Cover of The Detroit Apartment, a biography of Grace Lee Boggs

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3,663 words · no email, no account

No. 053 · Movements · Civil Rights

The Detroit Apartment

a biography of Grace Chin Lee Boggs

Written by Solomon Treadway · Published 2026 · 63,981 words

What the book is

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.

At a glance

Subject: Grace Chin Lee Boggs
Shelf: Movements · Civil Rights
Written by: Solomon Treadway
Chapters: 18 across 208 pages
Narrated by: Edmund Hartley
Editions: Paperback · EPUB · Audiobook
Authorisation: Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.

Contents · 18 chapters

01Above the RestaurantRead free
02The Education of Grace Chin Lee3,137 words
03The Discovery of Uselessness3,181 words
04The Johnson-Forest Tendency3,776 words
05The City That Made Cars3,216 words
06Jimmy3,078 words
07The Partnership2,959 words
08Revolution and Evolution3,899 words
09The Great Rebellion4,059 words
10After the Fire3,970 words
11The Long Turn3,548 words
12The Death of the Industrial City3,136 words
13Jimmy's Last Years3,956 words
14Detroit Summer3,362 words
15The Garden4,174 words
16The Next American Revolution3,128 words
17American Revolutionary4,296 words
18One Hundred Years3,629 words

The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.

Editions

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

The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.

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

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.