Grace Lee Boggs, civil rights and feminist activist, dies aged 100

She was active in many campaigns for more than seven decades

Grace Lee Boggs died in Detroit (Wikicommons)

Grace Lee Boggs, who over the course of more than seven decades threw her energies into the civil rights and labor movements, has died in Detroit. She was aged 100.

“She left this life as she lived it: surrounded by books, politics, people and ideas,” said her friends and caretakers Shay Howell and Alice Jennings.

At different times in her life, Ms Boggs was involved with the civil rights movement, Black Power, labour rights, environmental justice, and the feminist movement.


 
 (Barnard College)

She was born to Chinese immigrant parents in 1915. In 1992, she co-founded the Detroit Summer youth programme in an attempt to rebuild and renew her city.

Boggs was born in 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island, the child of Chinese immigrants, but grew up in New York City, where her father owned a Chinese restaurant on Broadway, the Detroit Free Press reported.

She won a scholarship to Barnard College for undergraduate studies, and earned a PhD from Bryn Mawr College in 1940. Ms Boggs came to Detroit in the early 1950s to write for The Correspondence, a socialist newspaper

Barnard College expresses its deepest condolences on the death of activist and civil rights icon Grace Lee Boggs, an alumna of the Class of 1935," the college said in a statement.

"The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Boggs faced countless barriers in the academic world of the 1930s but, in her full century of life, she never wavered in her dedication to the labour, civil rights, and Black Power movements. She was proud of her connection to Barnard and recently returned to campus for the screening of a documentary on her extraordinary life. The College celebrates her inspiring achievements as a fearless role model for our students and women everywhere."