Reviewed by: American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggsdir. by Grace Lee Azalia Muchransyah (bio) American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, directed by Grace Lee. 2013. DVD, 82 minutes. This documentary revolves around Grace Lee Boggs, described by the director, Grace Lee, as “a Marxist theoretician, a Black Power activist, [with] a thick FBI file.” Boggs was a Chinese American social justice activist who was heavily involved in the Black Power movement in Detroit for more than seventy years. After earning her doctorate in 1940, she came to Chicago and wound up in a low-paying job in a philosophy library because many places would not hire Asian Americans. While in Chicago she came into contact with the African American community and participated in the 1941 March on Washington movement. She discovered that mobilizing a mass action could actually bring about change. As a Hegelian and a Marxist, Boggs constantly tested her own limits and those of others to gain new understandings through conversations and exchanging books with anybody she could engage. “Once ideas are fixed, they are already dead,” she said. For Boggs, the Black Power movement was about something deeper than civil rights. She criticized Caucasians who believe African Americans want to become exactly the same as white people. She said, “[An African American] is striving to become equal to a particular image of himself that he has achieved. That he has not trying to become equal to whites.” Along with her late husband, James, Boggs contributed significantly to the movement by creating a bimonthly publication titled Correspondence. Both of them worked hand-in-hand in distinct, though complementary, roles in the Detroit Black Power movement. In fact, Boggs was so well-known as a Black Power figure in the 1960s that FBI records at the time said that Boggs was probably an Afro-Chinese. However, even though people around her did not care about her identity as a Chinese American living in an African American community, Boggs described herself as “a part of and apart from the community.” Throughout the ten years covered by this documentary we see the changes that took place both in Detroit and in the United States. Juxtapositions of archival footage and present-day Detroit highlight the evolution of an American city driven by capitalism and automation, often discussed and criticized by both James and Grace Lee Boggs. We also see how the Black Power movement, in which Boggs became heavily involved, resulted in gradual socio-political changes that ultimately led to the election of the United States’ first African American president, Barack Obama. At the same time we also watch Boggs age and change in experience, personality, and thoughts by constantly challenging her ideas as a human being. The film explores at some length Boggs’s relationship with the Asian American community and her Asian American identity (or lack thereof). Ten years [End Page 268] prior to the film, when Lee first filmed Boggs for another documentary titled The Grace Lee Project, Boggs said on camera that she did not think of herself so much as a Chinese American or a woman “because the Chinese-American woman hadn’t emerged and the woman’s woman hadn’t emerged.”1 However, in a 2008 interview included in this film, she expressed a different view, saying, “I’m not sure why I am who I am. I think it does have something to do with the fact that I was born female and born Chinese.” She explored that idea through her discussions with Lee and ultimately admitted in her 2016 autobiography that being born female and Chinese American had made her realize from an early age that fundamental changes were necessary in American society.2 Change is also apparent in how Boggs viewed two key civil rights figures of the 1960s: Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. As a Marxist, Boggs was at first naturally drawn to Malcolm X’s radicalism and dismissive of King’s strategy of nonviolence. However, after witnessing Malcolm X’s assassination and the Detroit Riot of 1967, where she saw how violence could cause more problems than it solved, Boggs began to find ways...