Bill Moyers Journal (2007-2010); 1121; Robert Bly; Grace Lee Boggs

Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai Hai This week on Bill Moyer's journal, First Vietnam, now Iraq. His poems speak truth to power.

What's the sense of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out. See who will answer. This is Colin Answer. Poet Robert Bly. And, at 92, she's still speaking up for democracy. We are not looking sufficiently at what is happening at the grassroots in the country. Activist Grace Lee Boggs. In this edition of Bill Moyer's journal, Major Funding is provided by the Partridge Foundation, a John and Polly Guth Charitable Fund, Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues, the Colbert Foundation, the Herbalpert Foundation, Marilyn and Bob Clements and the Clements Foundation, Bernard and Audrey Rappaport and the Bernard and Audrey Rappaport Foundation, the Fetzer Institute, the Orphala Family Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation and by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, providing retirement plan products and services

to employers and individuals since 1945, Mutual of America, your retirement company. From our studios in New York, Bill Moyer's. Welcome to the journal. I want to introduce you to two people whose combined age is 172 years. They've lived full and original lives, and they're still going strong. Reminding me of the iconic-class H.L. Minken, who once said, I go on working for the same reason that a hint goes on laying eggs. He had nothing on gracely bogs and Robert Bly. I first met Robert Blyb back in 1979. He was reading from his portrait, Cooper Union, here in New York. How amazed I am after working hard in the afternoon, that when I sit down at the table with my elbows touching the elbows of my children, so much love flows out and around in circles.

It wasn't hard to figure out why Blyb was exerting such influence on aspiring American poets. He already enjoyed a large following, appealing to poetry lovers with powerful images of intimate subjects. More of the fathers are dying each day. It's time for the sun and the daughter. Bits of darkness are gathering around them, and the bits of darkness appear as plates of light. Blyb was daring in word and example. He was also cut aversial. In 1966, he had co-founded American writers against the Vietnam War, and when he won the National Book Award two years later for the light around the body, he contributed the prize money to the resistance. Over the years, Robert Blyb has ranged far and wide in his poems, with 30 more books touching on spiritual insights and deep and dark truths about American culture. He is Iron John, became an international bestseller, and brought untold numbers of men to poetry.

It is a massive masculine shadow, 50 male sitting together in hall or crowded room, lifting something in distinct up into the resonating night. I've encountered Robert Blyb again and again at poetry festivals, and interviewed him about the passions of his life, including his work as an interpreter of the Islamic poets Ruby and Hafez. My ego is stubborn, often drunk, impolite. My loving, finely sensitive, impatient, confused. Please take messages from one to the other. He was in town recently, and I invited him over to the studio. He came, bearing, as always, a satchel of books, and eager to talk, as always, about poets and poetry. Welcome to the journal. Thank you.

I love what the English professor said about you last year. He said Robert Blyb is an important guy. He's so famous, I'm sometimes surprised to find he's still alive. I am surprised, too. You ever wake up surprised that you were still here? Yes, I do, very much. Present company accepted. Who do you think has been the greatest American poet up to now? Well, Walt Whitman, you have to bring him in immediately. Why? He does everything, and whenever you have a person in another culture like India who is trying to make us understand what religious in life is like in India, they quote Whitman. When he begins calling out his beautiful lists of people that he loves and things that he loves, the divine always comes into it, so you just feel he is pretending to write about human beings. And he's some sort of messenger from God. You know, when I first met you, you were just barely 50,

and you read this little poem. You remember this one? I lived my life in growing orbits, which moved out over the things of the world. I have wandered in a face for hours, passing through dark fires. And I have gone to the desert, to the parts places, to the landscape of zeroes. And I can't tell if this joy is from the body or the soul or a third place. Well, that's very good you find that, because when you say what is the divine, it's much simpler to say there is the body than there's a soul and then there's a third place. Have you figured out what that third place is 30 years later? It's a place where all of the geniuses and the lovely people and the brilliant women and they all go there, and they watch over us a little bit. And once in a while they'll say, drop that line, it's no good. Sometimes when you do poetry, especially if you do translate people like Hafez and Rumi, you go almost immediately to this third world.

