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331 “Community Building: An Idea Whose Time Has Come” is a speech delivered on April 5, 1987, in Detroit to an African American Leadership Conference titled “Return to the Source II,” which was a follow-up to a conference two years earlier to which Boggs gave a “State of the Nation Address.” The title of this speech appears in the last line of the preceding selection as well as this one. While the two speeches share the same subject—community building—and contain some similar language and ideas, they take different approaches to the topic and pose distinct questions and challenges to their audiences. The two speeches, therefore, are more complementary than duplicative and together provide a rich picture of Boggs’s thinking about the importance of community building during the 1980s. Community Building:An IdeaWhoseTime Has Come Good morning. I start this way because I will always remember that when I first came to Detroit in 1937, I went over to Hastings and Theodore and said “Good Morning” to every old person I saw on the street. But nobody said anything back to me. When I told my auntie what happened, she said, “Boy, you are from the country. Folks up North don’t say ‘Good morning.’ They take care of their own business.” This seemed to me to violate everything human because my mother had always taught me that saying “Good morning” was the way you initiated relationships of humanity with old people and everybody else. Over the last few days we have been grappling with the many profound contradictions facing African Americans today, nearly twenty years after the great struggles that enabled us to overturn a way of life that was accepted as normal and natural by the majority of Americans. In this session I do not intend to review the issues we have discussed. Rather what I hope to do at this point is to take some of the major ideas that have emerged and the unity and collectivity I have sensed and pull these together into an overall strategy so that as we go out from this conference, each of us, individually and collectively, in our various organizations and the many different areas where we function, can begin to see our struggles as part of the overall struggle we must now embark on to turn our communities and our lives around. As I have listened to and participated in the discussions and in the workshops, I have two main impressions. On the one hand, it is clear to me that there is a high degree of black consciousness among the participants in this conference—for which I am profoundly grateful. In other words, most of you are proud of the great contributions to the evolution of humanity that have been made by African civilizations in the past, by Africans in the present (during the very moving ceremony with which we opened this morning I kept thinking of Nkrumah and Cabral), and by African Americans on this continent. It was on our backs that the infrastructure of this country was created; we were the first major labor force. An integral part of that black consciousness is the sense of solidarity and identity you feel with the millions of people in the third world who are also victims of U.S. capitalism and imperialism. Most of you also realize Ward.indb 331 12/21/10 9:28 AM Part IV 332 that blacks were not born with this consciousness but that it is the result of the great struggles that blacks have carried on over the centuries, culminating in the civil rights and Black Power struggles of the 1950s and 1960s—all of which have made you aware of the power that resides within you to change this whole society. At the same time it is also clear to me that we are still groping for the spiritual vision and the political strategies that will enable us to meet the much more complex contradictions of this period—or, in the words of the conference call, the “assaults on our communities, our families, our children and our very souls, both from within and without.” Today, far more than twenty and thirty years ago, we live from crisis to crisis, both internally and externally. Every day I wake up feeling the devastation of this city and what is happening to our people on my back. Today the unity we once enjoyed no longer exists among us. We are now...

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