Grace Lee Boggs: 'We Are Shaking the World With a New Dream'

As Detroit faces possible bankruptcy and more calls for safety-net shredding austerity, 98-year-old activist, author and visionary organizer Grace Lee Boggs offers a powerful counter-narrative to the system that rewards banks with bailouts and discards residents of the nation’s cities as victims of free market ideology.

Speaking with PBS’s Tavis Smiley, the six-decade Detroit resident said that the poverty-stricken city was not a hopeless cause but a place that is “providing a model for change in the world.”

The vacant lots lots left by behind by outsourced industry, seen by some as “the end of everything,” also brought opportunity, said Boggs, “opportunity to grow food for the community and give city kids a different sense of time and change,” and the opportunity to create a healthier, more sustainable city.

Even more, she said, “we’re creating a whole new society which is post-industrial.  And that turning point, the evolution of humanity, is a great privilege.”

Boggs sees this turning point as crucial, being “culturally as important as the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and from agriculture to industry.”

People are hungry for change, said Boggs, and they know that “that there’s something unsustainable and really invalid humanly about the way we’re living.” People are “just recognizing that all the contradictions of an industrial society are coming home to roost and we have to create something new, and we are.”