by Grace Lee Boggs

About the author: Grace Lee Boggs is an activist, writer, and speaker whose political involvement encompasses the labor, civil rights, women’s liberation, and environmental justice movements in the United States.

In the 1960s I didn’t pay much attention to Martin Luther King, Jr. My own social-change activities unfolded in the inner city of Detroit [Michigan]. So I identified more with Malcolm [X] than with Martin. Like most Black Power activists, I tended to view King’s notions of nonviolence and “the beloved community” as somewhat naive and sentimental.

Nor was I involved in the fifteen-year campaign that was launched in 1968 by Detroit’s own Congressman John Conyers to declare King’s birthday a national holiday. While many progressives rallied to the cause...