A prominent activist her entire adult life, Grace Lee was born in Rhode Island in 1915, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She studied at Barnard College and Bryn Mawr, receiving her Ph.D. in 1940. Her studies in philosophy and the writings of Marx, Hegel, and Margaret Mead led not to a life in academia, but rather to a lifetime of social activism.

Lee's activism began in Chicago, where she joined the movement for tenants' rights, and then the Workers Party, a splinter group of the Socialist Workers Party. In these associations, as well as in her involvement with the 1941 March on Washington, Lee focused on marginalized groups such as women and people of color. In 1953, Lee married black auto worker and activist James Boggs and moved to Detroit, where she remains an activist today, writing columns for the Michigan Citizen. 

Boggs has rejected the stereotypical radical idea that capitalist society is just something to be done away with, believing more that "you cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it."

She believes that it is by working together in small groups that positive social change can happen, not in large revolutions where one group of power simply changes position with another.

With this philosophy, she and her husband founded Detroit Summer in 1992, a community movement bringing together people of all races, cultures, and ages to rebuild Detroit. Working from the ground up, Detroit Summer's activities include planting community gardens in vacant lots, creating huge murals on buildings, and renovating houses.

Source: https://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/grace-lee-boggs