But we don't go there very often. Why? I suppose it's because we think too much about our houses and our places. Maybe I should read a Kabir poem here, which is called Kabir. Kabir is a poet from India, 14th century. Friend, hope for the guest while you are alive. Jump into experience while you are alive. Think and think while you are alive. If you call salvation belongs to the time before death. If you don't break your hopes while you are alive, you think that ghosts will do it after. The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten, that's all fantasy. What is found now is found then. And if you find nothing now, you will simply end up with an apartment in the city of death. I was going through Chicago one time with a young poet and we were inviting it and he said, if you find nothing now, you will simply end up with a suite in the Ramada end of death.

That's very interesting to see how that thing really comes alive when you're living in terms of your own country. You will end up with a suite in the Ramada end of death. If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire. So, plunge into the truth, find out who the teacher is, believe in the great sound. Kabir says this. When the guest is being searched for, see, then we'll use it with God. Capital G guest. When the guest is being searched for, it's the intensity of the longing for the guest that does all the work. And he says, look at me and you'll see a slave of that intensity. So, he's the first one that I ever went into who wrote two religious ones. You've been working a lot lately in Islamic poems, poems of Islam, right? The Muslims have a great literature and fantastic poets. Rumi and Hafez have been guiding lights, Rumi especially, American poetry for the last five or ten years. But also, it seems to me that if we're doing so much attack upon the Muslim world,

it's criticizing the Muslim world so much. We should be able to give thanks for the genius that is there. So, this is Persian poetry, 14 and 14. The foods turned out by the factories of time and space are not all that great. Bring some wine because the good things that this world are not all that great. The true kingdom comes to you without any breaking of bones. If that weren't so, achieving the garden through your own neighbors wouldn't be all that great. In the five days remaining to you in this rest stop before you go to the grave, take it easy. Give yourself time because time is not all that great. Two more. You purtons on the stone floor, you are not safe from the tricks of God's zeal. The distance between the cloister and the tavern we love is not all that great. In the last ages, the name of Hafez has been well inscribed in the books. But in our clan of distributors, the difference between profit and loss is not all that great. Do you see how he's withdrawing all our obsessions?

I've got to get this done. I don't have much time left. So, he is a tremendous spiritual poet. Can you help me understand the popularity of Rumi, the 13th century mystical poet? Yes. I like geniuses and Rumi was a geniuses. Yes, he was. I'm going to give you one that I translate it. I don't like it here. I want to go back. According to the old knowers, if you're absent from the one you love even for one second that ruins the whole thing. There must be someone just to find one sign of the other world in this town would be helpful. I feel that in Minneapolis, just to find one sign of the other world in this town would be helpful. You know the great Chinese Seymour bird got caught in this net? What can I do? I'm only a man. My desire about it don't come strolling over this way. It's said where you are. It's a good place. When you want to search, you choose something rich. When you choose wine, you look for what's clear and firm. What is the rest?

What is the rest? The rest is television. What is the rest? The rest is mirages and blurry pictures and milk mixed with water. The rest is self-hatred and mocking other people in bombing. So just be quiet and sit down. The reason is you're drunk and this is the edge of the roof. It's a good poem even for the United States right now. What? I'm looking for what's clear and firm. What is the rest? The rest is mirages and blurry pictures and milk mixed with water that is the way to cheat in the old days. The rest is self-hatred and mocking other people in bombing. So just be quiet and sit down. That'd be a good thing to say to Bush. Just be quiet and sit down. The reason is you're drunk and this is the edge of the roof. Your mature life has been bracketed by two wars, two long wars, Vietnam and Iraq. And you wrote poems against Iraq and you wrote poems against Vietnam and both of them went on.

Yeah. Portray didn't stop the war. No, it's never been able to do anything of that sort. It merely speaks to the soul so the soul can remember. So it's quite proper to have all the poems against the war and it's proper not to be disappointed if nothing changes. Would you like me to read the poem I have against the... This is probably the first poem written against the Iraq War in August of 2002. This was before the invasion. Yeah. Tell me why we don't lift our voices these days and cry over what is happening. Have you noticed the plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting? I say to myself, go on, cry. What's the sense of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out. See who will answer. This is called an answer. We will have to call especially loud to reach our angels who are harder hearing. They are hiding in the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

I was thinking of Grenada. I remember we invaded Grenada and why did we do that? We'll have to call especially loud to reach our angels who are harder hearing. They are hiding in the jugs of silence filled during our wars. Have we agreed to so many wars that we can't escape from silence? If we don't lift our voices, we love others who are ourselves to rob the house. How come we listened to the great cries? Neruda, Akmadava, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass? And now we're silent in the little bushes. It's a very bad pun but I left it in. We are silent in the little bushes. Some masters say our life only lasts seven days. Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet? Hurry cry now. Soon Sunday night will come. And Sunday night came when we bombed Baghdad. Where are we in the week?

