Collected for the first time are Sinclair’s poetry, reviews and writings on the musical genius of John Coltrane. A companion CD is also being issued by the publisher Trembling Press in New Orleans.

[John Sinclair is] … deep inside a tradition beginning with Whitman, Williams, and Ezra Pound, and continuing through Charles Olson and Ginsberg.
—Dennis Formento, from the afterword

John Sinclair’s writing about “The Music” has always been well informed and inspiring, from his early Detroit-hip days. So it’s important to gather this writing to show where he and we have been, and the great period of American Classical Music we lived through and particularly the marvelous revelation that John Coltrane provided everybody who could hear.
—Amiri Baraka

Poet, activist, major jazz head, John Sinclair’s SONG OF PRAISE is a wild outward/ inward ride through time like any of Trane’s great solos. It’s a surge of time travel from the ‘60s breakthroughs & breakdowns as reflected in the revolutionary free jazz awakening as well as in the political uprisings of that time that changed the world.
—David Meltzer

About the CD:

Finally, John Sinclair’s legendary performances and tributes to John Coltrane are available together in this collection; Sinclair has long been on the scene recording the history and extolling the beauties of these life changing moments in music. The entire suite HOMAGE TO JOHN COLTRANE was first performed by John Sinclair’s newly-formed Blues Scholars—Michael Ray, trumpet; Richard Theodore (Harry Lenz), alto sax & bass clarinet; Nick Sanzenbach, tenor sax; Phil deVille, guitar; Lucky Joe Drake, bass; Michael Voelker, drums—at Kaldi’s Coffeehouse in September 1994 in conjunction with John Coltrane’s Sept 23 birthday. The moon was full that night and the DAT recording by Keith Keller became Sinclair’s first album, FULL MOON NIGHT, on Alive/Total Energy Records in Los Angeles. The first version of “I Talk with the Spirits” is from Sinclair’s second Alive album, FULL CIRCLE, recorded in Los Angeles in 1996 with Wayne Kramer, guitar; Charles Moore, trumpet; Ralph “Buzzy” Jones, tenor & alto sax; Craig Stewart, alto sax; Paul Ill, bass; Brock Avery, drums, and the shortened suite HOMAGE TO JOHN COLTRANE—spiritual, consequences, blues to you, i talk with the spirits—is from a live broadcast on KXLU-FM in Los Angeles in August 1997 with the same band less Craig Stewart and with Michael Voelker in place of Brock Avery, issued on Sinclair’s 2000 album UNDERGROUND ISSUES. The opening reading of “spiritual” is a duet with Marion Brown, alto sax, recorded by Mark Bingham at the Louisiana Music Factory in February 1993, first issued on the 2nd number of the WWOZ ON CD series in 1994.

About John Sinclair:

Author, poet and activist John Sinclair (born October 2, 1941, in Flint, Michigan) mutated from small-town rock’n’roll fanatic and teenage disc jockey to cultural revolutionary, pioneer of marijuana activism, radical leader and political prisoner by the end of the 1960s.

In 1966-67 the jazz poet, downbeat correspondent, founder of the Detroit Artists Workshop and underground journalist joined the front ranks of the hippie revolution, managing the “avant-rock” MC5 and organizing countless free concerts in the parks, White Panther rallies and radical benefits. In 1969 Sinclair was railroaded off to prison on a 9½ to ten year sentence for giving away two joints to an undercover policewoman. While he was in prison, Sinclair wrote the books Guitar Army: Street Writings/Prison Writings, a collection of his writings for the underground press between 1968-71, and Music & Politics, co-written with Robert Levin. Sinclair was released from Jackson Prison when the twenty nine month campaign to gain his freedom climaxed in the mammoth “John Sinclair Freedom Rally” in Ann Arbor, Michigan on December 10, 1971, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Stevie Wonder, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, Bobby Seale and others performed and spoke at the eight-hour long event in front of 15,000 people. Lennon wrote and performed his song, “John Sinclair,” later released on his Some Time in New York City album. Three days after the concert, the Michigan Supreme Court released Sinclair, and later overturned his conviction.

