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<h1 class="documentFirstHeading"> <span class=""
id="parent-fieldname-title-4405500c910f443d9e6f1ff611e47d85"> After
Death of Radical Mayor, Mississippi's Capital Wrestles With His
Economic Vision </span> </h1>
<div class="articleSubheadline"> <span class=""
id="parent-fieldname-subheadline-4405500c910f443d9e6f1ff611e47d85">
Mayor Chokwe Lumumba implemented only the first steps of his plan to
address Jackson's extreme income inequality, which most seriously
affected black residents. Now the city faces a choice between vastly
different approaches to economic development. </span> </div>
<br>
<div class="articleByline"> by <a class="articleAuthor"
href="http://www.yesmagazine.org/@@also-by?author=Laura+Flanders">Laura
Flanders</a> </div>
<div class="articleDate">posted Apr 01, 2014<br>
<br>
<b><small><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.yesmagazine.org/commonomics/mississippi-capital-jackson-wrestles-economic-vision?b_start%3Aint=0#.Uz7S04gB5t4.facebook">http://www.yesmagazine.org/commonomics/mississippi-capital-jackson-wrestles-economic-vision?b_start%3Aint=0#.Uz7S04gB5t4.facebook</a></small></small></small></small></b><br>
</div>
<p>On his way into work every morning, Chokwe Lumumba, the late mayor
of Jackson, Miss., used to pass a historical marker: “Jackson City
Hall: built 1846-7 by slave labor.”</p>
<p>The building, like the city around it, came into being when African
American lives didn’t count for much. Unpaid black workers created
Mississippi’s plantation fortunes; as recently as the 1960s, their
descendants were still earning $3 to $6 a day as sharecropper farmers.
Today, black Jacksonians are almost 10 times as likely as white
residents to live in poverty or surrounded by it. There’s no need for a
historical marker to trace the roots of the city’s enormous wealth gap.
The question is how to narrow it.</p>
<p>Mayor Lumumba had a plan. Believing that history of a new sort could
be made here in Jackson, he sought to use public spending to boost
local wealth through worker owned cooperatives, urban gardening, and a
community-based approach to urban development. His vision, developed
over years in social movements, not only prized black experience and
drew on the survival strategies that black Americans had come up with
over the decades, but also set out to prioritize in the city’s policies
the very people who until now had been on the bottom of the state's
list. The goal, he said, was “revolutionary transformation.”</p>
<p>In promoting what he called “solidarity economics,” Mayor Lumumba
was continuing a long tradition. “Name any famous African American
leader, Ella Baker, [W. E. B.] Dubois, Marcus Garvey, A. Philip
Randolph, they were all proponents of co-ops,” says Jessica Gordon
Nembhard, author of <i>Collective Courage</i>, a new book on the
African American experience with worker-owned cooperatives.</p>
<p>“I can’t find any era when most of our leaders weren’t talking about
co-ops in one form or another,” says Gordon Nembhard.</p>
<p>“The most significant things happen in history when you get the
right people in the right place at the right time, and I think that’s
what we are,” Mayor Lumumba told me this February in Jackson.</p>
<p>Less than two weeks later, on Feb. 25, he died after just seven
months in office. Now Jacksonians are working to keep his vision alive,
not just for the sake of their city, but as a model of alternative
development for the nation.</p>
<h3><b>The solidarity economy</b></h3>
The capital city of Mississippi, <a class="external-link"
href="http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/28/2836000.html">population
175,000</a>, Jackson is home to some of the poorest citizens in the
nation and a higher percentage of African Americans than any other city
except Detroit (<a class="external-link"
href="http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-06.pdf%20http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk">just
under 80 percent</a>).
<p>The racial wealth gap is extreme—laid down, like the city’s
infrastructure, decades back. A few years ago, the federal government
stepped in, threatening the city with massive fines if the
infrastructure crisis wasn’t addressed. But no federal agency stepped
in to address the inequality crisis.</p>
<p>Which is why the election last summer of a new mayor who took race
and poverty seriously, was a big deal, not only in Jackson, but around
the country.</p>
<p>According to a <a class="external-link"
href="http://www.cbpp.org/files/11-15-12sfp.pdf">2013 study</a> by the
Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, the gap between the rich and the poor grew more in
Mississippi in the last few years than in any other state. (The top
fifth of households saw a <a class="external-link"
href="http://mepconline.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Pulling-Apart-Fact-Sheet.pdf">19
percent gain</a> in income from the late 1990s to the mid 2000s, while
the bottom quintile of earners saw a 17.3 percent drop.)</p>
<p>Lots of leaders talk about reducing poverty and inequality. But
Mayor Lumumba ran on an innovative plan to do it and received 85
percent of the vote in June 2013, after beating out the the incumbent
mayor and a well-funded former businessman in the Democratic primary. A
former public defender and longtime radical activist, Lumumba had the
organizing support of the group he co-founded, the Malcolm X Grassroots
Movement, along with the Jackson People's Assembly, a
neighborhood-based participatory democracy group, and the Mississippi
Disaster Relief Coalition, which he’d helped to convene after Hurricane
Katrina.</p>
<p>Short of funds, but rich in organizers, Lumumba advanced what he
called “The People’s Platform” to revitalize the city—not by chasing
away the people with problems but by tackling the wealth gap’s
underpinnings: the asset and income disparities that drive populations
apart.</p>
<p>“Mayors typically don’t do the things we’re trying to do,” he said.
"On the other hand, revolutionaries don’t typically find themselves as
mayor.”</p>
<p>Typically, mayors attempt to increase their city’s “assets” and
reduce their “liabilities” through promising investors they’ll provide
high-quality services at low prices and cutting taxes and crime rates.
This February, Lumumba said he’d be doing “some” of that, but he also
had a larger goal. Not urban renewal through what he called “urban
removal,” but urban revival<b>—</b>for everyone.</p>
<p>“The mission is to accomplish economic development together,” he
said.</p>
<p>When it comes to oppression in America, said Lumumba, Mississippians
had experienced the worst of it for a long time. In terms of
exploitation, disinvestment, deindustrialization and so-called “white
flight,” he said:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">What’s exciting to me is the prospect of
going from worst to first … to take groups of dispossessed black folks
here and others, and make us controllers of our own destiny.</p>
<p>The city’s old infrastructure and its corroded pipes, he believed,
could actually help.</p>
<h3><b>Rebuilding infrastructure—and the economy</b></h3>
<p>Two years ago, a consent decree signed with the Environmental
Protection Agency and the Department of Justice committed the city of
Jackson to raising and spending an estimated $1.2 billion over the next
17 years to repair and upgrade its infrastructure.</p>
<p>Lumumba’s first order of business after taking office on July 1,
2013, was raising water and sewer rates and building support for a 1
percent increase in the sales tax on certain items, to be spent
specifically on the infrastructure project. In a citywide referendum
held this January, an astonishing <a class="external-link"
href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/01/15/jackson-ms-sales-tax-vote/4489851/">nine
of out 10 residents</a> voted "yes."</p>
<blockquote class="pullquote">Even as Lumumba replaced those leaky
pipes, he planned to stop city money from draining away. <br>
</blockquote>
<p>While he initially opposed the sales tax as regressive—and
especially the special commission that the state set up to spend the
sales-tax dollars—Lumumba eventually agreed to raise the people’s taxes
but pledged that his administration would put as many of those dollars
as possible back into the people’s pockets.</p>
<p>To accomplish that, he laid out clear principles: buy local and hire
local people. According to the census, whites, who make up just <a
class="external-link"
href="http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk">18
percent</a> of Jackson’s population, own nearly <a
class="external-link"
href="http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=SBO_2007_00CSA04&prodType=table">70
percent</a> of businesses in the greater metro area. Under Lumumba,
major employers would be required to hire 60 percent or more of their
employees from within the city limits. To further expand the economic
base of the majority population, he wanted half of project
subcontractors and partners to be so-called <a class="external-link"
href="http://www.policylink.org/site/c.lkIXLbMNJrE/b.8920695/k.FDAF/Americas_Tomorrow__December_18_2013.htm#.UztBr-jOt_l">“minority”
developers</a>.</p>
<p>“We want the wealth that is going to be generated here to stay
here,” Lumumba often said in speeches.</p>
<p>To ensure the commission’s spending stayed local, he sought to
change the city’s laws.</p>
<p>“We have to have rules,” he said. “One of the rules is, if you come
to Jackson, you have to hire the people of Jackson.”</p>
<p>As a first step, the city changed its own hiring practices. City
data showed <a class="external-link"
href="http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2013/dec/20/council-mulls-residency-requirements/">635
nonresident city employees</a>, whose salaries totaled more than $20
million a year. Even as Lumumba replaced the city's leaky pipes, he
planned to stop city money from draining away and supported legislation
to change the residency requirements for city workers. This January,
Jackson's City Council <a class="external-link"
href="http://www.city.jackson.ms.us/DocumentCenter/View/944">voted to
ensure</a> that the money the city pays in wages stays within the city
limits. All new city employees will have to be city residents. It was
to have been only a beginning.</p>
<p>The city is now facing its future without Mayor Lumumba. Chokwe
Lumumba died of reported heart failure at the age of 66 on Feb. 25,
less than two weeks after we talked.</p>
<p>Next week, on April 8, Jackson will elect a new mayor. The crowded
field of candidates includes Lumumba’s son, Chokwe Antar, a graduate of
Tuskegee University in Alabama and the Thurgood Marshall School of Law
in Texas. Chokwe Antar Lumumba worked on both his father’s
campaigns—for Jackson City Council in 2009 and for mayor in 2013—and
has the support of his father’s grassroots political machine behind
him, not to mention his name’s deep resonance.</p>
<p>But Lumumba’s supporters aren’t hanging their hopes solely on the
next mayor. “The vision that he represented—the People's Platform and
the solidarity economics, were all social movement pieces," says Kali
Akuno, director of special projects in the late mayor’s administration.
"They weren't framed by him alone.”</p>
<p>Lumumba’s plan for economic democracy was backed by the Jackson
People’s Assembly, a self-organized process of local consultation that
took off during Lumumba’s 2009 run for city council. Attended by voters
and vote-seekers alike, the assemblies were held across the district
and are expected to spread citywide in 2014.</p>
<p>“We started by going out into the community asking people, ‘What do
you want government to do for you?’” Mattie Wilson Stoddard, vice chair
of the Jackson People’s Assembly, told me.</p>
<p>The Jackson People’s Assembly is one of the sponsors of “Jackson
Rising: New Economies,” an <a class="external-link"
href="http://jacksonrising.wordpress.com/">international conference</a>
taking place in May which was to have been a launching pad for
Lumumba’s solidarity economy project.</p>
<p>“Jackson Rising is more important than ever,” says Akuno, the late
mayor’s point-person on the conference, which focuses heavily on
education and organizing around the development and incubation of
cooperative enterprises. “We can’t build economic democracy alone.”</p>
<p>In different hands, the city’s infrastructure spending could trigger
a development gold rush of the sort seen in New Orleans after Hurricane
Katrina, which resulted in disastrous speculation and permanent
displacement, especially of low-income residents. Jacksonians need to
know their options, says Akuno. Members of worker-owned enterprises in
Cleveland, Ohio, and the Basque region of Spain have been invited to
come share strategies for creating and keeping wealth in the community.</p>
<p>“We need to make sure we’re not robbed again, but get something
that's going to benefit our children and our grandchildren,” Akuno says
of the infrastructure fund. <br>
The best way to do that, Akuno and the other organizers of Jackson
Rising believe, is by capturing and concentrating wealth in the hands
of local people through solidarity economics and worker-owned
cooperatives. It is not a new concept in these parts. Far from it.</p>
<p>When asked if co-ops were a “hippy” thing, Mayor Lumumba’s patrician
face cracked a grin and he replied, “There’s a little hippy in all of
us. And I think the hippies probably got a lot of it from what used to
happen in Africa.”</p>
<h3><b>The first black cooperatives</b></h3>
<p>“The community I grew up in, in a sense, was a co-op although we
didn’t use the name,” recalls Lumumba supporter Hollis Watkins,
co-founder and president of the Jackson-based movement support
organization, Southern Echo, “If you needed work done on your farm
before the rain came, we all stepped in. At some point you knew your
turn would come.”</p>
<p>Hollis was born to sharecroppers in 1941, the youngest of twelve
children.</p>
<p>After graduating college, Watkins joined the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, SNCC, a grassroots-based black liberation
organization, that played a leading role in the 1963 March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom.</p>
<p>“When we talked about rights, economics was always part of the
program,” Watkins recalled. “Our people understood that education and
jobs and political empowerment were all intertwined.”</p>
<p>Jacksonite Melbah Smith, who worked with Watkins at Southern Echo,
and before that with civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, grew up on
her grandfather’s farm in Brandon, just fifteen miles east of downtown
Jackson. She still remembers the good times—like “hog-killing time,”
when the community would pool skills and tools to butcher meat. But she
also remembers the hard times: “Ours was the last home in the county to
get electricity or a telephone.”</p>
<p>Smith went on to serve as the Mississippi Director of the <a
class="external-link"
href="http://www.federationsoutherncoop.com/coopinfo/Black%20co-ops.pdf">Federation
of Southern Cooperatives</a>, a regional nonprofit which has helped
create or support more than 200 cooperatives and credit unions in 10
states, providing services and meeting needs that were going unmet.</p>
<p>“Cooperatives were born out of a need to bring services to
underserved communities,” says Smith. Co-ops were also as a way to
survive discrimination.</p>
<p>Smith’s grandfather collaborated with his brothers to buy farmland
after emancipation. Her father, born in in 1910, grew up under the
system of de facto and de jure apartheid known as Jim Crow. Under Jim
Crow, not only were impossible obstacles erected to deny African
Americans the vote; black farmers were also denied loans and credit
from white-controlled local banks.</p>
<p>The first black cooperatives date back to the colonial age and
“beneficial and burial societies”—founded by slaves who gathered dues
covertly to pay for one another’s burials. Free blacks started
insurance companies to pay for cemeteries and doctors’ bills. The
first, according to <a class="external-link"
href="http://%20W.E.B.%20Du%20Bois,%201907,%20Economic%20Cooperation%20Among%20Negro%20Americans.%20Atlanta%20Atlanta%20University%20Press,%20p.%2021">a
study</a> by NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois, was incorporated by the AME
Church in Philadelphia in 1787.</p>
In his 1907 study of black economic cooperation, DuBois includes the
Underground Railroad, which transported hundreds of thousands of
refugees across thousands of miles, via cooperating networks of
supporters, organizers, and sympathetic landowners.
