James Boggs (activist)
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- For other people with this name, see James Boggs
James Boggs, born 1919, was a prominent African-American political activist, auto worker and author. He was married for forty years until his death in 1993 to Chinese American socialist and feminist activist, Grace Lee Boggs.
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[edit] Biography
James Boggs was a militant African American activist, perhaps best known for authoring, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook in 1963. He was also an auto worker at Chrysler from 1940 until 1968. Boggs was active in the far left organization, Correspondence Publishing Committee led by C.L.R. James from around the time it left the Trotskyist movement in the early 1950s until Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs led a split in 1962, breaking with C.L.R. James. When Correspondence Publishing Committee earlier suffered a split in 1955 led by Raya Dunayevskaya and lost nearly half its membership, Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs remained loyal to Correspondence Publishing Committee and an exiled C.L.R. James who advised the group from Britain. James Boggs was named the editor of their bi-monthly publication, also known as Correspondence, in 1955. However, political differences with C.L.R. James over time would eventually lead Boggs to take control over Correspondence Publishing Committee in 1962 and continue publication independently for a couple of years. James Boggs expressed the reasons for the 1962 split in his 1963 book, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook.
In later years, he would play an influential role in the radical wing of the civil rights movement and interacted with many of the most important civil rights activists of the day including Malcolm X, Ossie Davis and many others.
[edit] Works
James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1963).
James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker's Notebook (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970).
[edit] External links
- The Boggs Center Home Page
- The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro Worker's Notebook by James Boggs
[edit] Sources
Paul Buhle, "An Asian-American Tale" Monthly Review (January 1999), pp. 47-50.
Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
Kent Worcester, C.L.R. James: A Political biography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).