Is it Thursday yet? Hurry cry now. Soon Sunday night will come. Why isn't there more outcry? If they were drafted, the outcry would be just as great as it was in the Vietnam War. Many of the people getting killed are the sons of people in northern Minnesota or somewhere who don't have any access to protest. But it was a disastrous choice like most of the other decisions he made. I go back to that acceptance speech. It made in 1969 when you accepted the National Book Award but you gave your $1,000 prize to the resistance against Vietnam. You said quote, as Americans we have all, remember this is 1969. As Americans we have always wanted the life of feeling without the life of suffering. We long for pure light, constant victory. We've always wanted to avoid suffering and therefore we are unable to live in the present. You think that's still true today?

Yes. Isn't that amazing that it's happening that the people in Washington are not suffering at all. But the ones who are suffering are those young men who had a bad education and needed to escape somehow from the trap of American life. And so they go there and get their legs and arms thrown off. You went to Iran a few months ago. Tell me about that. Yes. They flew us to Shuraz where our visit graves is. So we get up in the morning and we went to the grave. And about eight o'clock in the morning children started to come. Maybe a third grade children. And they stood around the little tomb and sang a poem of herfes. Yeah, really charming. And then they went away and now some fifth graders came. And they stood around the tomb and sang a poem of herfes. And of course every poem of herfes is connected with the tune. So you teach the children the tune and then they have the poem. So I said to myself, isn't that unbelievable? And why don't we do that? Why don't we go to the grave of Walt Whitman and have children come there? I do.

I don't have an answer. Why don't we? Because we don't love. We don't bring in Walt Whitman and love him in the way that the Iranians bring in their poets and love them. So that would be great if children could go to Walt Whitman's grave and recite little poems. What do you think it would mean if we went to the graves of our poets? You would bring the poets into heart instead of having them in your head in graduate school. And that's what you do with children. You bring children in and they get associated with the heart when they're very small. And then they can feel it all through their lives. You've been talking and writing a lot lately about the greedy soul. I'm glad you got that. Read this. All right, thank you. More and more I've learned to respect the power of the phrase a greedy soul. We all understand what it's intended after that phrase. It's the purpose of the United Nations to check the greedy soul in nations. It's the purpose of police to check the greedy soul in people. We know our soul has enormous abilities and worship and intuition coming to us from a very ancient past. But the greedy part of the soul, what the Muslims call the nafs,

also receives its energy from a very ancient past. The nafs is the covetous, desirous, shameless energy that steals food from neighboring tribes. Once what it wants and is willing to destroy anyone who receives more good things than itself. In the writer, it wants praise. I wrote these three lines. I live very close to my greedy soul. When I see a book published 2000 years ago, I check to see if my name is mentioned. This is really true. Really? I've done that. Yes, I've checked that. So in writers, the nafs often enter in the issue of how much do people love me? How many people are reading my books? Do people write about me? Do you understand that? It probably affects you, too, in that way. As journalists never. No, okay. If the covetous soul feels that its national sphere of influence is being threatened by another country, it will kill recklessly and brutally. In Poverty's millions, order thousands of young men in its own country to be killed. Only to find out 30 years later that the whole thing was a mistake.

