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317 This section presents writings from 1984 to 1993, the last ten years of James Boggs’s life. Though he battled cancer during the latter half of those years, first bladder cancer and then lung cancer, to which he succumbed on July 22, 1993, Boggs nonetheless continued his writing, speaking, and organizing throughout this period. As Grace Lee Boggs recalled, he remained “alert and active almost to the very end.”1 The specific character of his activism and the contours of his thinking during this final stage of his career are documented in this group of writings, which include a letter to fellow activists, a guest editorial in the Detroit Free Press, three speeches, and several short articles from the SOSAD newsletter.2 Five concerns animate this group of writings: empowering local communities; repairing social relationships; rebuilding crisis-ridden cities (with particular attention to the unique challenges of urban youth); facing internal contradictions; and finding new ways to meet basic economic and human needs. As this list of concerns suggests, Boggs’s writings during this period focused squarely on local conditions. His activism had always been rooted in local experience, but during the 1980s and 1990s the specific crises facing Detroit took on a particular urgency and primacy in his thinking. At the heart of these writings is a firm commitment to grassroots efforts to meet the urgent challenges faced by black communities in post-industrial Detroit in the aftermath of the Black Power movement. This local turn and the specific concerns it called forth clearly mark this group of writings as a new period in Boggs’s career, but this should not be taken as a sharp departure from the radical vision that drove his activism and his writing during the preceding decades. The goal of revolutionary change remained, but the context in which he sought it and the shape or form in which he envisioned it shifted. During the previous three decades he wrote in connection to progressive social movements or organized political spaces—the labor movement, the Marxist left, the civil rights movement, and the Black Power movement —giving his work specific contexts. Each such context furnished concrete political questions to address, intellectual spaces to engage, even venues in which to publish. No such context existed in the 1980s and 1990s. Thus, the writings in this section are not, as we have seen in his work from previous periods, interventions into an ongoing movement. For the first time in Boggs’s political life, the country faced no significant mass movement or other form of collective social protest. Thus, his writings of the 1980s and early 1990s took a slightly different character because they were not, as all of his previous work had been, designed to interject an ideology or develop a program for an existing or fully articulated struggle. Rather, in this period he sought to cultivate or call forth a new movement. There is, however, some continuity in that these writings build on or develop further ideas first articulated in previous periods. Moreover, this group of writings demonstrates how Boggs’s Introduction to Part IV Ward.indb 317 12/21/10 9:28 AM Part IV 318 method of analysis and political practice continued to be guided by his belief in the need to “think dialectically,” that is, to recognize that social struggles create new conditions and new contradictions. A recurring theme in these writings is Boggs’s insistence that the social and political challenges facing African Americans in the 1980s and 1990s must be approached differently than they had been during the 1960s. Broadly speaking, two sets of conditions speak most dramatically to the changed social and political reality of 1980s and 1990s Detroit. One was the ascendency of black political power.3 As Boggs had predicted, the struggle for Black Power coupled with urban demographic shifts created black political power in many cities, with African Americans constituting majorities and assuming control of municipal government in cities like Detroit, which elected Coleman Young, its first black mayor, in 1973. By the 1980s, Detroit was the archetypal black city—African Americans constituted nearly 80 percent of the city’s population, and municipal power firmly rested with black politicians and other officials.4 The arrival of a post-industrial economy constituted the second set of conditions. The insidious impacts of deindustrialization—the decades-long process of automating, relocating, and closing factories—resulted in massive job elimination and the virtual gutting of the city’s industrial economy.5...

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