SUSIH 2025: Previewing the “American Revolutionaries: James and Grace Lee Boggs and Their Circles in Detroit” Panel

No intellectual history conference taking place in Detroit would be complete without a session on James and Grace Lee Boggs, “two of America’s foremost radical theoreticians” of the 20^th century, who called the city their home. In 1953, James, a writer, activist, and autoworker at the Chrysler-Jefferson plant for 28 years, married Grace, a philosopher and activist who co-founded the Johnson-Forest Tendency within the Trotskyite Socialist Workers’ Party. Throughout their forty-year partnership, the duo produced books and pamphlets about Black Power, the evolution of revolutionary movements, and the changing nature of labor caused by automation. They also developed a unique approach to community organizing and education, which lives on through the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, located in their former Detroit home.

Conference co-chair Paul Murphy and I, though no experts on the Boggses, set out to organize a panel that might do justice to the couple’s robust intellectual work and activism. The result is “American Revolutionaries: James and Grace Lee Boggs and Their Circles in Detroit,” which brings together scholars Stephen Ward, Mike Doan, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Sam Klug.

In addition to their academic work, Ward and Doan serve on the board of the Boggs Center. Their presentations will draw on their experiences bridging intellectual life and community organizing. Ward, the author of In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (2016) and editor of Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader (2011), will provide us with a history of the Boggs Center: how it came to be, how it keeps the Boggs’s ideas alive, and what kind of educational work it does. He will also speak about the couple’s concept of “visionary organizing,” which he described in his political biography of the two as “grassroots political work not focused solely on protesting current injustices, but rather geared toward projecting alternatives and creating new visions for the future.”

Visionary organizing had its roots in James and Grace’s theorizing of “dialectical humanism,” which is the subject of Doan’s presentation. Doan will explore how the idea of dialectical humanism emerged out of disputes among C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and James Boggs around questions of industrial automation and the revolutionary potential of the proletariat.

Lichtenstein will also address disagreement between the Boggs’s peers and collaborators, focusing on Martin Glaberman and his relationship to C.L.R. James and the Facing Reality circle, another group that originated in the Johnson-Forest Tendency that existed during the 1960s. In the spring of 2024, Lichtenstein published an essay in Dissent on “The Labor Intellectuals,” who “translated the radicalism and democratic enthusiasms of a boisterous rank and file into a set of concrete programs.” How do the Boggses, their associates, and those who continue their work through the Center fit into Lichtenstein’s formulation of the labor intellectual? And how does the figure of the labor intellectual expand or enrich intellectual history?

Finally, Klug will discuss James Boggs’s speech at the 1969 National Black Economic Development Conference, held in Detroit, his critique of Black capitalism, and the political-economic thought of the Black Power movement. In that speech, Boggs skewered President Richard Nixon’s policy platform that emphasized private enterprise, using “a sustained comparison between the economic predicament of Black America and that of the colonial and postcolonial world” to make his point. You can preview Klug’s exquisite research in his recent book The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization (2025)

“American Revolutionaries” promises to be an exciting session full of thoughtful reflections—and productive disagreements—on labor history, theories of capitalist transformation, social movements, and civic education. It will take place on Saturday, November 8^th from 10:45-12:15pm in the Crystal Ballroom. I hope you can join us!