In politics, the fog of war could be called the fog of the greedy soul. You know, the reason that one says things like the greedy soul is psychologically easy. There's no point in this war at all. It's not achieving anything, never would achieve anything. Only something as mad as the greedy soul could want it to begin and continue. It doesn't make any sense. As you say, the insanity of empire. You know, Robert, you told me once many years ago that you tried to write a poem every day. Do you still do that? Yes. It's a joyful thing. Especially when I'm doing the guzzles because then I can do a poem. And when I get a few stances done every day, anyway. Here are a couple of the viewers that I like. Read both of those. Think in ways you've never thought before. If a phone rings, think of this carrying a message larger than anything you've ever heard, faster than a hundred lines of yates. Think that someone may bring a bear to your door, may be wounded or deranged. And think that a mousse has risen out of the lake and he's carrying on his antlers

a child of your own whom you've never seen. When some one knocks on the door, think that he's about to give you something large. And tell Bill Moyers that you've been forgiven. Or that it's not necessary to work all the time. Or that it's been decided that if you lie down, no one will die. And that's for you, too, isn't it? And someone knocks at the door, think that he's about to give you something large. And tell Bill Moyers that you've been forgiven. That it's not necessary for you to work all the time. Or that it's been decided that if you lie down, no one will die. So, well, that's a beautiful quality in you, the feeling that you, that it isn't right for you to lie down. And I'm glad you're still working all the time. What about this one? This is one of your earliest that you read to me many years ago. And I wonder if it still resonates with you. For my son, Noah, 10 years old.

Ninth and day arrive and day after day goes by. And what is old remains old. And what is young remains young and grows old. The lumber pile does not grow younger, nor the two by fours lose their darkness. But the old tree goes on. The barn stands without help so many years. The advocate of darkness and night is not lost. The horse steps up, swings on one leg, turns its body. The chicken flapping claws onto the roof that swings, cramping and walloping. But what is primitive? It's not to be shot out into the night in the dark. And slowly the kind man comes closer. Loses his rage, sits down at table. That's the second stance. In the end of it, I can feel that when I was about 35 or 40 or so and I had children, I realized that what is primitive as me and me is not to be shot out all the time into the dark. Slowly the kind man comes closer. Loses his rage. Some of it sits down at table.

So I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness. When you said drawing or making books, stapled with messages in the world, or coloring a man with fire coming out of his hair. This is from my son Noah. Or we sit at the table with small key carefully poured. So we pass our time together, calm and delighted. Where do you reconcile that in the end? Well, when I learned from the Muslims about the knobs, it helps me to understand that if I am demanding or hopelessly aggressive with my children or whatever, that isn't me. It's the knobs. The greedy soul. And that greedy soul is very powerful and doesn't want to be looked at. And my hope is that the greedy soul will hear my words and understand it. It isn't necessary.

I'm 80 years old. How much more do I need to have to obey the greedy soul? Isn't this enough? You got it. I'm famous enough. Haven't I published enough books? I remember the first time I came to see you back in the late 70s. You were living in Moose Lake, Minnesota. You're still there? Well, I still am. We have a house in Minneapolis, but I sometimes go back up to Moose Lake when I want to be by myself. Do you have a favorite from up there? A favorite from Moose Lake? How about after drinking all night with a friend? Oh, that's good. That sounds like Moose Lake. This is a poem from the 60s, really. A friend and I went up to a lake up north. After drinking all night with a friend who he got in the boat had dawned to see you can write the best poem. This is Bill Duffy. These pines, these follow, these rocks. This water dark and touched by wind. I am like you, you dark boat, drifting over waters fed by cool springs. Beneath the waters since I was a boy, I have dreamt of strange and dark treasures, not of gold or strange stones, but the two gift beneath the pale lakes of Minnesota.

This morning also, drifting in the dawn wind, I sense my hands and my shoes in this ink. Drifting is all of the body drifts above the clouds of the flesh and the stone. A few friendships, a few dawns, a few glimpses of grass, a few ores weathered by the snow in the heat, so we drift toward shore over cold waters, no longer caring if we drift or go straight. So the last line is pretty good, because it's got some of you. You see something of the hope that my nostril gets smaller. I didn't even know the word at that time. So we drift toward shore over cold waters, no longer caring if we drift or go straight. I like these three lines from the poem in your book. My sentence was a thousand years of joy. You say, Robert, those high spirits don't prove you are a close friend of truth, but you have learned to drive your buggy over the prairies of human sorrow.

