Below is an excerpt from the book "Living for Change" by Grade Lee Boggs. Grace Lee Boggs is an activist who lives in Detroit. In the 1950s and 60s she and her husband James were very active in the Socialist movement.

When people asked Jimmy how we got together, he would pause, smile broadly, and say, Grace got me. The story behind those three little words goes back a long way.

I never thought of getting married. My mothers unhappiness may have had something to do with it. But the main reason, I believe, is that when I was fifteen, I read Women and Economics by the feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman and was impressed with her thesis that wives are like prostitutes because they exchange sex for economic support. According to Gilman, a girl learns early on that she can get a new doll or a new dress by sitting on her fathers knees and tickling him under the chin. That is how girls are socialized for marriage. The edition I read was not illustrated, but that image of a little girl on her fathers knees never left me. That was not where I was going to end up.

As I got older, my father from time to time would bring home an overseas Chinese student to test out the waters. I wasnt interested. We had nothing in common except the slant of our eyes and the color of our skin. I suspect that they took one look at me and decided that I would be plenty of trouble. Most overseas Chinese students were from the upper classes and looked down on Chinese born and raised in the United States. Our parents came from peasant stock and had little education. Most of us didnt know how to read and write Chinese. So the called us Jook Sing, which means bamboo head or having nothing between the ears

I first met Jimmy in the fall of 1952. We were both members of Correspondence. I was living in New York City. He was living in Detroit. In 1948, while the Johnson-forest Tendency was still in the Socialist Workers party we heard that a number of black auto workers in Detroit were coming around the party looking for an organization more radical than the union and the Communist Party. This was the period when UAW (United AutoWorkers) President Walter Reuther and his followers were redbaiting and purging the Communist party-supported Frankensteen-Addes caucus in the union. The main purpo9se of CLRs 1948 Detroit speech, The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States was to attract these workers to the Socialist Workers party. It worked. Jimmy and his good friend and fellow Chrysler worker Willie Lewis came to several public meetings but did not join. Then, at a meeting in 1950-51 they discovered that Orientals from New York had become part of the local and that they were members of a tendency, led by C.L.R. James, that was splitting from the Socialist Workers party and forming an independent organization to publish a newsletter written and edited by rank-and-file workers, blacks, women, and youth. The Orientals were my brothers Eddie and Harry and Harrys wife, Julie. The newsletter we were getting ready to publish was Correspondence.

The Correspondence comrades in Detroit recognized immediately that in Jimmy Boggs they had found (or been found by) someone who was a prototype of the kind of individual for whom the newsletter was being created. A rank-and-file black Chrysler-Jefferson worker and community activist, Jimmy had very definite positions on everything locally nationally, and internationally and could dash off an article on any subject at the drop of a hat. Soon after he became a member, he was so highly regarded by the Detroit comrades that when he caught pneumonia, they caused near panic in the organization by sending out a telegram to all the locals reading, Jimmy has pneumonia. Outside of Detroit we thought that the telegram referred to CLR whom we called Jimmie. One of the main reasons we organized the Third Layer School in the fall of 1952 was to give rank-and-file black workers like Jimmy the opportunity to teach trade unionists and intellectuals like myself. To make it possible for him to attend the school in New York, the Detroit comrades raised the money to support his family for two weeks.

The Third Layer School was held in two sessions; Jimmy was in the first session and I was in the second. So I didnt meet him until we held a social one night, although I had already heard that he had practically taken over leadership of the school, for example, volunteering to write the reports of the discussions and actually doing so from day to day. When I asked him to dance, he declined because, as he had said, he had already made clear to his comrades in Detroit that he didnt come around the radical movement to get himself a woman.

After the social I didnt think anymore about Jimmy. I heard later that his sister had died during the school session and that he was also going through a painful divorce, initiated by his wife, Annie. He and Annie had grown up together in Marion Junction, Alabama, and like almost everyone in that little community they were distant relatives. They had been married since they were teenagers and already had six children. Another was born after the divorce.

Then in June 1951 I came to Detroit to work on correspondence. Soon after my arrival I bought myself a red 1938 Plymouth for $100. Jimmy, who by this time was a member of the editorial board, didnt own a car. So after meetings I would drive him home. In the car he would position himself as close to the passenger door as possible and give only monosyllabic answers to my questions. After a couple of months of this, I invited him for dinner and he accepted. When he had not arrived an hour after the scheduled time, I called my brother Harry and discovered that Jimmy was still at his house working on a car. When he finally showed up two hours late, he turned up his nose at the lamb chops I had prepared (he didnt eat the lamb of God) and my Louis Armstrong album (Armstrong was an Uncle Tom because he kept saying Yowsah). It was not an auspicious beginning. But later in the evening, to my surprise, he asked me to marry him and, also to my surprise, I said yes.

