Abstract
The opening scene of Grace Lee’s film American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, positions viewers behind the 97-year-old Boggs as she walks down a deteriorating sidewalk near the Packard Building. From this long shot the camera gradually pans its way to a close-up of Boggs smack in front of the now dilapidated resemblance of a building. She smiles and says, ‘I feel sorry for people who don’t live in Detroit.’ Through the Packard Building’s size and scale, Boggs tells us, ‘This is a symbol of how giants fall.’ From this moment the filmmaker Grace Lee takes viewers on a complex journey through Boggs’s life as an activist-turned-revolutionary. In each epoch through which Lee moves viewers, she echoes Boggs’s assessment: ‘this is a time of great opportunity and great danger’.
The black power movement became Boggs’s entrée to the life of politics. Born to a comfortable Chinese American family, she was educated at Barnard College as an undergraduate. The film flashes back to images of Boggs’s nuclear family. Briefly, Grace Lee turns her gaze to New York in the 1930s. Here Boggs’s father’s restaurant, Chin Lee’s, was thriving. So too was the young Grace Lee’s life of the mind. Seduced by philosophy, particularly the works of Hegel and Marx, Boggs earned a PhD in 1940. Here is the root of her passion for cultivating ideas through conversation. Grace Lee gives viewers a 30-second lesson on Hegel. Suddenly Hegel is broken down in three frames. That every idea has an opposite to be worked out and struggled over flashes on the screen. Dialectic and living through contradictions not only captures Grace Lee Boggs’s revolutionary path, it is also the primary frame through which filmmaker Grace Lee unpacks the film.
Boggs found her calling in the black political resistance shortly after she completed her doctorate. Living in the basement of an apartment building in a black neighborhood, she was forced to travel through rat-infested spaces to get home. Black folks in her community organized and protested against housing policy. After shots of neighborhoods where rats run wild, Grace Lee moves the imagery to Washington DC where we see masses of people marching on the square. This was how Boggs became fully entrenched in the emerging black power movement. She looks straight at the camera and tells us: ‘If a movement can change the world, that’s what I am going to do with my life.’ The self-conscious activist challenge was on, and Boggs moved to Detroit. Initially, she identified with Malcolm X’s principles, even those that were most threatening to established authorities. Boggs believed in the notion of ‘by any means necessary’. Force was a material reality in her life. In time, she shifted away from Malcolm and other radical black nationalist thinkers, embracing Martin Luther King’s philosophy of peaceful resistance. Inspired by King, she ultimately created revolutionary ideas and practices out of logics and politics of hope. This reflexive journey is articulated in the relationship that Lee weaves in and through shot, found, and searched footage. It produces a tapestry of contradictions, ironic outcomes, and unexpected trajectories.
Acknowledging the relevance of Detroit and the role of the auto industry, Grace Lee takes us to Boggs’s home in Detroit. At this moment in the film Grace Lee reveals some of her most subtle skills as a filmmaker. We see an old Detroit fully mixed with white and black people filling the streets. We see a range of class locations, children, older people, and families. The hustle and bustle breaks the dominant convention governing most historical footage about Detroit, where the city is remembered as exclusively white and working class. This visual trope is undone through Grace Lee’s cinematography. As Grace Lee leads viewers through this epoch in industrial production we meet Jimmy Boggs and his rich imagination. Migrating from Alabama with thousands of others, Jimmy Boggs worked on the line at Chrysler for 28 years. Grace and Jimmy met through their common commitments to the labor movement and the black power movement. They called themselves revolutionaries.
Tracking other elements of Boggs’s revolutionary life-course, Grace Lee tackles the decade where Grace Lee, not yet married to Jimmy Boggs, worked closely with C.L.R. James in their own branch of the socialist party. Grace Lee’s footage ranges from images of Boggs’s FBI file, to shots of Boggs and C.L.R. James together. As the film shifts from images latent with McCarthyism, raids, and people being detained and booked to the 1960s in Detroit we see a lot of footage of young Grace Lee Boggs politically active, typing, marching, and talking in small groups. Several scholars across disciplines have contributed to the conversations through which Grace Lee captures Grace Lee Boggs ruminating (see, for example, Capeci and Wilkerson, 1991; Farley et al., 2000; Sugrue, 1996; Thomas, 2013; Thompson, 2000). In this era when civil rights language is emergent, Boggs comments: ‘In those days I thought Martin Luther King was naïve.’ In her view, Malcolm X, his zeal and militant style, was more appealing. Following the charge to act, the film highlights shots of protesting, organizing, and small groups of people engaging one another in study groups and sit-ins. Hope has its own pulse in the film.