Good. Do you like that one? Yeah, I do. So what now for you? Well, I'm going to read something else here. I want to read this one poem before we quit. Stealing sugar from the castle. This has the word joy. We are poor students who stay after school to study joy. We are, like those birds in the India Mountains, I'm a widow whose child is their only joy. The only thing I hold in my ant-like head is the builder's plan of the castle of sugar, just the steel one grain of sugar is a joy. Translating great poetry in a way of stealing sugar. The only thing I hold in my ant-like head is the builder's plan of the castle of sugar, just the steel one grain of sugar is a joy. This is from the bay wolf. Like a bird we fly out of darkness into the hall which is lit with singing, then fly out again. Being shot out of the warm hall is also a joy. I'm a lager, a loafer, and an idiot. One of my boys said to me, Dad, you're not a loafer. I'm a lager, a loafer, and an idiot.

But I'd love to read about those who caught one glimpse of the face and died twenty years later in joy. I don't mind you saying I will die soon. Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear the word you, which begins every sentence of joy. Your thief, the judge, said, Let's see your hands. I showed my calloused hands in court. My sentence was a thousand years of joy. Are you happy at eighty? Yeah, I'm happy. I'm happy at eighty. And I can't stand so much happiness, so used to it. You're a loafer. And sometimes maybe one day out of the week I'll become depressed. But the rest of the time, especially if I'm writing poetry, I'm never depressed. What depresses you? Who knows? Depression comes up from underneath. It just grabs you. It's an entity on its own. We're built for depression in a way,

because the nofs is so strong in us. It doesn't want us to be happy and give away things. It wants us to pull back inside and say, My mother wasn't good enough to me. My father wasn't good enough to me. You know, they hold that whole thing. Let's bring the circle around. Because when I first met you thirty years ago, you told me this was a poem that had marked you. Remember it? Yeah. I live my life in growing orbits, which move out over the things in the world. Perhaps I will never achieve the last, but that'll be my attempt. Well, that's the various sixties, isn't it? I live my life in growing orbits, which move out over the things in the world. Perhaps I can never achieve the last, but that'll be my attempt. This is right in Maria Wilka, translated into German. I am circling around God. So the word made me nervous. So he said, around the ancient tower. And I have been circling for a thousand years.

And I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song. Genius poem. Isn't it genius? Wilky. Wilky. I am circling around God around the ancient tower. And I have been circling for a thousand years. There's a part of you that has been circling for a thousand years. And you? Yeah. And all of us. And those echoes we don't know the source of. That's right. And that wonderful energy that you can see in a human face, even when walking down the street in New York, you see this incredible energy that's inside there and is being blocked all the time by family and business and all of that, but it's still there. Circling around God around the ancient tower. And I have been circling for a thousand years. And I still don't know if I am a falcon, which means someone who goes into grabs things and steals them. Or a storm. A storm, a circle, too.

Or a great song. We both hope that we're a great song. I'm glad I've heard something. Thank you. That was so wonderful to be with you. Same here. Thank you. Robert Blind must seem a kid to my next guest. He's only 80. Grace Lee Boggs is 92. That's right. 92. She was born in the first term of President Woodrow Wilson in 1915. But I'm here to tell you that when she was in New York on her last visit, she ran our producing team ragged, just trying to keep up with her, and there a third her age. What's her secret? Well, somewhere along the way, she seems to have given the boot to her knaffes. Those greedy souls Robert Blind said can drown us in toxic self-absorption.

She's also proof that no matter how great a hair, it's always in season to be learning something new. When I met Grace Lee, I remembered how that wise old Greek dogenies answered when as an old man he was told he should rest. If I were running in the stadium, he asked, ought I to slacken my pace when approaching the goal? Or I not rather to put on speed? Well, look out on the highway. Grace Lee Boggs has the accelerator pushed to the floor. Grace Lee Boggs has lived in this same house in Detroit, Michigan for almost 50 years. That's over half her life. I'm a terrible housekeeper. Let me tell you that. It's a life that's taken her down many roads in the struggle for civil rights. She's still going strong. I'm sorry. I think that if we stick to those categories of race and class and gender, we are stuck. Would you send three or four petitions to Oneida Newton? From the analysis of Karl Marx

to the agitation of black power, from Martin Luther King's non-violence to grassroots activism in the inner city, this philosopher activist has never been afraid of change. We're going to George Washington's bridge. Her story begins here in New York City, where she was born to immigrant Chinese parents. During the rowing 20s, her father ran a popular Chinese restaurant on Broadway near Times Square. But to buy the land for their first house across the river in Queens, he had to put the deed in the name of an Irish contractor, because Asians were prohibited to own land there. Every week, Grace spent hours at the local library and won a region scholarship to Barnard College, earned a PhD in philosophy from Bryn Mar, and would soon be testing her ideas of a good society from the ground up. I met her recently when she came back to town from Detroit. Is it true that the waiters at your father's Chinese restaurant when you were born, said, take her out and put her on a hillside as you just a girl?

