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<h1 id="reader-title">Did the Death of a Mississippi Mayor End a
Great Experiment in African American Liberation? | VICE |
United States</h1>
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<p class="contributor-full-name"> <span>By</span> <a
href="http://www.vice.com/author/nathan-schneider">Nathan
Schneider</a> </p>
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<div class="meta-information"> <span class="publish-time"
data-publish-date="2016-04-18"
data-publish-date-format="MMMM D, YYYY">April 18, 2016</span>
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<p>On February 21, 2014, 49 years to the day after Malcolm
X's earthly form fell to assassins' bullets in Harlem,
Chokwe Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, came
home to find the power out. The outage affected only his
house, not any others on the block. He phoned friends
for help, including an electrician, an electrical
engineer, and his longtime bodyguard—each in some way
associated with his administration. They couldn't figure
out the problem at first. They called the power company,
and waited, and as they did, they talked about the
strange notions that had been circulating. At the grand
opening of Jackson's first Whole Foods Market a few
weeks earlier, a white woman said she'd been told at her
neighborhood-association meeting that the mayor was
dead. He'd been coughing more than he should've maybe,
and his blood pressure was running high, but he was very
much alive. He gave a speech at the grocery store that
day.</p>
<p> In a time of outcry for black lives across the United
States, Lumumba had come to office in a Southern capital
on a platform of black power and human rights. He built
a nationwide network of supporters and a local political
base after decades as one of the most radical, outspoken
lawyers in the black nationalist movement.
</p>
<p>Earlier that February, Lumumba had given an interview
to the progressive journalist Laura Flanders, host of
GRITtv. Flanders pressed him on his goals on camera, and
the mayor was more forthcoming than he'd been since
taking office that previous July. He discussed the
principle of cooperative economics in Kwanzaa, Ujima,
which guided his plans for upending how the city awarded
its lucrative infrastructure contracts; he wanted to
redirect that money from outside firms to local
worker-owned businesses. He also spoke of the idea of
the Kush District, starting with 18 contiguous counties
with large black populations around Jackson, which he
and his closest allies wanted to establish as a safe
homeland for African American self-determination.
Jackson was to be its capital. Implied in this kind of
talk was a very tangible transfer of power from the
white suburbs to the region's urban black majority.
</p>
<p>At the time, Black Lives Matter was still nascent, more
a hashtag than an on-the-ground movement, and <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.vice.com/read/baltimore-son-v23n2">DeRay
Mckesson</a>—the activist now running for mayor of
Baltimore—was still working for the Minneapolis Public
Schools between sending off tweets. But those paying
attention were coming to see Jackson as a model, the
capital of a new African American politics and
economics, a form of resistance more durable than
protest.
</p>
<p>Four days after the outage at Lumumba's home, he phoned
his 30-year-old son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba. He felt
tightness in his chest. Chokwe Antar, an attorney like
his father, was in court, but he rushed over to the
house, eased his father into the car, and drove him over
Jackson's cracked and cratered roads to St. Dominic
Hospital. There were tests, and there was waiting.
Nurses brought Lumumba into a room for a transfusion
around 4 PM. They weighed him. After they finished, he
leaned back on the bed, cried out about his heart,
shook, trembled, and lost consciousness. Less than eight
months after he had taken office, Lumumba was dead.
</p>
<p>As word of what had happened began to spread through
city hall, Kali Akuno made calls. Akuno had been one of
the mayor's chief deputies. He set in motion the local
and national security protocol of the Malcolm X
Grassroots Movement, the organization to which he,
Lumumba, and many of the others in the administration
belonged. He saw clerks rummaging through the mayor's
office, and downstairs the city council was already
jockeying to fill the power vacuum. The administration,
together with Akuno's job, was already all but over.
</p>
<p class="pullquote">"I'm glad he's dead," Akuno remembers
hearing someone say the day Mayor Chokwe Lumumba died.
"I don't know what the hell he thought he was doing. He
was trying to turn this place into Cuba."
</p>
<p>That evening, Akuno himself started feeling something
strange in his chest. He'd been having heart problems of
his own, a clotting issue. He checked himself into St.
Dominic near 10 PM and was taken not far from where the
mayor's body lay. As Akuno waited to be seen for
whatever was happening in him, he heard voices down the
hall.