Following his release from prison, Sinclair got back into music management and promotion and hosted popular radio shows on WNRZ and WCBN, founded the People’s Ballroom, the Free Concerts in the Park program, and the Ann Arbor Tribal Council, and played a leading role in the success of the local Human Rights Party that resulted in the election of two City Council members and the institution of the legendary $5 fine for marijuana possession in Ann Arbor. For the next fifteen years he raised his family in Detroit and worked as editor of the Detroit Sun newspaper, founder and director of the Detroit Jazz Center, adjunct professor of popular music history at Wayne State University, artists manager and concert producer, WDET-FM program host, director of the City Arts Gallery for the Detroit Councilof the Arts and editor of City Arts Quarterly.

On Thursday May 26th at 7:00 pm the Book Beat is pleased to present Grace Lee Boggs together with Oran Hesterman in discussion at the Oak Park Library, located at 14200 Oak Park, Blvd., in Oak Park. Books will be available at the event for purchase. Please call 248-968-1190 for more information. We sincerely thank the Oak Park Library for providing their space and support for this important community event.

Grace Lee Boggs is a legendary Detroit based activist and force for social change. She is a visionary thinker and author who has devoted over seven decades of her life not only in sharing her ideas on civil rights, education, environmental justice and peace but putting them into everyday use and practice. She is an internationally renowned author and inspirational force for change. Her new book is The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century.

Grace Lee Boggs was born in New York City in 1915 and is the daughter of Chinese born immigrants. In 1953 she moved to Detroit and married African-American labor and Black Power activist Jimmy Boggs (1919-1993) whose selected writings have recently been released as Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebooks: A James Boggs Reader.

“Reading Grace Lee Boggs helps you glimpse a United States that is better and more beautiful than you thought it was. As she analyzes some of the inspiring theories and practices that have emerged from the struggles for equality and freedom in Detroit and beyond, she also shows us that in this country, a future revolution is not only necessary but possible.” –Michael Hardt, co-author of Commonwealth

“One of the most accomplished radicals of our time, the Detroit-based visionary Grace Lee Boggs has become one of our most influential and inspiring public intellectuals. The Next American Revolution is her powerful reflection on a lifetime of urban revolutionary work, an ode to the courage and brilliance of her late partner James Boggs, and a plain-spoken call for us to address the troubled times we face with a sense of history, a strong set of values, and an unwavering faith in our own creative, restorative powers.” –Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

A short fascinating article in the Monthly Review by Grace Lee Boggs on education, Freedom Schools and the Detroit Summer Project.

Grace Lee Boggs, an “elder stateswoman on the Black Power movement” reflects on the Beloved Community of Martin Luther King Other archived articles by Grace Lee Boggs are available on the site of Yes! Magazine.

The Boggs Center was established in Detroit in 1995 by friends of Jimmy Boggs (1919-1993) and Grace Lee Boggs to continue their legacy as movement activists and theoreticians.

Oran Hesterman on Fair Food

Dr. Oran Hesterman is the founder of the Fair Food Network “a national nonprofit that works at the intersection of food systems, sustainability and social equity to guarantee access to healthy, fresh and sustainably grown food, especially in underserved communities.” He is also author of the new book Fair Food, a book that takes a look at how food gets to our dinner table and how it can be done better. We are pleased to bring him into this discussion on new ways to think about living and creating a sustainable future. Oran Hesterman lives in Ann Arbor.