I attribute some of my activism to that. I think being born female on top of Chinese restaurant gave me an idea that a lot of things in this world that need to be changed. How did it happen that you came to identify over the years far more with the black American world than with the Chinese American world? When I was growing up, Asians were so few and far between as to be almost invisible. And so the idea of an Asian American movement or an Asian American thrust in this country was unthinkable. What I'm trying to figure out is how it is that a daughter of a Chinese entrepreneur in New York City goes to Brent Mar at a very early age, gets her PhD in 1940 before the Second World War, becomes a Marxist theorist, an activist in the socialist movement,

moves on to become an apostle, disciple of Martin Luther King, and here having outlived all those theories and all those characters and leaders and people is still agitating for what she calls democracy. Well, you know, I had no idea what I was going to do after I got my degree in philosophy in 1940. But what I did know was at that time if you were Chinese American, even department stores wouldn't hire you. They'd come right out and say, we don't hire orientals. And so the idea of my getting a job, teaching in the university and so forth, was really ridiculous. I was in Chicago and I got a job in the philosophy library there for $10 a week. And so I found a little Jewish woman right near the university who took pity on me and said I could stay in her basement rent-free. The only obstacle was that I had to face down a barricade of rats,

and at that time, in the black community, they were beginning to protest and struggle against rat infested housing. I joined one of the attendance organizations, and thereby came in touch with the black community for the first time in my life. 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 FDR, the president was sympathetic, but reluctant to act. Perclaiming 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. FDR 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 gracely bogs that black men could bring home a regular paycheck. And when I saw what a movement could do, I said, boy, that's what I wanted with my life. It was just amazing. I mean, how do 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's very tricky. It does take moral force to make it political decisions possible. Yeah, and I think that too much of 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. 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 struggle. You know, as Douglass said, he's power used, nothing without a struggle. But how are the struggles, I think, is now a very challenging question. She would learn a lot more about struggle from the man she married in 1952. Jimmy Boggs, a radical activist, organizer, and writer. They couldn't have been outwardly more different. He was a black man, an auto worker from Alabama. And she was a Chinese American college-educated philosopher. But they were kindred spirits and their marriage lasted four decades until his death. I think that I owe a great deal of my rootedness to Jimmy because he learned to write and become a writer because in his illiterate community, nobody could read and write. He picked cotton and then went to work in Detroit. He saw himself as having been part of one epoch, the agriculture epoch, and now the industrial epoch,

and now the post-industrial epoch. And I think that's a very important part of what we need in this country. There's that sense that we have lived through so many stages and that we are entering into a new stage where we could create something completely different. Jimmy had that feeling. She and Jimmy worked together in the Socialist Workers' Party at first, agitating through newsletters and books. They were drawn to the burgeoning black power movement. Alfred Malcolm X, a place to stay when he visited Detroit, and argued in any available form that black power couldn't be worse than white power. Jimmy was drawn into a round of correspondence with the famous British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Help me to understand what Jimmy met with the letter to the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Negroes in the United States still think they are struggling for democracy. In fact, democracy is what they are struggling against. Well, for folks who don't understand,

I'm saying for example, how the Democratic Party was a coalition of labor and liberals from the north and people like Eastland and all those Ku Klux Klaners down south. The races in the south. And to mark that was the American democracy. People created a whole lot of love for it and all that sort of thing. Without understanding how the conditions that people were living under, natural, and that was called democracy. And finally, fortunately, we broke through that in the 60s. But that breakthrough came only with great pain. In the summer of 1967, a police raid and Detroit exploded into violence. Fires raised across the city, including in the Boggs neighborhood. President Johnson called out the U.S. Army and the nation watched on television horrified as the city burned. The press called it a violent spasm of riot and lawlessness.