</p>
<p>"I'm glad he's dead," Akuno remembers hearing. "I don't
know what the hell he thought he was doing. He was
trying to turn this place into Cuba." There is a way of
doing things in Mississippi, and Lumumba wasn't playing
along. There are lines you don't cross, and he was
crossing them. One county supervisor wondered aloud on
TV what a lot of black people in Jackson were thinking:
"Who killed the mayor?"
</p>
<p>Louis Farrakhan helped pay for an autopsy by Michael
Baden, who had also performed autopsies on Michael Brown
in Ferguson and the exhumed body of Jackson's most
famous martyr, Medgar Evers. Supporters had their
suspicions of foul play, but the cause of death was an
aortic aneurysm, likely enough a consequence of the
mayor's tendencies for overwork and undernourishment. He
had been trying harder than was healthy to make the most
of the opportunity, to do as much as he could with the
time he had left.
</p>
<p>As Akuno, off camera, watched Lumumba give his
interview with Flanders that February, he felt like his
boss was ready to stop playing nice with the
Establishment, as he had been so far. The honeymoon was
over; the gloves were coming off.
</p>
<p>"Mayors typically don't do the things we're trying to
do," Lumumba said. "On the other hand, revolutionaries
don't typically find themselves as mayor."
</p>
<p class="photo-credit has-image"><span
class="body-image-wrapper"> </span></p>
<p>***</p>
<p>At the center of Jackson's civic district,
Mississippi's former capitol building looms over Capitol
Street, which has been subject to a variably successful
renovation effort seeking to replicate the urban revival
that has lately been sweeping hollowed-out cities across
the country. Intersecting Capitol Street to the north,
the segregation-era black business district, Farish
Street, now stands nearly empty. Historical signs are
more plentiful than pedestrians. The Old Capitol Museum
presents slavery and Indian removal—the city was named
after Andrew Jackson, in gratitude for his role in the
latter—as quandaries to be pondered rather than obvious
moral disasters. After all, these were law; there were
treaties and contracts. The same could also be said of
the predatory mortgages that, in the Great Recession,
wiped away what gains civil rights had brought to
African American wealth, especially in places like
Jackson.
</p>
<p>Capitol Street changes abruptly after crossing the
railroad tracks on the west end of downtown as it heads
toward the city zoo. Lots are empty and overgrown, right
in the shadow of the refurbished King Edward Hotel.
Poverty lurks; opportunity for renewal beckons. And
right there, at the gateway of this boarded-up frontier,
is a one-story former day-care building newly painted
red, green, and black: the Chokwe Lumumba Center for
Economic Democracy and Development. Standing guard
against the gentrification sure to come, this has become
the most visible remnant of the mayor's four-decade
legacy in the city.
</p>
<p>Lumumba first arrived in Mississippi when he was 23
years old, in 1971. He had been born Edwin Finley
Taliaferro in Detroit, but like many who discovered
black nationalist movements in the 1960s, he
relinquished his European names and took African
ones—each, in his case, with connotations of
anti-colonial resistance. While at Kalamazoo College, in
southwest Michigan, he joined an organization called the
Republic of New Afrika (RNA). Its purpose was not to
achieve integration or voting rights, but to establish a
new nation in the heartland of US slavery, one where
black people could rule themselves, mounting their own
secession from both the Northern and Southern styles of
racism alike. This quest was, to its adherents, a
natural extension of the independence struggles then
spreading across Africa.
</p>
<p>Local authorities did not prove welcoming. That August,
the RNA endured a shootout at a house they were
occupying in Jackson. Police officers and FBI agents
came armed with heavy weapons and a small tank; the
resulting confrontation left an officer dead. Lumumba
himself wasn't present that day, but supporting his
comrades kept him in Jackson a few years longer. A 1973
RNA document in the archives of the Mississippi
Sovereignty Commission—the state's segregationist
Gestapo—records him as the republic's minister of
justice. The document calls for reparations, in this
form: "We are urging Congress to provide 200 million
dollars to blacks in Mississippi for a pilot co-op
project to make New Communities, jobs, training, fine
free housing, and adequate food and health for
thousands."
</p>
<p>Lumumba soon returned to Detroit, where he graduated
from law school at Wayne State University in 1975.
