Grace Lee Boggs, who over the course of more than seven decades threw her energies into the civil rights and labor movements, has died in Detroit. She was aged 100.
“She left this life as she lived it: surrounded by books, politics, people and ideas,” said her friends and caretakers Shay Howell and Alice Jennings.
At different times in her life, Ms Boggs was involved with the civil rights movement, Black Power, labour rights, environmental justice, and the feminist movement.
She was born to Chinese immigrant parents in 1915. In 1992, she co-founded the Detroit Summer youth programme in an attempt to rebuild and renew her city.
Boggs was born in 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island, the child of Chinese immigrants, but grew up in New York City, where her father owned a Chinese restaurant on Broadway, the Detroit Free Press reported.
She won a scholarship to Barnard College for undergraduate studies, and earned a PhD from Bryn Mawr College in 1940. Ms Boggs came to Detroit in the early 1950s to write for The Correspondence, a socialist newspaper