Let's get off this crap! But Grace Lee Boggs saw something in those flames that many outsiders missed. Her beloved neighborhood was offering the slow bleed of manufacturing jobs from the city and an unemployment rate doubled that of whites. Well, let me take you back to that terrible summer of 1967 when Detroit erupted into that awful riot out there. I asked you to think about your calling it a riot. What would you call it? We in Detroit called it the rebellion. The rebellion? Of course, we understand there was a righteousness about the young people rising up. It was a standing up by young people against both the police which they considered an occupation army. And against what they sensed was had become their expendability because of high tech.

That what black people had been valued for for hundreds of years only for their labor was now being taken away from them. And you think that this question of work was at the heart of what happened or it was part of what happened in Detroit that summer? I don't think that they were conscious of it, but I wonder why I saw happen was that young people who recognized that working in the factory was what had allowed their parents to buy a house to raise a family to get married to send their kids to school that that was eroding. They felt that no one cares anymore. And what we tried to do is explain that a rebellion is righteous because it's the protest by a people against injustice against an unrighteous situation. But it's not enough. You have to go beyond rebellion. And it was amazing. I'm turning point in my life because until that time I had not made a distinction between a rebellion and a revolution.

And it forced us to begin thinking, what does a revolution mean? How does it relate to evolution? The violence in Detroit brought some new thinking on her part about a strategy for change. After seeing how anger and frustration could turn so quickly into chaos, Boggs began to take a closer look at the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr. She had been slow to appreciate King's spiritual journey or his belief in non-violence. But now she discovered that King too was wrestling with how to go beyond the civil rights movement to a profound transformation of society. By this point, King had realized it wasn't enough just to end racial segregation in the South. In the spring of 1967, he came to New York's historic Riverside Church to challenge inequality throughout America and to link conditions at home to the nation's war in Southeast Asia. I speak for the poor of America, who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home

and death and corruption in Vietnam. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours. 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 in April 4th, 1967. His moral argument did not take hold with the powers that be. 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. Then do moral arguments have any force? Of course they do. If they can be so heedlessly ignored. I think because we depend too much on the government to do it. I think we are 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. Wars do. Wars do. Wars do. But positive changes leaves forward in the evolution of a humankind do not start with governments. I think that's what the civil rights movement taught us. But Martin Luther King was ignored then on the war. Yeah. In fact, the last few years of his life as he was moving beyond the protest and the south and the end of official segregation, he was largely ignored if not ridiculed for his position on economic equality upon doing something about poverty and for ending war. In fact, many civil rights leaders, as you remember Grace, condemned him for mixing foreign policy with civil rights. They said that's not what we should be about.

But see, what I hear in what you're saying is a separation of the anti-war speech of the peace trajectory from the other things that Martin was saying. He was talking about a radical revolution of values. And that radical revolution of values has not been pursued in the last 40 years. I mean, the consumerism, the materialism is not worse. The militarism has continued while people have gone around and they're just using their credit cards. He all has been taking place. And so would he have continued to challenge those? I think he would. But on the whole, our society has not been challenging those, except in small pockets. He said that the three triplets of society and America were racism, consumerism or materialism and militarism.

And you're saying those have a change. I'm saying that not only have those not changed, but people have isolated the struggles against each of these from the other. They have not seen that they're part of one whole of a radical revolution of values that we all must undergo. Or whose failing is that? I think that this... I'm not sure I'll use the word failing. I would say that people who have engaged in one struggle tend to be locked into that struggle. When you look back, who do you think was closer to the truth? Karl Marx and Martin Luther King. The truth about human society. King was an extraordinary thinker. He understood... He read Marx. He was serious about reading Marx. He was also serious about reading Hagel, about Rhe Gandhi, about the Bible and Jesus Christ and Christianity. So Marx belongs to a particular period. I think to be anti-Marxist.

King was not an anti-Marxist. He was a man of his time. I've often wondered, Grace, if Martin Luther King would have been more effective if he'd been slightly more radical. First of all, I think it's difficult to understand what more radical means. If he had challenged the system or the interlocking relationship between power, both in the economy and power in Washington. You know, Bill, to develop your ideas, to meet the crisis that you're faced with takes time. King, from 65 August to April 1968, only had three years. And he was moving very fast. It takes time. What we need to do is not to thought him for not having done in the few years that he has. What we need to do now. We need to build on what he did. That's what the movement's about,

