 1950s. 102”
― Stephen M. Ward, In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs

“Remarkably, Grace never considered pursuing a career and very rarely sought consistent employment. At no time in her long life was Grace driven by the question of how to make a living. Accordingly, political considerations frequently guided her choices about employment, including where to work, for how long, and even whether to take a job. This set of choices, of course, was available to her because of the relative material security she enjoyed at most stages of her life: her comfortable middle-class upbringing and the family support she continued to enjoy when she returned to New York during the 1940s; her marital union with Jimmy; and the support of her political community, as she sometimes worked as a member of the organization’s (minimally) paid staff and later received financial support from Freddy and Lyman. But that alone does not explain her employment decisions. Grace’s indifference to career and upward mobility reflected her decidedly nonacquisitive personality and a complete disinterest in status or the trappings of any sort of professional life. This was evident in 1940 when Grace earned her Ph.D. Securing an academic job “was never on my mind,” she said decades later, thinking back to her mind-set and priorities while completing the degree. With no aspiration of becoming a professor—“ I had not studied philosophy in order to teach it”—Grace had allowed herself to sink into her studies without regard for where they would lead, intellectually or materially. The need to eventually find employment beyond what she had already been doing “was never in my consciousness. It just never bothered me,” she recalled. “What I knew was that by and large I had been able to make a living because I was a very good typist and I figured, if I needed money I can type.” 84 And that is what she did over the next two decades, taking various secretarial and clerical jobs, most of them short term or temporary and some of them part time.”
― Stephen M. Ward, In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs

“Jimmy likely wrote all three editorials, and one, titled “Who Is for Law and Order?” carried his byline. He argued that the spectacle, seen in other recent conflicts and then repeated most dramatically in the Little Rock crisis, of white people defying police as well as state and federal troops raised the question, “If white people defy the Constitution, who then are the law-abiding citizens of the U.S. and who is for democracy?” Inherent in his answer was a reshaping of the relations between blacks and whites. On one hand this meant the loss of white people’s claim to civic and moral authority. “The Little Rock crisis has put an end to the era of the white man’s burden to preserve democracy,” he asserted. “The white man’s burden now is to prove that he believes in democracy and that he can follow the example of the colored people in upholding law and order.” As for black Americans, their newfound racial assertion struck a blow to the edifice upon which their subordination had long rested. “For years untold colored people have been forced to maneuver in all directions trying to avoid a head-on collision,” Jimmy wrote. “They have allowed white people to name them ‘Negroes’ by which the whites mean a thing and not a person. They have stayed out of the public parks, restaurants, hotels and golf courses, walked on the cinder path when meeting whites on the sidewalk, gone to separate schools, worked on the worst jobs under the worst conditions, smiled and acted unhurt when abused in public places.” But the recent tide of black protest revealed that African Americans were making “an about face.” Black people, he wrote, were not only pressing for their rights but were also beginning to “denounce” the people and practices that had denied them those rights. 80 Jimmy’s analysis of Little Rock differed from other commentaries, which tended to emphasize it as an advance in the struggle for integration, highlight the moral questions it raised, or discuss it as a crisis of authority played out through conflict among the local, state, and national governments. Instead, Jimmy said Little Rock represented a rather sudden transformation now taking place among black people. The importance of Little Rock for him was in revealing how black people were seeing themselves differently and thus making this “about face,” no longer accepting the southern way of life and even rejecting the standards by which white people had organized society and elevated themselves. This analysis, and all of the editorials on Little Rock more generally, continued the focus and tone of Jimmy’s previous writings in the paper, but they also reflected the greater attention that Correspondence was soon to give to the escalating civil rights movement.”
― Stephen M. Ward, In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs

“Jimmy and Grace returned to Detroit in late August, in time to participate in the final work to relaunch Correspondence. On September 21–22 the organization held a national convention in Detroit attended by the full membership across the country, just as they had done with the initial founding of the paper. During the convention Jimmy and Lyman were elected as the cochairmen of the organization. 77 This reflected a solidification of Jimmy’s leadership of the organization. In title Jimmy and Lyman shared responsibility, but in practice, with Jimmy there in Detroit and Lyman in Los Angeles, “90% of the burden of national leadership rest[ ed] with” Jimmy, as Glaberman described the situation. In a letter to C. L. R., Glaberman reported that Jimmy had been “the key figure in the convention” and “he remains that today. He consciously and vigorously took over the direction of the organization and his leadership was accepted by everyone.” Given the many activities and spaces in which Jimmy had taken responsibility for building the organization—leading editorial committees and reaching out to workers in his neighborhood and at Chrysler—Glaberman expressed concern that Jimmy not overextend himself: “The organization looks to him to give direction on all these things and he is not very cooperative when any attempt is made to slow him down.” 78”
― Stephen M. Ward, In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs

“They listened to a series of speeches by civil rights luminaries, capped off by a rousing, crowd-pleasing address by Martin Luther King. While the SCLC named their protest “Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom,” its stated goals of expressing black unity and urging federal action on civil rights made the moniker that Jimmy gave it, “the March on Washington,” equally appropriate. That name, of course, was subsequently claimed by the much larger and more famous civil rights demonstration six years later. The huge crowds and celebrated oratory of the 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Justice” completely superseded the Prayer Pilgrimage in both size and importance, but the thousands who attended the 1957 affair made it the largest civil rights demonstration to date and a significant moment in the rising civil rights movement of the mid-1950s. Jimmy concluded his article with this assessment of the impact of the Prayer Pilgrimage: “The southern people went home determined beyond the expectations of even King. No one in the South is big enough to stop this march of people and no one can call it off.” 66”
― Stephen M. Ward, In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs

“By highlighting what she learned from Jimmy on these cross-country trips, Grace was affirming the political wisdom that he derived from his background and experiences that differed from hers—namely, his rural upbringing, experiences riding freight trains, and many years as an autoworker. She was also asserting the significance of their divergent backgrounds for their relationship. 63 Decades later, after they had made many more such trips over many years, she reinforced this point with a telling description of their trips: “Traveling along the highway, I would have my head in a book, while he was pointing out the cows and sheep, counting the freight cars and trying to figure out what they were carrying based on his knowledge of industry and agriculture in the region.” And this, she said, reflected not just their divergent personal styles but also their differing political styles: “My approach to political questions came more from books, his from experience.” 64 This duality of books and experience may have been exaggerated—theoretical concepts informed Jimmy’s political practice more than the statement would suggest—but it captures the complementary and cumulative nature of their collaboration. Combining their respective approaches to the politics that they engaged together, Grace and Jimmy could learn from each other, influence each other’s thinking, and grow together. This mutual growth came to be a crucial dynamic of their intellectual and political partnership, and this is what Grace was coming to see, and reporting to C. L. R. in their 1957 correspondence, as she weighed the decision to join him in London for several months.”
― Stephen M. Ward, In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs