I'd like to thank the Commission on the Status of Women, the Women's Studies Program, the Undergraduate Library and the other groups sponsoring today's Women's History Month event for giving me the opportunity to tell the story of my journey as an Asian American female who has lived most of my adult life in the African American community.

I was born 92 years ago in 1915 above my father's Chinese American restaurant in downtown Providence, R.I. When I cried, the Chinese waiters used to say: "Leave her on the hillside to die. She's only a girl baby." That experience taught me early on that going back to China (which is what Chinese immigrants in those days had in mind) was not such a good idea; and that serious changes in the treatment of females were long overdue.

Four years before I was born, my mother, who was my father's No. 2 wife, had given birth to my sister on the floor in steerage during the month it took for my parents to come by slow boat from China, Born in 1890. my mother never learned to read and write because there were no schools for females in the little village where she grew up. My father's No. 1 wife, whom he had left behind in China, was giving birth to a son around the same time that my mother was giving birth to my sister.

However, I didn't discover the concept of feminism until I was a teenager and read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Women and Economics." Females, Gilman explained, are little better than prostitutes. From childhood on, they are socialized to get what they want, e.g. new dolls or new clothes, by sitting on their father's laps and tickling him under the chin.

The edition I read wasn't illustrated, but that image made such a profound impression on me that I vowed I would never become the kind of woman who depended on a man for what I needed or wanted. So in my senior year in high school I learned shorthand and typing so that I would always be able to earn my living and decided to go to college to get the higher education that would enable me to live my own life in accordance with my own convictions.

This very personal understanding of feminism was what kept me going in my 20s and 30s. It was what gave me the gumption to decide in 1941, when I became involved with the March on Washington movement to demand jobs for blacks in defense plants, that what I wanted to do with my life was to become a movement activist in the black community. It was also what made it easy for me to marry Jimmy Boggs, an African American auto worker in 1953, without worrying what others, including my parents, would think.

Jimmy and I were married for 40 years, from 1953 to his death in 1993, Those 40 years changed my life. Jimmy was not only an activist in the labor and black movements; he was also the person who helped folks in the community and in the plant fill out their income tax forms, obtain their birth certificates, and fix their cars. As his wife I became a member of the black community and so active in the black movement in the 60s that FBI records suggested that I might be AfroAsian.

Working together, Jimmy and I were both so active in the Black Power movement in Detroit that when thousands of black young people exploded in July 1967 in what the media called "the riot" and Detroiters called the "Rebellion," we were among the six people allegedly responsible, even though we were in California on our vacation when it erupted. The others were Rev. Cleage or Jerimoge, founder of the Shrine of the Black Madonna, Richard and Milton Henry (who died recently), and Ed Vaughn who later became a state representative .

The 1967 Rebellion, whose 40th anniversary we will be commemorating this year, was a turning point for Detroit. It was chiefly responsible for the election of Coleman Young, Detroit' first black mayor, in 1973 because it told the Establishment that law and order could no longer be maintained in Detroit by white power.

At the same time that blacks came to power, however, multinational corporations were exporting jobs offshore so that young people could no longer drop out of school in the 9th grade and get a job making enough money to get married and raise a family.

As a result, young people lost hope and our communities began to deteriorate. This process accelerated after crack came to the city in the 1980s and kids began saying "why go to school with the idea that one day you'll be able to get a good job and make a lot of money when you can make it now by rolling."

Faced with this crisis, Coleman Young tried desperately to re-industrialize the city. For example, in 1980, despite fierce community resistance, he demolished 1500 houses and 600 businesses so that GM could build the Poletown plant which was supposed to create 6000 jobs. In 1988, insisting that a Casino industry could produce 50,000 jobs, he asked voters to approve Casino Gambling.

What Young was unable or refused to recognize was that in Detroit, as in other cities all across the U.S. and Europe, we have come to the end of the industrial age when economic development and material abundance were the main goal, and are entering a new age when our challenge is to stop pursuing economic development and concentrate instead on creating more human and loving relationships with each other, with other peoples and with the Earth.

The 13 month-long Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56, which the Women's Political Alliance in Montgomery initiated to protest Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her seat, was the first indication that we had entered this new era in the evolution of popular struggles. (For more on the role of women in organizing the boycott, I recommend this book by Paula Giddings: : When & Where I enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America).

That is because the Montgomery Bus Boycott created a theory and practice of revolutionary struggle very different from that which prevailed in the first half of the 20th century. In those days, under the influence of the 1917 Russian Revolution. most radicals, including myself, conceived of revolutionary struggle mainly as an insurrection, a seizure of state power by the oppressed from their oppressors, by the victims from the villains.

By contrast, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a long, non-violent, disciplined, and ultimately successful boycott by an African-American community, struggling against their dehumanization not as angry victims or rebels but as new men and women, representative of a new more human society. Using methods that transformed themselves as they challenged racial discrimination and segregation, they inspired the human identity and ecology movements that over the last 40 years have been creating a new civil society in the United States.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, inspired by the black movement, the modern women's movement exploded. It began with consciousness-raising discussions by small groups of women followed by huge demonstrations. Two parallel tendencies then emerged within the movement: (1) the pursuit of individual upward mobility by women like Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina; and (2) what Alice Walker calls the "Womanist" tendency to emphasize relationships rather than individual aggrandizement, as dramatized in ""The Color Purple," the book and film starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover which created such a furore in the 1980s.

