We believe this is a time for visionary organizing and freedom dreams. The James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership are inviting folks to this space who recognize that this moment has so much potential and requires us to work and study together with greater depth and intention. They want to nurture community leadership through developing theory and praxis and strengthening our capacity to think and act collectively.

James Boggs was born in sharecropping Marion Junction, Alabama. He later moved to Detroit, where he worked in the Chrysler auto plants for 25 years and began as a labor leader and leading political activist in the Black Power movement. He is a noted cultural visionary who advanced Marxist praxis in the black radical tradition as Dr. W.E.B. DuBois has done before him. James is noted for predicting in the 1960s that automation in the auto plants would replace workers and that revolutionaries must become “revolutionists.” A revolutionist is “a ‘revolutionary’ who accepts responsibility for leadership which involves projecting a philosophy of change, developing a method or form of struggle based on a new ideology, and organizing to change society along the lines of this new ideology.”

Join them for a series of events over the course of April and May where events will be centered around the reading of The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook

April 6: Study Circle 1

April 20: Study Circle 2

May 19-21: Discussion circles, teach-in, and celebration