<p>After the Civil War, “freedom” for millions of formerly enslaved men
and women turned on their ability to combine their means in order to
purchase land and sustain themselves—or find themselves forced back
into bonded labor on their former plantations.</p>
<p>“The wonder is not that so many, but that so few, have needed help,”
DuBois quotes a chief of the federal Freedmen’s Bureau, which was set
up to assist freed blacks in 1865.</p>
<p>Almost 100 years later, black political rights were still tied to
black economic resilience. When the civil rights movement of the ‘60s
started, recalcitrant whites responded by exploiting the economic
vulnerability of the movement’s base.</p>
<p>“The Selma to Montgomery marchers couldn’t stay on sharecroppers’
land” recalls Jackson Rising supporter Wendell Paris, who helped
organize the historic 1965 voting rights march that took place some 250
miles to the east of where he now lives near Jackson. Hundreds of
tenant farmers were evicted for standing up for their rights.</p>
<h3><b>Economic power is political power</b></h3>
<p>The land of the Mississippi River Delta is famously fertile; rich
enough to capitalize the early U.S. economy. But the people who have
worked that land have rarely been enriched.</p>
<p>From the founding of the United States through the Civil War to the
modern era, the plantation class, with overwhelming power and
resources, has fought to keep their advantage. In the civil rights
era—along with lynching, firebombing, and assassination—farmers who
joined the NAACP would lose their loans, and African Americans who
registered to vote risked losing hard-to-come-by employment.</p>
<p>Wendell Paris remembers spending a week persuading an older domestic
worker to register. He took the woman, named Catherine Jones, to the
registrar’s office every morning, starting on a Monday.</p>
<p>“She’d stay there all day too afraid to sign her name.” Finally,
that Thursday afternoon, she signed and by Friday morning, she’d lost
her job.</p>
<p>“Reprisals were immediate,” Paris recalls.</p>
<p>Known for her role as a voting rights activist and founder of the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Fannie Lou Hamer also started a
co-op, “Freedom Farm,” to support civil rights activists punished for
their work.</p>
<p>With Hamer, Watkins started buying clubs and selling co-ops as a way
to help poor families he met through the Head Start program. “They
needed some economic stability before they could even begin to change
the political situation,” says Watkins.</p>
<p>In the 1970s, Watkins went on to manage two large farms bought by
the Nation of Islam in Mississippi. “As manager of the Nation of
Islam’s farms, Watkins was able to buy farming supplies in bulk and
share costly farm equipment with poorer farmers. Paris was doing the
same with SNCC in Alabama.</p>
<p>The white establishment was quick to react to the co-op push,
fearing, presumably, that black coops could shift the power-balance.</p>
<p>“At one point we bought cows and white folks poisoned the water and
killed the cows,” says Watkins.</p>
<p>Paris remembers finding a market in New York that would pay almost
three times the price Alabama farmers could get locally for their
cucumbers. The local growers’ cooperative rented a truck. On just their
second run to market, state troopers pulled them over. “We asked
Governor (George) Wallace why he’d stopped our truck. He said he didn’t
have to tell us why. He could detain any vehicle for 72 hours,”
recalled Paris.</p>
<p>“Seventy-two hours later, we opened the door and the entire load
poured out.” The cucumbers had liquefied in the burning summer heat.</p>
<p>Having retired from the federation, Melbah Smith directs the
Coalition for a Prosperous Mississippi, which works to change
Mississippi's laws concerning cooperatives. Currently, only <a
class="external-link"
href="http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2014/feb/03/jackson-rising-emphasizes-cooperatives/">agricultural-based
entities</a> can incorporate in Mississippi. Any other type of
cooperatives must be charted out-of-state. According to the coalition,
44 percent of the 162 non-agricultural co-ops in Mississippi report
that they could not have opened their businesses had it not been set up
as a co-op.</p>
<p>“Co-ops are part of how we grew up,” says Smith. In her view, their
future is bright.</p>
<p>Just as cooperation worked for rural Mississippians—providing
electricity or loans or social services in poor communities—so too can
city dwellers use the cooperative model to pool resources and share the
risk of starting a business. Cooperatives provide a way for low-income
communities to build assets and create wealth, the decisive factor in
narrowing the racial wealth gap. They have a strong track record of
raising wages for their members too, and of staying put. Indeed, the
experience of working together on an equal footing with co-workers
often leads to to other sorts of civic engagement.</p>
<p>Which is part, no doubt, of what Smith will be telling participants
at the Jackson Rising. Still not retired, she’s helping to plan the
conference.</p>
<h3><b>Jackson rises</b></h3>
<p>The immediate threat poor blacks face today in Jackson comes from
outside developers and speculators with the resources to move in and
take over their neighborhoods.</p>
<p>Nia Umoja belongs to the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. She moved to
West Jackson last year with her husband. For just $1,500 they were able
to purchase a single family home a couple of blocks off Capitol Street
(a major east-west thoroughfare), within walking distance of the city
zoo and Jackson State University.</p>
<p>Like the majority of the homes around hers, Umoja’s house needs
work. When she moved in, the empty plots on two sides of hers were
overgrown with high, scrubby trees and bushes. According to recent
surveys, some 40 percent of the lots nearby are abandoned or vacant.
