I have never before heard someone speak so eloquently on the democracy I believe in. She also provided scope and breadth to the history of what democracy should be, which opened my eyes to misconceptions I had. After all, at the time of this interview, she is 91 and still an activist fighting for true democracy.
PLEASE, readers, view the full video (25+ min).
Excerpts
BILL MOYERS: One of her first heroes in that community was A. Philip Randolph, the charismatic labor leader who had won a long struggle to organize black railroad porters. In the 1930s. on the eve of World War II, Randolph was furious that blacks were being turned away from good paying jobs in the booming defense plants.
When he took his argument to F.D.R.... the president was sympathetic but reluctant to act. Proclaiming that quote 'power is the active principle of only the organized masses,' Randolph called for a huge march on Washington to shame the president. It worked. F.D.R. backed down and signed an order banning discrimination in the defense industry. All over America blacks moved from the countryside into the cities to take up jobs - the first time in 400 years, says Grace Lee Boggs, that black men could bring home a regular paycheck.
GRACE LEE BOGGS: And when I saw what a movement could do, I said, "Boy, that's what I wanna do with my life."
GRACE LEE BOGGS: It was just amazing. I mean, how you have to take advantage of a crisis in the system and in the government and also press to meet the needs of the people who are struggling for dignity. I mean, that-- that's very tricky.
BILL MOYERS: It does take moral force to make political-- decisions possible.
GRACE LEE BOGGS: Yeah. I-- and I think that too much of a-- our emphasis on struggle has simply been in terms of confrontation and not enough recognition of how much spiritual and moral force is involved in the people who are struggling.
BILL MOYERS: Well, that's true. But power never gives up anything voluntarily. People have to ask for it. They have to demand it. They have-to--
GRACE LEE BOGGS: Well, you know as Douglas said, "Power yields nothing without a struggle." But how one struggles I think is now a very challenging question.
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GRACE LEE BOGGS: Well, for folks who don't understand, say for example, how the Democratic Party was a coalition of labor and liberals from the North, and the-- and people like Eastland and all those Klu Klux Klanners down South--
BILL MOYERS: The racist in the South.
GRACE LEE BOGGS: That was American Democracy. People sort of-- they-- they create a whole lot of-- love for it, and all that. Without understanding how-- what the conditions that people were living under, and that that was called democracy.
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BILL MOYERS: The conundrum for me is this; The war in Vietnam continued another seven years----after Martin Luther King's great speech at Riverside here in New York City on April 4th, 1967. His moral argument did not take hold with the powers-that-be.
GRACE LEE BOGGS: I don't expect moral arguments to take hold with the powers-that-be. They are in their positions of power. They are part of the system. They are part of the problem.
BILL MOYERS: Then do moral arguments have any force if they--
GRACE LEE BOGGS: Of course they do.
BILL MOYERS: If they can be so heedlessly ignored?
GRACE LEE BOGGS: I think because we depend too much on the government to do it. I think we're not looking sufficiently at what is happening at the grassroots in the country. We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently. Things do not start with governments--
BILL MOYERS: But wars do.
GRACE LEE BOGGS: Wars do. But positive changes leaps forward in the evolution of human kind, do not start with governments. I think that's what the Civil Rights Movement taught us.
....and there is so much more
There are parts of this interview I know some people will not like, but this well spoken woman is not iconoclastic, she has changed her views and is always willing to change again. But her core is there, the struggle to bring about a true democracy for everyone, not just the few and powerful.
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