Actually, my response was not so surprising. Until I married Jimmy, most of my major decisions where to go to school, where to live, or whom to relate tohad been made this way, without much premeditation or consultation with anyone inside or outside my family. Early on I had realized that I would have to plot my own course. So I had become accustomed to trusting my own feelings to let me know what I needed to do at a particular time.

I dont know why Jimmy asked me to marry him. Maybe he was testing me. If he was surprised by my affirmative response, there was no indication. We never discussed it. It all happened so naturally that there was nothing to discuss. Jimmy radiated a personal and political energy that I found very attractive. He was also more rooted and more secure in his identity as a human being than any man I had ever met. At the same time I was finding the life I was living increasingly unsatisfying. Between 1940, when I left Bryn Mawr, and 1953 I had been in a half dozen relationships and lived in a half dozen places. The contradictions in this nomadic existence had been growing, and even though I had not said it to myself or anyone else, I needed to settle down in a place and in a relationship that would be both nurturing and challenging

Nobody was happy about our decision. Nobody gave us a party or gifts. But only two people openly objected, both of them black

Jimmys mother, brothers, nephews, and nieces (with one exception) not only accepted me; they welcomed me into the family. Overnight, in line with old southern customs, I became Daughter Grace, Sister Grace, and Auntie Grace. They all lived in Chicago and we visited back and forth. The exception was Jimmys oldest niece, the daughter of his recently deceased sister. I made the mistake of letter her cut my hair and she hacked away most of it on one side, saying the scissors had slipped.

I also felt very comfortable with Jimmys friends and coworkers in DetroitIn those days there were few signs in the Detroit black community of the Black Nationalism that would later make relationships with blacks so sensitive. I may have been more acceptable as a person of color, although I was always careful to keep clear the distinction between the discrimination experienced by Chinese Americans and the hell that African Americans had endured. I didnt feel that I was being seen as exotic probably because during World War II Americans had gotten used to working alongside Orientals, as they were still called. Many blacks had also served in Korea during the war that had recently ended without a victory for the United States. Some had returned with Korean wives. To children, however, I was still a novelty. They wanted to play with my hair because it was so straight

When discover that my husband was African American, they almost always ask whether we had children. My reply has been that we had no children of our own but that Jimmy had plenty of children by his first marriage and that I have a lot of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I sense that they are disappointed, partly because of natural curiosity about how our offspring would look. Personally, I never wanted children because raising children is a full-time job and I always saw myself out in the world than in the home. It has even occurred to me that one of the reasons I married Jimmy was that he wasnt likely to want children because it was tough enough to support the children he already had. For years we were married he used to get up a 3am to walk to one job cleaning a bar, then take the streetcar at six to work on the line at Chrysler. The first thing he did every payday was send a money order to the Friend of the Court for child support.

Reactions in my own family varied. Harry and Eddie who lived in Detroit had been friends with Jimmy before I met him. Around the same time that Jimmy and I got together Eddie married Averis, a fellow worker from a small town in Georgia. He was welcomed into her close-knit poor white family the same way I was welcomed into Jimmys. Averis and Jimmy got along famously, talking and laughing about the experience they had shared in the South. Eddie, who had known CLR, especially respected Jimmy because he was the kind of leader who didnt overwhelm you, who let you think for yourself, and who did not expect others to minister to his needs.

My sister Kay, who lived in New York and my brother Bob, who eventually settled in Hawaii, only met Jimmy a few times, but would always send best wishes to him in their letters. Bob said he knew Jimmy was a good man because he took such good care of our father. On my few visits to New York I never discussed my marriage with my father and until he came to live in Detroit, he said nothing about it, having learned through long experience not to intervene in matters that he was powerless to influence.

Jimmy and I came from such different backgrounds that if we hadnt both been so committed to the struggle to change this country, it is unlikely that we could have stayed together so long

We couldnt have been more different. An attractive brown-skinned man of medium, height with a powerful neck and shoulders and a slim body, Jimmy took pride in his personal appearance, spending a lot of time in front of the mirror trimming his mustache, combing his hair, and rubbing on lotion and cologne. I never wear makeup or cologne and would brush my hair, throw on some clothes, and be ready to go. I had been raised in New York City. Jimmy was raised in rural Alabama. The saying You can take the person out of the country, but you cant take the country out of the person might have been coined for him. I have a New England accent. He spoke what is usually called Black English, taking pride in his Alabamese and telling audiences that they had better struggle to understand him because one day they would have to understand a billion Chinese. I like my meat and vegetables crisp, Chinese style; he liked them cooked to death. Traveling along the highway, I would have my head in a book, while he was pointing out the cows and the sheep, counting the freight cars and trying to figure out what they were carrying based on his knowledge of industry and agriculture in the region. I hated housework; he actually enjoyed vacuuming and mopping and waxing the bathroom and kitchen floors. After working all day at Chrysler, he would take out his frustrations with a broom or a mop. My approach to political questions came more from books his from experience. We struggled over almost every issue. But I felt myself growing from the struggle, and I could see the growth in him.

From the book "Living for Change" by Grace Lee Boggs