“The author’s deft explanation of our current cultivation and consumption of food should have families moving away from their supermarket aisles and into farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture programs…A thorough, inspiring guide on how to restructure the food system for a long and healthy future, for consumers and legislators alike.” - Kirkus Review

“Fair Food not only chronicles the challenges our food system faces and the achievements already made but also illuminates a clear path toward a more sustainable, fair, and delicious future.” —Alice Waters | Chef, Restaurateur

Issues are discussed on tapes that were evidently kept as assiduously as those by their enemy, Richard Nixon. White Panthers discuss the hashish that’s making them cough, kick around the organizational need for each ‘Panther chapter to set up an LSD fund, whether or not the guitar is a gun or vice versa, macrobiotics and the possibility their people will be offed before the next issue of the Ann Arbor Sun appears if they don’t apply “theory, practice and all that shit!” Sometimes after the most ponderous stretch of broad-brush left economics, roll call of their puritarian ministries (Defense, Propaganda, Chairman), and cadrespeak, they break up in a snicker or inquiring “Dig?”

The lead wordslinger on this CD is the excitable poet and former MC5 guru John Sinclair. “Rock n’ Roll music and fucking IS revolutionary violence!” he insists. He harangues his peers, is quick with his ideas but a bit hobbled by an unexamined romantic racism (his insistence that “carrying a piece” is universal in black culture) and the macho posturing that caused Adrienne Rich to skewer Sinclair in her poem to sexist male radicals “Goodbye to All That.” Nevertheless, Sinclair proved a righteous rhetoritician in his manifestos, broadsides and editorials and has written some memorable poems in a sort of lyrical early Beatnik style a la Allen Ginsberg. He commemorates the police inspector who busted him, Warner Stringfellow, in an impassioned but badly recorded tirade. Sinclair’s wife Leni (Magdalene) speaks low in a German accent like Nico as she recounts his indignities in prison, where he was allowed a record player but no records. In a prison interview, Black Panther Bobby Seale defends the White Panthers, after his initial skepticism towards their “psychedelic program,” and points to Sinclair’s imprisonment as testimony to the activist’s effectiveness.

Music is taken very seriously by the Panthers and their circle. Avant jazzman Joseph Jarman rambles about spacey “great black music evading the reality of what’s going on if we’re interested in communication, creating something of value to coin a phrase from a novel written about Africa and the dude who had to deal with it there.” And Dan Carlyle and Frank Bach discuss on WABX radio whether or not mid-Michigan’s immensely successful Grand Funk Railroad are to be considered truly a part of the Detroit freak community.

The disc’s producer and publisher Cary Loren is owner of the jampacked independent bookstore Book Beat in a suburb just north of the Detroit city limits. As an artist Loren explored the radical rhetoric suffusing and impacting his formative years in the 1998 video Strange Frut, where he filmed White Panther texts circa 1970 spoken by 1990s Goth teenagers. As with his Destroy All Monsters collaborators Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, showy molotov cocktails of revolutionary verbiage were a part of the mix of remembered cultural phenomena. Like Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, goofy Detroit kiddie show and horror movie hosts, it helped shape their regionally- and generationally-distinct Pop Art sensibilities. An excerpt from a TV news broadcast about a campus banning of the White Panther paper reminds the listener that the mainstream media voice in the sixties sounded different from today’s but was just as strident and ultimately clueless…which is why smart kids, then as now, sought input and insight from the fringes.

Loren has provided a sampling of the rich archival material from the era now found in the John & Leni Sinclair Library at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. It’s a fun listen for contemporary intellectuals and activists who may recognize themselves in the skull sessions or may not. I would like to hear some of these readings, like Bernadine Dohrn’s echoey 1970 “Weather Report,” over a dance track. Yet what shines through thirty years later is how the bunch of left hippie stoners on Music is Revolution grapple with the possibilities of making existential and cultural choices significantly political, smack dab in the heart of a working, shopping, consuming land that still wants you and its youth to have anything but that.”

A limited number of copies of Music is Revolution are available from the Book Beat.

“….it’s been widely reported that “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln’s decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Mr. Obama’s decision to name his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State. In other cases, books about F. D. R.’s first hundred days in office and Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars,“ about Afghanistan and the C.I.A., have provided useful background material on some of the myriad challenges Mr. Obama will face upon taking office.”