A number of scenes documenting the rebellion of 1967 command the screen. Violence, police brutality, young black men and women running away from white authorities, burning buildings and cars melt the hope that punctuated the film up to this point. Looting scenes and general destruction follow. Heaviness raises its head. And just like one of Grace Lee Boggs’s famous statements – ‘Make your path by walking in it’ – Grace Lee transitions us to the series of hopeful conversations that marked an important point in Grace and Jimmy Boggs’s life together, the epoch of Conversations in Maine. This period was so important that it inspired Boggs to write this book, showcasing the ways in which political conversations change lives.
In Maine we meet Lyman and Freddie Paine, political allies and friends of Grace and Jimmy, who opened up their house on a tiny island in Maine to travelers interested in revolutionary change. Theirs was no usual summer home where guests eat, drink, and loll about the place. The house in Maine became a landmark for political conversation. The footage shows Grace Lee Boggs in some of her most fierce conversational moments, arguing and taking up philosophical positions. We see her rough edges, but rarely a tender or doubtful side.
One wonders how Grace Lee Boggs encounters vulnerability. When she speaks of her age, and how hard just moving around can be, the audience is sobered by her daily life. Though one reality is clear: Boggs will not process personal issues; the film makes this clear. At one point in the film when Boggs is being interviewed she is asked what it was like to be married to a black man and for Jimmy to be married to a Chinese woman. She said: ‘We never talked about personal things much.’
Flashbacks to Maine set up the understanding that conversation is how we change the world, in Boggs’s mind. As she reflects back and moves forward she tells us, ‘we need less activism and more reflection’. The last third of the film is organized around Boggs’s commitment to creativity, ‘solutionaries’, and reflection. With rich, historic footage, Grace Lee draws a beautiful analogy between Coleman Young and Barak Obama. As we see black and white communities rejoicing in the victories of each candidate, Boggs says: ‘We have to be careful not to turn our political leaders into Messiahs.’ While there is no obvious argument on Grace Lee’s part, the juxtaposition and cautionary warning is provocative.
Politicians, fellow revolutionaries, and academics are featured in Grace Lee’s film. Danny Glover also makes an appearance in deep conversation with Grace Boggs over the state of American education. They argue for a moment about how important math and science are in our curriculum. Boggs will not relent about her position that our current system amounts to child abuse. She asks Glover, what is education for if not solving problems? He pauses and says: ‘You have got me thinking.’ This is the inevitable experience that everyone has when talking with Boggs. There is one other reality: one will leave with a lot to read. In the same sweet scene we see Boggs loading up Danny Glover with books about the pitfalls of the American education system. He begins to shudder after the seventh is handed to him.
The latter part of the film focuses on the work that Boggs does today in Detroit. The multigenerational collective, Detroit Summer, is featured; the soundtrack blasts the beats of hip hop, taken from a music video produced by a local hip hop legend, Invincible. Boggs is the mentor of youth who are artists, musicians, videographers, writers, poets, and producers, all of whom are part of the hip hop generation. One can’t miss the respect younger Detroiters have for their revered elder, Boggs.
Grace Lee takes us in and out of Grace Lee Boggs’s home. She has become so familiar with Boggs that she cuts her hair during an interview. Boggs articulates her truths of aging: ‘I don’t care much how I look now. I think I have had these clothes on for a month.’ These moments paint a beautiful human picture, a no frills honest account of aging. No matter where the camera pans, in her kitchen, living room, or hallway, all rooms are set up for conversation. The once master bedroom is now a library on steroids. Boggs’s priorities are clear: reading, thinking, and talking are the blueprints for change – they mark the materiality of her life.
