ABSTRACT
In February 2013, the North Dakota Study Group, an informal collection of progressive educators who have been meeting on an annual basis since the 1970s, broke its long-standing tradition of assembling for three days in Chicago to gather in Detroit to see and hear about ways local residents there are responding to what former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich is now calling ‘the war against the poor and the middle class’ (Kornbluth 2014). Three years earlier, Grace Lee Boggs, the now 99-year-old philosopher and civil rights activist, met with the group in Chicago. Her presence was electrifying, and people were interested in learning more. Boggs and activists associated with the organization named after her and her late husband have been at the center of some of the most creative and hopeful initiatives in a city that is generally portrayed in the media as the poster child of political and economic mismanagement. Examples of their efforts can be found in the 2012 film, We Are Not Ghosts (Dworkin and Young 2012). Boggs frequently speaks about the critical nature of our time ‘on the clock of the universe,’ and the way the combination of environmental and social crises of the twenty-first century is necessitating an evolution to new patterns of thinking and acting. She calls for the emergence of ‘solutionaries,’ people able not only to reject and resist but to imagine and create new institutions needed to replace the failing structures of late capitalism (Boggs 2011).
