# The Detroit Apartment *A Biography of Grace Lee Boggs* — Legendary Biographies No. 053 - **Subject:** Grace Chin Lee Boggs - **Written by:** Solomon Treadway - **Shelf:** Movements / Civil Rights - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 208 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 208 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-068-3) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-235-9) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/053-the-detroit-apartment.html ## About this book She was born Grace Chin Lee on June 27, 1915, above her father's Chinese restaurant on Manhattan's Upper West Side. She earned a doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr in 1940, moved to Chicago and then to Detroit, married the African-American Workers Party organiser James Boggs in 1953, and spent the next sixty-two years organising in Detroit's Black radical, labour, environmentalist, and women's movements. She lived in the same East Side house from 1962 until her death in 2015 at one hundred. Solomon Treadway's biography opens earlier — in the Manhattan childhood and the Bryn Mawr years and the early Trotskyist Workers Party organising — and follows the arc through the marriage to James Boggs, the long 1960s Detroit movement of the Inner-City Organising Committee, the Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (1974) co-authored with James, the Detroit Summer youth program of 1992, the East Side Boggs Educational Center founded in 2013, and the long retirement of correspondence and the Detroit house's morning conversations with the steady stream of younger movement organisers who came to learn. What emerges is a portrait of a Chinese-American philosopher whose Detroit organising spanned every American social movement of the second half of the twentieth century — and whose centenary the city's movement chose to mark with a community garden in her name. ## Contents 1. Above the Restaurant 2. The Education of Grace Chin Lee 3. The Discovery of Uselessness 4. The Johnson-Forest Tendency 5. The City That Made Cars 6. Jimmy 7. The Partnership 8. Revolution and Evolution 9. The Great Rebellion 10. After the Fire 11. The Long Turn 12. The Death of the Industrial City 13. Jimmy's Last Years 14. Detroit Summer 15. The Garden 16. The Next American Revolution 17. American Revolutionary 18. One Hundred Years ## Questions **Who is The Detroit Apartment about?** Grace Chin Lee Boggs. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Detroit Apartment — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,663 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 64,000 words, 18 chapters, 208 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Solomon Treadway is a Chicago-born culture critic whose biographies focus on Black American writers, intellectuals, and the post-war public sphere. His research utilizes deep archival investigations to reconstruct the social circles, political struggles, and literary debates that shaped mid-century American thought. In works like The Chairman, Passing the Torch, and The Papers, Treadway traces how ideas move from private correspondence into the broader cultural consciousness. His writing emphasizes the everyday realities and collaborative networks behind major intellectual shifts, avoiding dry academic jargon in favor of clear, character-driven narrative history. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he works as an independent researcher and spends his weekends volunteering at local community archives and bookshops.