You may or may not have heard of Asian American activist Grace Lee Boggs. PBS is making the documentary about Boggs available for free online viewing from Oct. 16th – Nov. 15th, 2014. I saw the documentary earlier this year when it was broadcasted and Boggs was definitely an activist ahead of her time, battling for civil rights and particularly active in the African American community in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. To be honest, I didn’t know much about Boggs when I saw her speak at V3con back in June 2013.
The Wikipedia overview on Boggs goes like this:
“Grace Lee Boggs (born June 27, 1915) is an author, social activist, philosopher, and feminist. She is known for her years of political collaboration with C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s.[5] She eventually went off in her own political direction in the 1960s with her husband of some forty years, James Boggs, until his death in 1993.[6] By 1998, she had written four books, including an autobiography. In 2011, still active at the age of 95, she wrote a fifth book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, co-written by Scott Kurashige and published by the University of California Press.
Her life is the subject of the documentary film American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs released in 2013, produced and directed by the American filmmaker Grace Lee.[7]“
If you don’t have time to watch or want to learn more, here’s the trailer:
If you’ve got the time and inclination, I recommend watching this fascinating documentary.
- Excited
- Fascinated
- Amused
- Disgusted
- Sad
- Angry