Malcolm X wished he could become a lawyer; Lumumba's
aspiration, he'd later tell his son, was to be the kind
of lawyer Malcolm X would have been. He defended Black
Panthers and prison rioters. For Mutulu Shakur—who was
facing charges of bank robbery, murder, and aiding the
jailbreak of Assata Shakur—Lumumba unsuccessfully argued
that Shakur was entitled to the protections of the 1949
Geneva Convention as a captured freedom fighter. (He
would later also defend Mutulu's stepson, the rapper
Tupac Shakur.) He became renowned to some, and notorious
to others. A federal court in New York held him in
contempt for referring to the judge as "a racist dog."
Then, in 1988, he persuaded his wife, Nubia, a flight
attendant, to move with their two children back to
Mississippi. He wanted to continue what he and the RNA
had started years before.
</p>
<p>The change that came over Jackson after Lumumba's first
sojourn in the 1970s was a cataclysmic but also entirely
familiar story of American urban life. ("As far as I am
concerned, Mississippi is anywhere south of the Canadian
border," Malcolm X once said.) The advent of civil
rights inclined most of the city's white residents to
flee for the suburbs, while maintaining their hold on
political power and the economic benefits of city
contracts. To many of them, the city's subsequent
decline was a case in point. To Hollis Watkins, a local
civil rights hero, the story of the city's
transformation after white flight was simple:
"intentional sabotage."
</p>
<p>Lumumba had helped found the New Afrikan People's
Organization, in 1984, and the Malcolm X Grassroots
Movement grew out of that in 1990. MXGM, whose first
chapter was in Jackson, set out to bring black
nationalism to a new generation of activists; adults
organized and strategized, while kids joined the New
Afrikan Scouts and attended their own summer camp.
</p>
<p>Safiya Omari, Lumumba's future chief of staff, came to
Jackson in 1989. At rallies, they chanted the old RNA
secessionist slogan, "Free the land!"—three times, in
quick triplets with call-and-response—followed by, in
dead-serious unison, its Malcolmian addendum, "By any
means necessary." Their names and message were foreign
to local black folks, and scary to many whites, but as
years passed, they became part of the landscape.
</p>
<p class="has-image"><span class="body-image-wrapper"> </span></p>
<p>***
</p>
<p>Since Lumumba's passing, Kali Akuno has become the
chief spokesman for what remains of their movement. As I
sat with Akuno at his makeshift desk at the Lumumba
Center's large multipurpose room last summer, he
described his world as a confluence of "forces." In a
generation whose radicals tend toward impossible demands
and reactive rage, he is the rare strategist. He thinks
in bullet points, enumerating and analyzing past
mistakes as readily as future plans, stroking the goatee
under his chin as his wide and wandering eyes look out
for forces swirling around him.
</p>
<p>Akuno came of age in California—Watts of the 1970s and
80s—immersed in the culture of black pride and power,
descended from Garveyites and New Afrikans. "Akuno" came
later in life, but his first name was Kali from birth.
People he grew up around talked about cooperative
economics, about businesses controlled democratically by
the people they serve. They talked about Mondragón, the
worker-owned conglomerate co-op in the Basque Country
that arose under the thumb of the Franco dictatorship.
In college at UC Davis and after, Akuno drifted from one
experiment in cooperative living and organizing to
another. After Lumumba and his comrades founded MXGM,
Akuno gravitated to its Oakland chapter. He would become
one of the organization's chief theorists.
</p>
<p>Hurricane Katrina brought him down to the South. When
it became evident how the storm had devastated black
neighborhoods of New Orleans, and the government
response only made matters worse, MXGM mobilized.
Lumumba's daughter Rukia, then in law school at Howard,
began flying down every chance she could to organize
volunteers. Akuno moved from Oakland and took a position
with the People's Hurricane Relief Fund.
</p>
<p>"We were trying to push a people's reconstruction
platform," said Akuno, "a Marshall Plan for the Gulf
Coast, where the resources would be democratically
distributed." But mostly they had to watch as the
reconstruction become an excuse for tearing down public
housing and dismembering the public schools. It was not
rebuilding; it seemed more like expulsion.
</p>
<p>"Katrina taught us a lot of lessons," Rukia Lumumba
said. The group started to think about the need to
control the seats of government, and to control land.
"Without land, you really don't have freedom."
</p>
<p class="pullquote">Lumumba proposed a "critical break
with capitalism" through three concurrent strategies:
assemblies to elevate ordinary people's voices, an
independent political party accountable to the
assemblies, and publicly financed economic development
through local cooperatives.
