Living by the Clock of the World: Grace Lee Boggs’ Call for Visionary Organizing

By: Matthew Birkhold
April 17, 2012

In response to a question regarding advice for young activists, 96 year old movement veteran Grace Lee Boggs recently told Hyphen Magazine that activists should turn our backs on protest organizing because it “leads you more and more to defensive operations” and “Do visionary organizing” because it “gives you the opportunity to encourage the creative capacity in people and it’s very fulfilling.” This quote made its way around facebook, twitter, and tumblr, as fans of Grace reposted it like it was common sense while others thought the quote bordered on conservatism.

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Yusuf Shakur Film

We Are Not Ghosts

WE ARE NOT GHOSTS! Rebuilding Detroit from the Bottom up – preview from Mark Dworkin on Vimeo.

Fifty years ago Detroit was booming, with two million hard working people living the American Dream. Then the auto industry fell on hard times and so did Detroit. Most people moved away.

Whole neighborhoods turned into wastelands. But some have a vision for a new Detroit, as a
human scaled city for a post industrial world. And they are starting to make it real. As spoken
word artist Jessica Care Moore puts it, “Somebody’s gotta tell them, that we are not ghosts, that we are in this city and we are alive!”

Many who stayed in Detroit envision a new kind of city for the post industrial era, and they are remaking themselves and their city from the ground up – with street art and the spoken word, with urban gardens and place based schools, with new local businesses, with block clubs and neighborhood groups to reduce violence.

Longtime Detroit activist and philosopher, Grace Lee Boggs, is one inspiration for many of
these efforts. “When crises happen, people not only try to solve them materially, of course they do. But they also recognize that something more fundamental is involved. Someone looks at a vacant lot and says, ‘I’m going to grow food on that.’ Somebody says, ‘we have to talk to our neighbors more, we have to bring the neighbor back into the hood.’ That is a profoundly philosophical approach.”

Industrial Detroit flourished in the mid 20th century, as the Great Migration brought tens of
thousands of African Americans and poor whites to Detroit to work in the auto industry. Says
civil rights lawyer Alice Jennings, “For many years it was truly the promised land, because
people could come here and they could have a job….We lived on a street with trees, nice homes, they were small homes, working class homes.” After decades of white flight, now Detroit is 80% African American, and many Detroiters still own their own homes.

“We got a chance to know our neighbors and to build life long friendships,” comments Kim
Sherrobi of the Birwood neighborhood, “The foreclosure crisis hit us pretty hard, and we’re still trying to come together and figure out solutions to live with the situation that we’re in. It’s not easy, but it’s definitely do-able and we’re going to make the best of it.”

In the 140 square miles of Detroit there is not one full service supermarket. “You have this
food desert and that’s a really terrible thing,” according to Greg Willerer, who grows vegetables on empty lots and sells them at the Eastern Market, “but it also opens up the possibility for some really amazing solutions.” “We have vast amounts of land that other cities simply don’t have,”.says Malik Yakini of the Detroit Food Policy Council, “and so we have this opportunity to grow massive amounts of food.” Yakini works with the D-town community farm that harvests several acres of vegetables and fruit in the city’s largest park.

Greening of Detroit trains home gardeners and provides seeds, tools, and starts, “everything you need to be a successful home gardener,” says director Rebecca Salminen Witt. At first the goal was just to increase the supply of fresh healthy food in the city. But local gardens also enlist the energy of young people and draw communities together, according to the organizer of one community garden, Myrtle Thompson Curtis.

New community based businesses are revitalizing Detroit, like flowers poking up through
cracks in the concrete. “We just wanted a way to make a living and make a difference,” says
Jackie Victor who helped to start Avalon, an organic bakery that has inspired 15 other new local businesses in a once blighted commercial neighborhood. Parent and teacher run schools promote place based education where students and community join forces to make things better. And Peace Zones for Life works to reduce violence and monitor police.

“I think the 20th century is a century of expanding materialism, of expanding conflicts, of
expanding consumerism. And we’re only beginning to understand that in the course of all of this expansion, we have lost our souls. And this is a great opportunity to begin to see how much we have been damaged by our affluence, how much in our pursuit of affluence we have exploited the earth, exploited other peoples, damaged ourselves.” Grace Lee Boggs

In We Are Not Ghosts, we see Detroiters remaking themselves and their city, with vision and
spirit not usually included in mass media reports that focus only on the city’s problems. “So
don’t write eulogies for Detroit,” says spoken word artist Jessica Care Moore, “no uninspired
folk song of gloom. Some of us are coming home to show the world, how we make the planet
move.”

About the producers:
Seasoned filmmakers Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young produced the film. Other recent films include Good Food, broadcast nationally on PBS in 2010, Setting the Stage, featured at the 2011 United Nations Association Film Festival, and now in production, Shift Change: Putting Democracy to Work.

Review:
In the voices, work and imagination of Detroiters a new world is taking shape. People are
remaking their city based on new concepts of sustainable, loving connections with one another and our earth. We Are Not Ghosts opens up a new way of thinking about Detroit and the possibilities we all have to make a better world. – Sharon Howell, Professor of Communication, Oakland University, columnist, Michigan Citizen

Please see http://www.movingimages.org/page22.html
Photos available upon request: Melissa@movingimages.org