“…Lincoln, like Mr. Obama, was a lifelong lover of books, indelibly shaped by his reading — most notably, in his case, the Bible and Shakespeare — which honed his poetic sense of language and his philosophical view of the world. Both men employ a densely allusive prose, richly embedded with the fruit of their reading, and both use language as a tool by which to explore and define themselves.”

Source: From “Books, A New President Found His Voice”, New York Times

“I am obviously profoundly honored and thrilled,” she said. “Not only to have a chance to have some small part of this extraordinary moment in American history. . . . This incoming president of ours has shown in every act that words matter, that words carry meaning, that words carry power, that words are the medium with which we communicate across difference and that words have tremendous possibilities, and those possibilities are not empty.”full article: The Washington Post

Listen to the Poetry Foundation interview with Elizabeth Alexander on how the Derek Walcott-toting, June Jordan-quoting president will affect poets and poetry – podcast at: Obamapoetics at the National Poetry Foundation.

“Words matter. Language matters. We live in and express ourselves with language, and that is how we communicate and move through the world in community.

President-elect Obama has shown us at all turns his respect for the power of language. The care with which he has always used language along with his evident understanding that language and words bear power and tell us who we are across differences, have been hallmarks of his political career. My joy at being selected to compose and deliver a poem on the occasion of Obama’s Presidential inaugural emanates from my deep respect for him as a person of meaningful, powerful words that move us forward. And as his campaign was a movement much larger than the man himself, I understand that as a country we stand poised to make tremendous choices about our collective future. The distillation of language in poetry, its precision, can help us see sharply in the midst of many conundrums.

This is a powerful moment in our history. The joy I feel is sober and profound because so much struggle and sacrifice have brought us to this day. And there is so much work to be done ahead of us. Poetry is not meant to cheer; rather, poetry challenges, and moves us towards transformation. Language distilled and artfully arranged shifts our experience of the words – and the worldviews – we live in.

This is only the fourth time in our history that a President has featured a poet at his inaugural. I hope that this portends well for the future of the arts in our everyday and civic life.”

Elizabeth Alexander
December 2008

Past Poet’s who have Read at a Presidential Inauguration:

• Robert Frost recited “The Gift Outright” (PBS transcript) at John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural. Frost recited the poem from memory after he was unable to read the text of the poem he’d written for the inauguration, “Dedication” (PBS transcript), because of the sun’s glare upon the snow-covered ground. A video of Frost reading “The Gift Outright” at Kennedy’s inauguration is available through the EarthStation1.com Web site (http://www.earthstation1.com/).
• Maya Angelou read “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s 1993 inaugural. A video of the reading is available through YouTube.
• Miller Williams read “Of History and Hope” at Bill Clinton’s 1997 inaugural. Click here to listen to a RealAudio recording of Williams reading the inaugural poem from the PBS Online NewsHour website.

In addition, James Dickey read ”The Strength of Fields” at Jimmy Carter’s January 19, 1977 inaugural gala at the Kennedy Center.

Source: Library of Congress, FAQ

In his 60 Minutes interview on Sunday Barack Obama mentioned he’s reading two books about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One, about FDR’s history-shaping first 100 days, is Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment: F.D.R’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope. The other: Jean Edward Smith’s brilliant FDR.

Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.

Maybe, just maybe, the result will be a step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life. Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse — a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance — doesn’t get very far either.

We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth. Source: The New York Times: Obama and the War on Brains by Nicholas Kristoff

also: FDR Books on Obama’s Nightstand, Chicago Tribune

“Introducing Goodman, Shanks said, “[She] reminds me why I’m a bookseller, and how important it is to put authors, books, and the community together. Amy doesn’t practice trickle-down journalism. She goes where the silence is and breaks the sound barrier.”

Amy Goodman autographed copies of Standing Up to the Madness for a number of booksellers who were moved by her address.

