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Grace Lee Boggs, a longtime activist who was part of the labor,
civil rights, black power, women's rights and environmental
justice movements, died Monday at her Detroit home. She was 100.
Boggs and late husband James Boggs were involved in advocacy for
decades. She helped organize a 1963 march in Detroit by the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. and the November 1963 Grassroots
Leadership Conference in Detroit with Malcom X.
Her death was announced by the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center
to Nurture Community Leadership, which she set up after her
husband's 1993 death.
"Grace died as she lived surrounded by books, politics, people
and ideas," Alice Jennings and Shea Howell, two of her trustees,
said in a statement issued by the center.
In a statement released by the White House, President Barack
Obama said Boggs learned early that "the world needed changing,
and she overcame barriers to do just that."
"Grace dedicated her life to serving and advocating for the
rights of others - from her community activism in Detroit, to
her leadership in the civil rights movement, to her ideas that
challenged us all to lead meaningful lives," the president said.
The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Boggs was born in Rhode
Island in 1915 and grew up in New York City. After receiving a
doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1940, Boggs
worked at the University of Chicago's Philosophy Library.
Boggs moved back to New York to work with socialist theorist
C.L.R. James, helping create an offshoot of the Socialist
Workers Party that focused on race and poverty.
She moved to Detroit in the 1950s to write for a socialist
newspaper. That's where she met James Boggs, an African-American
man who would become her husband and collaborator. In the 1960s,
the couple became involved in the black power movement and were
known to offer Malcolm X a place to stay when he visited Detroit.
Their later work focused on Detroit's residents and
neighborhoods and included starting Detroit Summer, a program
for young people to work on community projects.
Boggs was the subject of a 2013 documentary, "American
Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs," that aired on
PBS.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/labor-civil-rights-activist- grace-lee-boggs-dies-34270688
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