Category: CRDL

Civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs passed away on Monday, October 5, at the age of 100.

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Grace Lee was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1915, was raised in New York City, and received a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in 1940. Based in Detroit, Michigan since the early 1950s, she married African American civil rights worker James Boggs in 1953, who became her partner in civil rights activities. The couple organized a civil rights march with Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963, a Grassroots Leadership Conference with Malcom X (also in 1963), educated people on discrimination against African American factory workers, hosted study groups for activists that shaped Detroit leadership, and in 1992, developed the Detroit Summer neighborhood program for Detroit youth to connect to their community.

Read more about the life and legacy of Grace Lee Boggs here

You can learn more about Detroit civil rights work in the Civil Rights Digital Library at http://crdl.usg.edu/places/michigan/detroit_mich/

The Digital Library of Georgia remembers the life of activist, politician, writer, and educator Julian Bond who passed away Sunday at the age of 75.

As a student at Morehouse College in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bond co-organized the the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights, a civil rights group that successfully desegregated Atlanta’s public facilities. In 1960, Bond became a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), where he served as the organization’s communications director, and participated in southern voter registration drives. Bond later served in the Georgia House of Representatives for four terms (1967-1974) and then in the Georgia Senate for six terms (1975-1987). He was the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a position he held from 1971 to 1979.  After leaving the Georgia Senate, Bond served as a distinguished professor in residence at American University and as a faculty member in the history department at the University of Virginia. From 1998 to 2010, Bond was chairperson of the NAACP.

The Civil Rights Digital Library provides access to numerous resources featuring Julian Bond at http://crdl.usg.edu/people/b/bond_julian_1940/ .