Longtime social activist Boggs finds MLK's words still relevant today

At 91, Grace Lee Boggs looks like she could be anyone's grandmother. However, in reality, she is a living testament to just about every social rights movement that has occurred in the United States during the last 65 years.

REMEMBERING KING: Longtime social activist Grace Lee Boggs discusses the relevance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in today's world during the President's MLK Luncheon, which took place in the EMU Student Center Grand Ballroom Jan. 15. Boggs, of Detroit, provided brief remarks at the luncheon before giving her keynote address in Pease Auditorium.

Beginning with her plans to march with A. Philip Randolph on Washington, D.C., in 1941 to protest racial discrimination in the armed forces to her grave concerns about the war in Iraq today, Boggs has been an activist, writer and speaker involved in the following historical social movements: labor, civil rights, Black Power, Asian American, women's rights and environmental justice.  

Boggs, who served as the keynote speaker at Eastern Michigan University's Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration Jan. 15, said this year marks the 40th anniversary of King's "Time to Break the Silence" speech. The speech challenged Americans to a radical transformation of values. At that time, King saw the Vietnam War as "a symptom of a far deeper malady of the American spirit" and called for Americans to fight poverty, racism and militarism.

"What King meant was that there was a loss of interaction and participation. It's not just what's happening in Iraq, but happening in our own neighborhoods today," said Boggs, a resident of Detroit since 1953.

Today, Boggs sees the same challenges facing America, saying the word "communism" that was at the center of conflict in Vietnam has only been replaced by "terrorism" in the present.

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