Goodman launched into her talk by declaring independent bookstores “sanctuaries of dissent … where people can go to get independent information.” Disseminating a wide spectrum of information is especially critical now, she said, with a presidential election in the offing and when thousands of young men and women are being killed in Iraq.

In outlining some of the stories of the ordinary people doing extraordinary things who are featured in Standing Up to the Madness, Goodman told the story of the four Connecticut librarians who successfully fought the U.S. government when they refused to relinquish patron records. She chronicled the experience of four students in Wilton, Connecticut, who when told by their principal they would not be performing their play based on the letters of U.S. soldiers who fought in Iraq, took their show to the New York stage. And she mentioned that, in 1955, Mamie Till Mobley stood up and demanded an open casket for her violently murdered son Emmett Till, so the public would know of, and see, the “brutality of racism.”

Goodman also went on tell the story of the White Rose, a pamphlet written during Nazi Germany by Christian students who protested against the Third Reich. Six of the core members, including brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl, were caught and beheaded. The motto of the White Rose was “We will not be silent.”

Speaking out and standing up, said Goodman, was the coin of the realm for booksellers and librarians. “They are the freedom fighters of our time,” she said, closing to a standing ovation. “We will not be silent. That motto should be the Hippocratic Oath of the media landscape. Democracy now!”  — from Bookselling This Week

Photo left: Gore Vidal by Harlem Renaissance photographer Carl Van Vechten, 1948

Citizens, please take a few minutes & visit with Gore vidal, a voice of stability and sanity in these crazy times…
GORE VIDAL INTERVIEW: Now on the News, PBS
Writer, activist, cultural critic and iconoclast Gore Vidal talks to
Senior Correspondent Maria Hinojosa about what the killings at
Virginia Tech, and their aftermath, say about the state of America
today. The interview happened the week of the Virgina Tech killings, yet still its message is one to be heard. Vidal also shares his strong views on President Bush, a potential war with Iran, and ‘the loss of the republic.’

Interview Excerpts:

“We are in a terrible state of which the events in Virginia are more
warning signs that the heavens are about to fall.”

“George Bush was emblematic of everything that just happened in
Virginia.”

“He [President Bush] should have been impeached and thrown out long, long ago. I’m now getting ready with a group and we’re going to try to get an amendment to the Constitution that we have the right of recall of an administration that proves to be out of its mind.”

“If you have a nation where anybody can buy a lethal weapon you’re
going to have lots of mass murders.”

“We [Americans] are the most gullible people on Earth, and whatever our masters tell us we believe it.”

About Gore Vidal:

Gore Vidal is a novelist, essayist and playwright whose career began in the years immediately following World War II. Vidal has published more than 20 novels, including a sequence of seven novels about American history, and satirical novels such as “Myra Breckinridge” and “Duluth.” He has also written dozens of television plays, film scripts, and three mystery novels written under a pseudonym. A prolific writer, Vidal has published over a hundred essays on a wide variety of socio-political, sexual, historical, and literary themes.

His memoir “Point to Point Navigation” was published in 2006. For
more on Gore Vidal see American Masters.

Thanks to my friend Ira Land for pointing out this Vidal speech.

“Most people think that jobs are the answer to racism, to poverty, etc. We have to understand that jobs no longer play the role they did in periods of scarcity. We need to measure the worth of a human being in very different ways, and we don’t know how to do that yet. We don’t have the philosophy for it yet. We are coming from a period of Cartesian concepts of the separation of body and mind to a whole new era of uncertainty. This brings with it a different concept of reality, and a new potential for change. We are at a very different place, and we have to change our whole mindset.

