James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership

01 / The story of this place

Make time for these

James and Grace Lee Boggs, labor organizer and philosopher-activist respectively, moved into this house on Field Street on Detroit's east side in 1962 and turned it into an informal hub for Black radical and community organizing for the rest of their lives. Visitors and collaborators over the decades included Milton and Richard Henry, General Baker, and figures connected to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and the couple's ideas about grassroots, place-based activism grew directly out of conversations held in this home. James Boggs died in 1993 and Grace Lee Boggs continued living and working there until her death in 2015 at the age of 100. In 1995 the couple helped found the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, which has used the house as its base, and the City of Detroit designated it a local historic district in 2012. Plans are underway to preserve the house, which retains much of the Boggses' original furnishings, as a museum.

1. Home of activists James and Grace Lee Boggs from 1962 until their deaths
2. An informal gathering place for Detroit's Black radical and community organizing movements
3. Grace Lee Boggs lived and worked here until her death in 2015 at age 100
4. Designated a Detroit local historic district in 2012; preservation as a museum is underway