This womanist tendency represents a profound philosophical critique of Western industrial society which Starhawk describes in "Burning Times," an appendix to her book Dreaming the Dark,

In this very important essay Starhawk tells the story of how Western industrial society began with the witchhunts of the 16th and 17th century which not only expropriated the land from the peasants but also replaced the intuitive knowledge of women with the Scientific Rationalism of Bacon and Descartes, robbing us of our "souls" by creating a sharp dichotomy between ourselves and reality and thus legitimizing our desecration and exploitation of one another and of Nature.

Since writing this essay, Starhawk has become one of the leaders of the anti-corporate globalization movement, creating transformative and spiritual demonstrations that involve poetry, dance, singing and fellowship. She has also been a key organizer of the affinity groups which closed down the WTO in the 1999 Battle of Seattle and since then have mobilized against FTAA and other administrative bodies of global capitalism.

Meanwhile, in the last two decades women all over the country who have never heard of Starhawk are returning to the community instead of pursuing careers in the power structure like Condoleeza Rice, Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina. Instead of working to produce wealth and individual careers, they are building caring environments for young people in our inner cities. In the process they are helping to transform our communities and cities from centers of despair into centers of hope. This is what Maria Mies, the German eco-feminist, calls a feminist perspective on Work, as contrasted with a capitalist or a socialist perspective.

For example, I am a member of a group calling itself "Beloved Communities" (see belovedcommunitiesnet.org). We began two years ago with this flyer, "These are the times to grow our souls," which begins with a quote from Martin Luther King's Call to the Beloved Community, What we do is identify, visit and weave a network of "beloved communities" in different cities of the United States.

Two weekends ago I spent three days at the Cookman United Methodist Church community in an abandoned neighborhood in North Philadelphia. This community is an inspiring example of the hope and joy that can be generated when a few people, mainly women who have gone to college and could keep advancing themselves individually, return to the community to create a locally-based, multigenerational, loving, caring learning environment for young people, The visit deepened my appreciation of MLK's statement that "love is not some sentimental weakness but somehow the key to ultimate reality."

Last year on our visit to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, we met Sharon Adams who returned to the working class neighborhood near the Harley-Davidson and Anheuser-Busch plants where she grew up but which, because of declining jobs, had become infested with crackhouses and crime. With the cooperation of Growing Power, an urban farm founded by retired basketball player Will Allen, and with community rain gardens, Sharon and her husband have restored pride to this neighborhood. See www.walnutway.org

Fifteen years ago we started DETROIT SUMMER, an intergenerational multicultural Program to involve young people in the rebuilding, redefining and respiriting of Detroit through planting community gardens, painting public murals and rehabbing houses. Today Detroit Summer is being carried on by a group of young people in their mid-20s who are working with high school youth to create a new kind of schooling that involves young people in community-building, along the lines of the Freedom Schools that were established during Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964.

Most of these groups are small, involving less than a hundred people. But that is not necessarily a weakness because as Margaret Wheatley points out in her book Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World:

"In a web the potential impact of local actions bears no relationship to their size. When we choose to act locally, we may be wanting to influence the entire system. But we work where we are, with the system that we know, the one we can get our arms around.

"From a Newtonian perspective, our efforts often seem too small, and we doubt that our actions will contribute incrementally to large-scale change. Step by step, system by system we aspire to develop enough mass or force to alter the larger system.

"But a quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently.

"Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective. However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. I have learned that in this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass.' It's always about critical connections."

All over the world today individuals confronted by the destruction of our humanity, our communities and our environment by global corporations are coming together in small groups at the local level to imagine and begin creating new ways of living that will give us back control over our own lives and redefine what it means to be human in the 21st century. One estimate (by Paul Hawken) is that there may be as many as half a million of these self-healing civic groups in every country around the world, most of them small and barely visible. In order to join this movement what we need to do is find each other and develop transformative practices at the local level that can restore hope to the future. That is how change takes place in living systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously.

This feminist concept of change is what I believe we need to build the movement in our period.

Last week I conducted two workshops on Civic Engagement at a AARP conference for 50+ folks seeking new meaning in their lives. When I asked participants, mostly African American and mostly women, why they were attending the workshop, many of them said it was "because they wanted to give back to the community."

This year, 2007, is the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion and of MLK's anti-Vietnam war speech in which he called for a radical revolution in our values against the giant triplets of materialism and militarism. To commemorate these two historic events we are creating a Detroit-City of Hope campaign which will bring together Activists, Artists, Architects, Community Gardeners, Poets, Environmentalists, Entrepreneurs, Block Clubbers, and all those seeking and creating positive solutions to the ills that have kept our communities in cycles of broken down everything.

Our first event is planned for Saturday, April 21, on Rosa Parks Blvd. near the site where the 1967 Rebellion began. On that day we will be creating a sacred space with dancing, music, food and fellowship in order to encourage more people to engage in activities that will restore hope to our city and our communities.

 http://www.boggscenter.org/ideas/speeches/born_female_wsu.shtml

Rosa Parks:  http://www.allgambian.net/news-stories_285.html