Eighty-eight percent of the population lives in poverty. Payday lending
stores outnumber groceries 10 to one.</p>
<p>“You have to start with what you have to get what you want,”
community organizers say. What West Jackson has is a lot of overgrown
land, a lot of underemployed labor, and a good amount of (albeit rusty)
farming experience.</p>
<p>“The people here have lost their voice, but they’re not
resource-less,” Umoja told me. When she surveyed her neighbors about
their assets, she found that while they may not have considered
themselves “skilled,” they had talents. “They grew up on farms,”
explained Umoja. “They know how to grow things.”</p>
<p>In August 2013, Umoja helped establish the Cooperative Community of
New West Jackson with the hope of establishing a cooperative farm.
Under Mayor Lumumba, the group was able to clear <a
class="external-link"
href="http://jacksonrising.wordpress.com/local/local-cooperatives/">1.5
acres</a> of vacant city-owned land just off Capitol Street. Near the
north end of the plot sits an abandoned Dairy Queen whose forecourt
would make a great green market, she says, if only she could get the
long-absentee owner to agree to sell, or the city to take it over.</p>
<p>Umoja and her colleagues have grand plans for what they are calling
the Grenada Street Folk Garden, but private developers are already
coming around and just a few blocks away, lots are already selling for
$40,000 to $80,000.</p>
<p>Some would like to see gentrification come to West Jackson, like it
came to the city’s North Midtown section. That area too, was a high
crime, low income, low-property-price area not long ago. Now it’s one
of the city's leading neighborhoods, thanks to development funds from
the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as well as the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. With help from Habitat
for Humanity and private “green” developers, the Jackson Housing
Authority demolished dilapidated houses, retrofitted others, and
watched rents and property prices rise.</p>
<p>In 2012, a group of institutional stakeholders in West Jackson—a
group including Jackson State University, the Center for Social
Entrepreneurship, the Jackson Zoo, Jackson-Evers Municipal Airport, and
the Voice of Jackson Calvary Ministries (a church group)—hired Duvall
Decker Architects, the same firm that worked on North Midtown, to draw
up a master plan for West Jackson. Some are already calling it the
“Capitol Street Corridor.”</p>
<p>At a community meeting convened by architect Roy Decker this
February, Umoja and Akuno were shown half a dozen colorful maps,
detailing “assets” and “concerns” in the West Jackson neighborhood. On
Decker’s maps, the Cooperative Community of New West Jackson sits on
plots featuring almost no assets and many “concerns,” including
homelessness, crime, a high proportion of vacant properties, and few
businesses or public services. Still, when Umoja got a chance to
describe her garden plan, the response was mostly positive.</p>
<p>“Sounds good. Like hog-killing time in the old days,” said one
resident.</p>
<p>“We just have to work harder to get the word out,” Umoja said.</p>
<p>Whether change is driven by worker owned co-ops or outside
speculators, it’s going to take some doing to achieve “revolutionary
transformation” in Jackson. Investment is driven by demand, says Mukesh
Kumar, professor of urban planning at Jackson State University, and
right now, Jackson has very little of that. Downtown is already circled
by a big sticky suburban ring, sucking shoppers, contractors, and prime
business out of the city's center.</p>
<p>The Greater Jackson Chamber of Commerce, which backed the North
Midtown plan, is setting its hopes for growth on <a
class="external-link"
href="http://www.greaterjacksonpartnership.com/files/3103.pdf">further
development</a> of the city’s “medical corridor,” the building of a