</p>
<p>Akuno and MXGM's theorists around the country began
working on a plan. What they developed would become
public in 2012 as The Jackson-Kush Plan: The Struggle
for Black Self-Determination and Economic Democracy, a
full-color, 24-page pamphlet Akuno authored, with maps,
charts, photographs, and extended quotations from black
nationalist heroes. It calls for "a critical break with
capitalism and the dismantling of the American settler
colonial project," starting in Jackson and Mississippi's
Black Belt, by way of three concurrent strategies:
assemblies to elevate ordinary people's voices, an
independent political party accountable to the
assemblies, and publicly financed economic development
through local cooperatives. Each would inform and
reinforce the others.
</p>
<p>By 2008, the scheming led to talk of running a
candidate. MXGM had been organizing in Jackson for
almost two decades, and it had a robust base there.
Akuno suggested that MXGM should run Lumumba and begin
training Chokwe Antar—who was then finishing law school
in Texas—to run for office in the future. Both father
and son were reluctant, but Lumumba came around.
</p>
<p>In 2009, he ran for a city council seat in Jackson, and
with the help of MXGM's cadres and his name recognition
as an attorney of the people, he won. On the council, he
cast votes to protect funding for public transit and to
expand police accountability. But it became clear that,
in Jackson, the real power—in particular, power over
infrastructure contracts—lay with the mayor's office.
Those contracts were still going largely to white-owned
firms in the suburbs. Black people had long been the
majority of Jackson's population, but the MXGM felt its
land wasn't really free until it benefited financially,
too.
</p>
<p>Few among Jackson's small, collegial elite bothered to
notice the Jackson-Kush Plan when Lumumba ran for mayor
in 2013. He was just one in a crowded pool of
candidates. And the plan was still little more than a
series of ambitions. The co-ops didn't exist; the
assemblies, when they actually happened, were small and
populated mostly by true believers. Yet Lumumba
understood his role as an expression of the popular
will, which the co-ops and assemblies would someday
represent. At important junctures, he would often say,
"The people must decide."
</p>
<p>The mayoral race was a testament to what Lumumba had
built in Jackson and elsewhere. Rukia Lumumba gathered
support from MXGM supporters across the country. The
$334,560 raised in 2013 by Jonathan Lee, the young black
businessman Lumumba faced in the runoff vote, was still
much more than the $68,753 Lumumba's campaign raised
that same year. Lee, however, was mostly unknown in
town, except to his friends on the state's chamber of
commerce. MXGM's organizing efforts, combined with
Lumumba's long-standing reputation, resulted in a
landslide. On May 21, he won 86 percent of the
Democratic primary vote, guaranteeing him the mayoralty.
The Lumumba campaign's slogan, "One city, one aim, one
destiny"—an homage to an old Garveyite saying—seemed to
be coming true.
</p>
<p class="has-image"><span class="body-image-wrapper"> </span></p>
<p>"The spirit behind Chokwe was high," said Walter Zinn,
a local political consultant. "It was probably the
highest it had been in twenty years."
</p>
<p>Not everyone was on board, however. "I remember getting
all these calls when he was elected mayor from white
business owners—they were terrified," City Councilman
Melvin Priester Jr. told me. "They were afraid that he
was going to treat them like they had treated a lot of
black people, like a Rhodesia situation."
</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>For Lumumba and his new administration—full of MXGM
partisans—the first order of business was damage
control. The city's roads and pipes had been allowed to
deteriorate to the point of disfunction. An EPA consent
decree loomed over the crumbling wastewater system.
Funds needed to be raised for repairs; perhaps,
afterward, the money could be used to seed cooperative
businesses for doing the necessary work. Lumumba used
the political capital he'd won in the election to pass,
by referendum, a 1 percent sales tax increase. He raised
water rates. Practical exigencies won the day.
</p>
<p>"We didn't win power in Jackson," Akuno said. "We won
an election. It's two different things."
</p>
<p>To pass the 1 percent tax, Lumumba had to accept
oversight for the funds from a commission partly
controlled by the State Legislature—a concession that
not even his more conservative predecessor would accept.
He hoped that, later on, he could mobilize people in
Jackson to demand full control over their own tax
revenues, but the city was in an emergency, so for the
moment the commission would have to do.