If one searches contemporary documentaries about Detroit s/he will not be able to avoid Detropia, a popular film that reproduces the dominant narrative about Detroit. The film is like debilitating humidity: it sucks the life right out of Detroit’s rich history. There are so many seductive sites to explore in Detroit, so many complex ways to tell its story. Detropia focuses almost exclusively on murder, abandonment, and poverty; the resilience of Detroiters, DIY movements, and systematically devised community-based solutions to economic and social problems are invisible in the film. It is missing exactly what Grace Lee’s film highlights – other narratives, scenes, and explanations for how Detroit has been viewed as FUBAR.
Filmmaker Grace Lee’s work creates a refreshing, hopeful change from this troubled trope. While the film is responsible, important, and witty, there are many political and representational choices that open legitimate sites for critique. I shall begin with representation. Jimmy Boggs is a legend in Detroit, and while he is treated as a visionary and revolutionary force in the film, Grace Lee opted to use subtitles for Jimmy. English was his first language, albeit heavily marked by a southern dialect. It is never explained why his speech is given subtitles. One must assume his heavy accent warranted it. It is troubling that the recurring strong black man in the film, who is Grace Lee Bogg’s revolutionary ally, confidante, and spouse, is cast as an other – at least the subtitles give this appearance. Racial reasoning is presented with lacking sensitivity for a figure prominent in the black power movement. This choice is tied to two others that require attention. The political figures that waltz through Grace Lee Boggs life do just that; they dance through without proper context. We do not know how Grace Lee connected to and eventually split from C.L.R. James, other than loose references to differences over Marxist principles. Characters like C.L.R. James, Lyman and Freddie Paine were radical thinkers in the 1960s and ’70s.
Grace Lee does focus on the years that produced the book Conversations in Maine. Viewers get a glimpse of conversations and the home of Freddie and Lyman Paine. Audiences see Grace Lee Boggs voicing her point of view; they experience her hot temper when she is riled by seemingly salient issues. The problem is that viewers never know the history of or even current frameworks that shaped the political conversations in Maine. For example, we see one scene where Grace Lee Boggs is arguing furiously with a woman who is on the brink of tears – the conversation is that intense. The split in their conversation was political, but the film stitches together footage that makes the disputes at the dinner table appear to be personal. In actuality, the argument at the dinner table was about whether or not families had the right to refuse the right of the ANC (African National Council, fighting South African apartheid) to use their murdered children’s funerals as a site for revolutionary, cultural protest. Viewers do not hear anything more than statements like ‘that is absolutely naive and misguided’ from Grace Lee Boggs – we do not hear the why of it. These representational choices and editorial revision of found footage leave the political context of Grace Lee Boggs’s views unaddressed. Viewers have no framework for understanding the figures, groups, or everyday people who shaped Grace Lee Boggs’s formative years as a political thinker and actor. We know Boggs comes to be a leading figure in the black power movement, but the nuances of many overlapping struggles are not sufficiently contextualized. While these concerns raise questions that ought to be pursued by multiple critics, they should not overshadow Grace Lee’s brilliant accomplishments in and through creating the film.
The end of the film leaves viewers thinking about imagination. Boggs tells us: ‘Einstein had it right when he proclaimed imagination is more important than education.’ She believes that the world has its eyes on Detroit. She tells us that she is aware of the time on the world’s clock. This is the opportunity to create a postindustrial society based on local sustainable business, flowing from a different model than neoliberal capitalism. While the first words out of Boggs’s mouth were ‘I feel sorry for people who don’t live in Detroit’, her last words are equally compelling. She challenges viewers: ‘Is your imagination rich enough to live in Detroit?’
Grace Lee is well known for her earlier films. She has received numerous grants including Ford Foundation and Women Making Movies. She has won and been nominated for prestigious film festivals, most notably her 2002 film Barrier Device and The Grace Lee Project. Her work ranges from political and identity-based documentary to dramas and zombie films. American Revolutionary is not only achieving success in theatres, but many community-based organizations and media outlets are featuring it in their festivals and collective work. Of late the Detroit Free Press featured it in their FREEP Film series. This film is delicate, serious, and delightfully funny. It is one of the most honest accounts of Detroit’s postwar history and Grace Lee Boggs’s role in it.