Berman: Grace Lee Boggs a link to Detroit past, future

She was born Grace Lee, living above her father’s Chinese restaurant, at a time when women could not yet vote in the United States.

“When I cried,” she wrote later, “the waiters used to say, ‘Leave her on the hillside to die. She’s only a girl.’”

The waiters’ careless laughter never left the woman who became Grace Lee Boggs and who was never “only” anything: Her ferocious intelligence, curiosity and interest in people, always remarkable, became more so as she aged. With her cropped thatch of white hair, colorful clothing, and sheer luminosity, she became celebrated beyond the world of social activists. She lived long and well enough to be embraced by the mainstream, enshrined by a documentary filmmaker, beloved.

Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs, 100, dies

You made a pilgrimage to her home on Field Street, because she was a link to the city’s past and its future, both of which she saw more distinctly than most. “Visionary,” was a word she seized and held out, again and again.

With a mother who wasn’t allowed to learn English or to read, she was a feminist from the start. The child of immigrants, she got a Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr, becoming a civil rights activist at the dawn of that movement, a revolutionary who never lost her zeal for change that included everyone. She liked to tell people that “the reward for hard work is more work.”

When I visited her art-filled, book-cluttered home last, she was 90 years old and an emerging celebrity. Citing philosophy texts, surfing Web sites, and teaching university students who migrated toward her, she was still challenging her subjects to think more deeply, to question their assumptions. Although she never had children of her own, she drew young people to her, the way extraordinarily wise people do.

She talked that day about her husband, James Boggs, an African-American activist and writer, who remained always in the conversation, even two decades after his death. Yet Grace Lee Boggs lived in the present and the future: You could mine the past for lessons, but you didn’t live in it.

When Francesca Berardi, a young Italian author exploring Detroit for her first book, met her last year, Boggs, then 99, surprised her by asking: “Have you ever heard of 3-D printers?” Even as she deplored the way technology was used to displace people’s jobs, she was fascinated by how it might be used for the good.

When Berardi last saw her, in July, Boggs — her health failing, lying in bed — listened intently as Berardi read aloud the words she’d written. She spoke softly, reading for a couple of minutes, and then quietly left her, for the last time. “She sent me a kiss, with her hand,” Berardi remembers, “and that was the highest reward for my work.”

Her house is now home to The Boggs Center, a nonprofit dedicated to the vision of cultural change she and James Boggs imagined. She had lived in the house for half a century, while Detroit was on what others saw as a terrible trajectory. She saw it otherwise.

Her neighborhood reflected it all, abandonment, gunshots in the darkness. One night, she told me, she was sleeping upstairs when she heard a terrible banging on the door. Alone in her big house, she lay in bed, waiting for the noises or her life — she didn’t know which — to end.

The noise stopped, and the next morning, she descended the oak staircase in the grand red brick house on Field. She gazed through an empty door frame, straight to the street. It was the middle of the winter.

Even then, she stayed. Why?

“This is home,” she said. She died there Monday morning, quietly, and surrounded by friends.

LBerman@detroitnews.com