1,500-acre downtown lake, and an arts and culture expansion to “attract
talent.”</p>
<p>It’s hard to see how any of those plans will work. Several major
hospitals (including Baptist Health Systems, University of Mississippi
Medical Center, and St. Dominic's) and as many major colleges have left
the inner-city core poor up to this point. For tourists, Jackson’s
competing with Nashville and New Orleans.</p>
<p>At least Mayor Lumumba’s plan to stimulate internal demand through
local employment in public works has a proven track record. Federal
public works programs helped recovery after the Great Depression, just
as reconstruction projects helped rebuild the south after the Civil War
(until they fell victim to Jim Crow). As civil rights organizers
learned, for people to participate in the political process, their
economic necessities need to be seen to. After years of ineffective
government, Jackson needs both political, as well as economic revival.</p>
<p>Lumumba had the vision of a radical, but the manners of a
movement-builder. He reached across political lines to build support
for his plan. One of his first calls after his election was to Duane
O’Neal, head of the Jackson Regional Chamber of Commerce.</p>
<p>Before Lumumba’s death, O’Neal said he’d already had more and “more
meaningful” meetings with the new mayor than he did with the preceding
administration in all the 16 years they had been in office. Lumumba won
respect because, as O’Neal put it to me, “he’s shown himself to be a
man of action.”</p>
<p>Lumumba’s mission was “development together.” He understood his goal
was, as much as anything else, to re-engage the city.</p>
<p>“The job is not a single individual affair but a collective affair,
and the creation of jobs is not an individual affair but a collective
[one.]”</p>
<p>Cooperation in the handful of urban gardens currently in Jackson,
has already brought people together, says Akuno. What Jackson does not
yet have are any worker, producer or housing cooperatives. Only a few
cooperative Credit Unions operate within the city limits. Jackson
Rising seeks to change that.</p>
<p>With only a few months to go, organizers of the Jackson Rising
conference were struggling this February with how to appeal
simultaneously to entrepreneurially minded students and Nia Umoja’s
hard-up neighbors. Charlotte and Luke Landemeaux, founders of Jackson’s
one existing food co-op, Rainbow Foods, (incorporated in Delaware),
were feeling anxious about competition from Jackson’s first Whole
Foods, which has just opened its doors. But everyone’s immediate
problem was a good one. The first in a series of “Grassroots Economics”
meetings, intended to build to the May conference, was filled to
capacity.</p>
<p>In the 1960s, when they were fighting for bottom-up democracy,
Fannie Lou Hamer and the members of SNCC used to say “The people must
decide.”</p>
<p>Chokwe Lumumba and the Jackson Peoples Assembly used this phrase
over and over during his campaign. Even though he’s gone, it’s hard not
to hear those words echoing around Jackson more loudly than ever.</p>
<p>As they ask themselves which way forward for Jackson and
Jacksonians, the answer comes: “The people must decide.”</p>
<hr>
<p style="text-align: left;">Laura Flanders wrote this article for <a
href="http://www.yesmagazine.org/" class="external-link">YES! Magazine</a>'s
<a href="http://www.yesmagazine.org/commonomics/" class="external-link"><span
class="internal-link">Commonomics project</span></a>. Laura is YES!
Magazine's 2014 Local Economies Reporting Fellow and is executive
producer and founder and host of "<a class="external-link"
href="http://grittv.org/">GRITtv with Laura Flanders</a>." Follow her
on Twitter <a class="external-link"
href="http://www.twitter.com/GRITlaura">@GRITlaura.</a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Natalie Lubsen contributed research to
this article.</p>
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