A beautiful place to start doing that is Detroit because Detroit is a wasteland. We are the products of rapid industrialization. In the first half of the twentieth century people came to Detroit to marvel at the Ford Rouge plant where there were 120,000 workers under a single roof during World War II. The strikes and sit-downs during the 1930s looked like they were Marx’s Capital coming to life. It was just amazing! And now technological developments and the export of jobs overseas have turned the city into a wasteland. So what do we do? Do we dream of bringing back industry? Or do we recognize that, to be a human being, you have to have a different relationship with the earth, a different relationship with your fellow citizens, a different relationship between country and city. So many changes need to take place. How do we translate that into struggle? Into organizing? –Grace Lee Boggs from Revolution is a New Beginning

Grace Lee Boggs is a 91-year-young Chinese-American writer, philosopher, speaker and community activist who has lived and worked in the Detroit area since 1953. Her mind is quick, wise and well aimed, her ideas are the ground roots of compassion and wisdom we should all take notice and learn from. She was the subject for a recent Bill Moyer’s interview where they talked about the cultural revolution brewing in our country at the grassroots level. View the video at: Bill Moyer with Grace Lee Boggs

“The struggle we’re dealing with these days, which, I think, is part of what the 60s represented, is how do we define our humanity?”

At 91, Grace Lee Boggs has been a part of almost every major movement in the United States in the last 75 years, including: Labor, Civil Rights, Black Power, Women’s Rights and Environmental Justice.

Born in 1915 to Chinese immigrant parents, Boggs received her BA from Barnard College in 1935 and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1940. In the 1950’s she worked with West Indian Marxist C.L.R. James, before marrying African American activist, James Boggs, and moving to Detroit in 1953, where she’s lived for 54 years.

One of her earliest inspirations was A. Philip Randolph, an African-American labor leader who in 1941 fought successfully for equal hiring practices in defense plants as the United States geared up for WWII. “When I saw what a movement could do I said, ‘Boy that’s what I wanna do with my life,’” explains Boggs in her interview with Bill Moyers.

In the 1960’s, Boggs and her husband became very involved in the Black Power movement, notably offering Malcom X a place to stay whenever he visited Detroit. At this time, she identified much more closely with Malcom X than Martin Luther King Jr. “Like most black power activists, I tended to view King’s concepts of non-violence and Beloved Community as somewhat naïve and sentimental,” as she describes in her recent speech entitled, Catching up with Martin.”

But in 1967, when race violence gripped the city of Detroit and elsewhere in the nation, Boggs began to see what was missing in the Black Power movement and look toward the example of King as a more effective template for cultural revolution. “We could no longer separate ethics from politics or view revolutionary struggle simply in terms of us vs. them…The absence of this philosophical/spiritual dimension in the Black Power struggles of the 1960s helps to explain why these struggles ended up in the opportunism, drug abuse, and interpersonal violence…”
What the papers called race riots, she called “rebellions,” yet it was this pivotal event that helped her to learn that rebellion is not enough. “It was amazing – a turning point in my life, because until that time, I had not made the distinction between a rebellion and a revolution.” She extrapolates on this idea in REVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION IN THE 20TH CENTURY, which she wrote with her husband in 1974: “Rebellions tend to be negative, to denounce and expose the enemy without providing a positive vision of a new future…A revolution is not just for the purpose of correcting past injustices, a revolution involves a projection of man/woman into the future…It begins with projecting the notion of a more human human being, i.e. a human being who is more advanced in the specific qualities which only human beings have – creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, a sense of political and social responsibility.”

Grace Lee Boggs has since dedicated her life to helping to realize King’s vision of Beloved Community in her hometown of Detroit and elsewhere around the country, one grassroots protect at a time. In 1992, with James Boggs, who passed away in 1993, Shea Howell and others, she founded DETROIT SUMMER, “a multicultural, intergenerational youth program to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up.” The organization is coming upon its 15th season this summer.

Her autobiography, LIVING FOR CHANGE, published by the University of Minnesota Press in March l998, is widely used in university classes on social movements. In 2004, she helped organize the Beloved Communities Project, “an initiative begun to identify, explore and form a network of communities committed to and practicing the profound pursuit of justice, radical inclusivity, democratic governance, health and wholeness, and social / individual transformation.”

