James Boggs was a prominent African-American political activist, auto worker and author. He was married for forty years until his death in 1993 to Chinese American socialist and feminist activist, Grace Lee Boggs.
Biography
James Boggs was a militant African American activist, perhaps best known for authoring, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook in 1963. He was also an auto worker at Chrysler from 1940 until 1968. Boggs was active in the far left organization, Correspondence Publishing Committee led by C.L.R. James from around the time it left the Trotskyist movement in the early 1950s until Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs led a split in 1962, breaking with C.L.R. James. When Correspondence Publishing Committee suffered a split in the mid-1950s and lost nearly half its membership, Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs remained loyal to Correspondence Publishing Committee and an exiled C.L.R. James who advised the group from Britain. However, political differences with C.L.R. James would eventually lead Boggs to take control over Correspondence Publishing Committee. In later years, he would play an influential role in the radical wing of the civil rights movement and interacted with many of the most important civil rights activists of the day including Malcolm X, Ossie Davis and many others.