In Love and Struggle

In Love and Struggle centers on two of the twentieth century's most pioneering activist-intellectuals. With depth and nuance, the historian Stephen M. Ward delves into the Boggs's biographies and distinctive, yet intersecting, processes of politicization and radicalization. It begins by introducing readers to the different contexts that shaped the couple's formative years. On the one hand was James Boggs, born and reared in Jim Crow Alabama and molded by the physical and psychological violence of white supremacy and the rich traditions of post-enslavement African American rural life and culture. Grace Lee, on the other hand, was a child of upwardly mobile middle-class Chinese immigrants, leaving her without a “strong sense of cultural or ethnic identity” (p. 73). Escape from these contexts offered them spaces and sites for political maturation. As an autoworker in 1940s Detroit, James Boggs was drawn to the plant's labor struggles and the growing militancy among black workers and black Detroiters against racial discrimination in the workplace, housing, and the war industries. Lee, after receiving her doctorate degree in 1940, declined the life of academia and middle-class security for that of political action to abolish class divisions and black oppression. She relocated to Chicago where she joined first the Workers party and later the New York–based Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT), two American Trotskyist organizations

Aesthetics · Art · Elite · Identity (music · Immigration · New Left · Oppression · Political science · Politics · Racism · Radicalization · Sociology · White (mutation · White supremacy · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society

• The Political Ecology of James and Grace Lee Boggs

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