building on what you learned from the past. Where is the sign of the movement today? I believe that we are at the point now in the United States where a movement is beginning to emerge. I think that the calamity, the quagmire of the Iraq War, the outsourcing of jobs, the dropout of young people from the educational system, the monstrous worth of the prison industrial complex, the planetary emergency, in which we are engulfed at the present moment, is we demanding that instead of just complaining about these things, instead of just protesting about these things, we begin to look for and hope for another way of living. And I think that that's one of the movements. I see a movement beginning to emerge

because I see hope beginning to trump despair. Where do you see the signs of it? I see the signs in the various small groups that are emerging all over the place to try and regain our humanity in very practical ways. For example, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Wil Allen, who is a former basketball player, has purchased a two and a half acre land with five greenhouses on it. And he is beginning to grow food, healthy food for his community, and communities are growing up around that idea. I mean, that's a huge change in the way that we think of the city. I mean, the things that we have to restore are so elemental. And not just food, and not just healthy food,

but a different way of relating to time and history and to the earth. And a garden does that for you? Yes. A garden does all sorts of things. It helps young people to relate to the earth in a different way. It helps them to relate to their elders in a different way. It helps them to think of time in a different way. Well, if you just press a button and you think that's the key for reality, you're in a hell of a mess as a human being. That's why we're growing beyond capitalism. So it is that this woman who marched and agitated and argued in mass movements and social protests for over 70 years has come full circle to find seeds of hope in small places where people work quietly and patiently on every imaginable front. We work on trying to change policies for homeless people. The information is powerful.

They get little public attention although they're concerned with the most basic human needs. We want jobs that actually empower us, you know, and make it so that you actually have a say in what happens at your workplace. These days, Boggs works through what's known as the Beloved Community Initiative to encourage people like this in cities across the country to see themselves as crucial to how democracy works and for whom. The Beloved Community's initiative is identifying and helping to bring together small groups who are making this cultural revolution that we so urgently need in our country. And I see this as part of a pilgrimage which human beings have been embarked on for thousands or tens of thousands of years. People think of evolution mainly in terms of anatomical changes. I think that we have to think of evolution

in terms of very elemental human changes. And so we're evolving both through our knowledge and through our experiences to another stage of human kind. Well, I sell revolution and evolution and no longer so separate. But the economic system doesn't reflect this evolution, outsourcing of jobs, the flight of capital, the power of capital over workers, all of that has the system isn't catching up with this. Well, don't expect the system to catch up on the system, follow the system. What I think is that not since the 30s have the American people, the ordinary American face such uncertainty with regard to the economic system. In the 30s, what we did was we confronted management and we were able thereby to gain many advantages particularly to gain a respect for the dignity of labor.

That's no longer possible today because of the ability of corporations to fly all over the place and begin setting up on all this outsourcing. So people are finding other ways to regain control over the ways they make that living. You know, a lot of young people out there would agree with your analysis, with your diagnosis, and then they will say, what can I do that's practical? How do I make the difference that Grace Lee Boggs is talking about? What would you be doing? I would say do something local. Do something real, however small. And don't... don't dish the political things but understand their limitations. Don't dish them? Disrespect them? Well, in some of the limitations. We politics... there was a time when we believed that if we just achieved political power,

we'd solve all our problems. And I think what we've learned through the experiences of the Russian revolution and all those revolutions, that those who become... who try to get power in the state, become part of the state. They become locked into the practices. And we have to begin creating new practices. What would it take for this next round of change that you see as promising? What would it take? It takes discussions like this. I mean, it takes a whole lot of things. It takes people doing things. It takes people talking about things. It takes dialogue. It takes changing a whole lot of ways by which we think. Do you see any leaders who are advocating that change? I mean, people that we would all recognize. Anybody we don't recognize? I don't see any leaders. And I think we have to rethink the concept of leader. Because leader implies follower. And not so many. But I think we need to appropriate

and brace the idea that we are the leaders we've been looking for. Gracie Boggs, thank you very much. That's it for the journal. See you next week. I'm Bill Moyers. For more on our guests, Web Only Video, and a transcript of this program, log on to our website at pbs.org. This episode of Bill Moyer's Journal is available on DVD or V.A. For more on our guests, Web Only Video, and a transcript of this program, log on to our website at pbs.org. This episode of Bill Moyer's Journal is available on DVD or VHS for $29.95.

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