“I think we’re not looking sufficiently at what is happening at the grassroots in the country. We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently. Things do not start with governments.”
DETROIT SUMMER at Work in a Garden
Historical Reference: Race, Rebellion and Detroit
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence – by Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York City
“I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: ‘A time comes when silence is betrayal.’ That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”

“A Time of Violence and Tragedy” TIME, Aug. 4, 1967
“To the rest of the world, the televised glimpses of unsheathed bayonets, rumbling tanks and fire-gutted blocks in the heart of Detroit made it look as if the U.S. were on the edge of anarchy.”

Detroit Public Television: Bridging the Racial Divide
“It’s been called the most important topic in Southeast Michigan…relations between the races in the most segregated metropolitan region in the country. And Bridging the Racial Divide, an innovative approach to dealing with this vital subject, is currently reaching audiences across Metro Detroit.”

The Detroit Historical Society
“Since its founding in 1921, the Detroit Historical Society has been dedicated to ensuring that the history of the region is preserved so that current and future generations of Detroiters can better understand the people, places and events that helped shape our lives.”

Crime Among Our People
A pamphlet written by Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs in 1972 as a response to the growing violence in Detroit and other black communities. The pamphlet is subtitled: “Or a revolutionary proposal for regenerating Community.”

The Beloved Community Projects/br> The Boggs Center
“For nearly forty years, the Boggs’ home has been a community center and think-tank drawing together individuals and organizations from diverse backgrounds. People from around the world have come to create and discuss visions and strategies relating to local community struggles, workers’ movements, and global campaigns for social justice. Today, the second floor of the building serves as the offices and meeting space of the Boggs Center and includes a small boarding area.”

Detroit: City of Hope
A digital meeting place for organizations concerned with the betterment of the city of Detroit.

Detroit Summer
Grace Lee Boggs along with her husband James and Shea Howell and others founded this ‘multicultural, intergenerational youth program to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up.’ The organization is coming upon its 15th season this summer.”
Picture the Homeless
One of Grace Lee Boggs’ Beloved Community organizations located in The Bronx. “Picture the Homeless was founded on principle that homeless people have civil and human rights regardless of race, creed, color or economic status. It was founded and is led by homeless people.” On the Web site, you’ll find information about the many campaigns being conducted by the organization, such as the Potter’s Field Initiative, which is trying to secure the homeless access to Potters Field (on Hart Island, NY) in order to memorialize their loved ones.”

Poverty Truth Commission
This forum organized by the Poverty Initiative of the Union Theological Seminary, was created in order to hear the testimonies of those most affected by poverty in this region. Grace Lee Boggs served as one of the commissioners hearing testimony from a variety of grass roots organizers and people affected by poverty.”
Other Resources and Reference
The Michigan Citizen
Grace Lee Boggs writes a weekly column entitled “Fresh Ideas” for the Citizen. You can read many of her recent columns on The Boggs Center website.
Growing Power, Inc.
“Growing Power, Inc. is a non-profit organization and land trust supporting people from diverse backgrounds and the environment in which they live by helping to provide equal access to healthy, high-quality, safe and affordable food. This mission is implemented by providing hands-on training, on-the-ground demonstration, outreach and technical assistance through the development of Community Food Systems that help people grow, process, market and distribute food in a sustainable manner.”
The Grace Lee Project
“When Korean American filmmaker Grace Lee was growing up in Missouri, she was the only Grace Lee she knew. Once she left the Midwest however, everyone she met seemed to know ‘another Grace Lee.’ But why did they assume that all Grace Lees were reserved, dutiful, piano-playing overachievers? The filmmaker plunges into a funny, highly unscientific investigation into all those Grace Lees who break the mold — from a fiery social activist to a rebel who tried to burn down her high school. With wit and charm, THE GRACE LEE PROJECT puts a hilarious spin on the eternal question, ‘What’s in a name?’.”.

Source: Bill Moyers Journal, PBS