In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs by Stephen M. Ward (review)

Stephen Ward's In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs focuses on the period from 1940 to 1963, during which time the ideology of Grace Lee and James Boggs morphed from Marxist left to Black nationalist. Ward argues that, along with others, James and Grace Lee Boggs, laid "the organizational and ideological groundwork for the emergence of Black Power in the middle of the 1960s." (1–2) Ward's argument, however, is unconvincing, and perhaps more importantly, eclipsed by the backdrop of Marxist factionalism.

In Love and Struggle is divided into three parts. The first is biographical, examining the early lives of the book's subjects. Boggs, an African American, was born in 1919 near Selma, Alabama. Joining the Great Migration, he arrived in Detroit in May 1937, eventually gaining employment with Chrysler and with it, membership in United Auto Workers Local 7. He also joined American Youth for Democratic Action, the Young Communist League's successor organization. In 1946, disillusioned, he split from the Communists, joining the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (swp).

Grace Lee's trajectory differed significantly. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1915 to successful Chinese immigrants, she entered Barnard at 16 and graduated from Bryn Mawr with a PhD in philosophy in 1940. She moved to Chicago, where she came into contact with the Workers Party. In 1941, Ward says, "she became a Trotskyist." (85)

In order to understand the ensuing narrative, Ward provides a brief history of the American Marxist left of the 1930s and 1940s. A decade after being expelled from the Communist Party in 1928, James Cannon, Martin Ahern, and others formed the Socialist Workers' Party. In 1940, 40 percent of the membership split to form a rival Trotskyist organization – the Workers' Party (wp). In Chicago, Ahern mentored Grace Lee as a Marxist. She became an accomplished Marxist scholar, the first to translate several of Marx's essays into English. She soon joined a faction of the wp known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency (jft), named for its pseudonymous leaders J. R. Johnson and Freddie Forest, in actuality Marxist intellectual C.L.R. James and, former secretary to Trotsky himself, Raya Dunayevskaya. In 1947, condemning the wp for having "lost all confidence in the American working class," (125) the jft split from the wp and soon rejoined the swp.

In 1950 the jft formally rejected Leninism, and thereby Trotskyism as well, effectively cutting its ties with the swp. Now an independent Marxist organization with a membership of about 75 people, the jft changed its name to Correspondence. The following year James Boggs and a group of Detroit comrades split from the swp and joined Correspondence. Grace Lee and James Boggs met when the organization relocated Grace to Detroit in 1953 to edit the group's eponymously titled publication.

Part Two covers the period from 1953 to 1958 during which Correspondence focused on publishing. Boggs wrote; Lee edited. C.L.R James, for the most part, exercised editorial control, albeit from abroad. During this period three issues competed for the group's attention: the Kenyan independence struggle, the Hungarian Revolution, and the civil rights movement in the United States. Boggs and Lee immersed themselves in Kenya solidarity work, taking time in 1954 to marry. About the same time, Dunayevskaya and roughly half of Correspondence's membership split, citing, in reference to C.L.R. James, "the rottenness of Johnsonism." (196) Following the failed Hungarian Revolution, C.L.R. James, convinced that Hungarian anti-Communists were leading the world's working-class struggle, directed Correspondence to give substantial coverage to the subject. Far more interested in anti-colonialism abroad and civil rights at home, the Boggses did not share C.L.R. James' enthusiasm.

Part Three concerns the period 1958 to 1963. During this time Correspondence gave particular attention to Robert Williams, naacp Field Secretary in Monroe County, North...