</p>
<p>From his new position, as director of special projects
and external funding, Akuno tried to keep the
Jackson-Kush Plan on track. However long the
administration would last, he wanted to set up
structures that would outlive it. He drew up plans for a
$15 million development fund for cooperatives, using
money from the city, credit unions, and outside donors.
He wanted to create worker-owned co-ops for all the
city's needs—for collecting garbage, for growing the
food served at schools, for taking on the plentiful
engineering challenges. To help, Lumumba called for
rules to direct more contracts to local businesses. And
there were plans to roll out a participatory budgeting
process, based on experiments in Brazil and New York,
through which Jacksonians could decide how to allocate
public funds directly.
</p>
<p>Ben Allen, president of the city's development
corporation, started getting to know the new mayor, and
he was pleasantly surprised. When he invited Lumumba to
a garden party at his country club, the mayor made an
appearance. "Our fears were gone," remembered Allen, who
is white. "He wanted to work with us."
</p>
<p>Jackson's troubles, by 2013, were more than black and
white. An investment firm in Santa Monica had bought up
more than half of the private buildings downtown.
Israelis and Chinese were getting in on the action, too.
Far from the RNA's old secessionist strategy of the 70s,
Lumumba was forming coalitions where he could, with
whoever would work with him. Co-ops and assemblies took
a backseat to balancing the budget, at least as far as
official business went.
</p>
<p>Two miles from downtown along Capitol Street, however,
just blocks from the entrance to the zoo, another germ
of the Jackson-Kush vision was beginning to sprout. In
early 2013, MXGM members Nia and Takuma Umoja moved with
their children from Fort Worth, Texas, into a small
wooden house next to the local junkyard. Slowly
befriending their new neighbors, they started clearing
the garbage away, replaced it with raised soil beds, and
declared an eight-block section of the neighborhood the
Cooperative Community of New West Jackson. They began
putting their neighbors, many of whom grew up as
sharecroppers, to work on a construction crew and
growing food. Discreetly, they bought up more and more
property within the territory, intending to transfer it
to a community land trust. They renovated abandoned
houses and painted them with bright colors. It was all
part of the plan—the same plan that put their old friend
Lumumba into office. And, like the mayor, the Umojas
were making new friends as well.
</p>
<p>They started building relationships with power brokers
in town, including developers, pastors, and
politicians—people who had their own plans for sprucing
up the area around the zoo. Back in Fort Worth, the
Umojas' community center fell victim to eminent domain,
and they didn't want to see anything like that happen
again. As renewal progressed around them, they would
need powerful supporters. But where they saw necessity,
Akuno saw an effort to swallow up the movement.
</p>
<p class="has-image"><span class="body-image-wrapper"> </span></p>
<p>"Our enemy saw an opportunity," he said. Both the mayor
and MXGM's flagship cooperative project were teaming up
with the likes of Ben Allen. If divide and conquer was
the intent, it succeeded; a rift between Akuno and the
Umojas deepened until they were acting more like
competitors than comrades. According to Allen's email
signature, "Downtown redevelopment is like war." (Last
month, Allen was indicted for embezzlement of his
organization's funds.)
</p>
<p>"We knew, when we got here, what we'd have to do to
make sure that we're at the table when decisions about
development are being made," Nia Umoja told me. "Our
folks are never at the table."
</p>
<p>The forces that have kept #BlackLivesMatter trending
are not exactly what one might expect from the headlines
of black men killed by police. In reality, it's
primarily a queer- and women-led movement. It is also
only marginally interested in whether cops wear body
cameras. Its leaders are not afraid to use the word
"capitalism," and they do so derisively. (That slogan,
"Black Lives Matter," originated with Alicia Garza, an
organizer of domestic workers.) They feel that black
lives will not matter in this society until it adopts a
different system for determining what and who matters.
In this movement, as in so many movements before, only a
tiny sliver of its variform lifeblood gets into the
news.
</p>
<p>The civil rights struggle of the 1960s was no
exception, for it was never about civil rights alone.
Malcolm X preferred to speak of "human rights," and it
was in those terms that he wanted to bring a case
against the US before the United Nations. Martin Luther
King Jr. marched for "justice and jobs"; he died
supporting sanitation workers. "Black power," "black
liberation," "black lives"—these betray demands more
comprehensive than either headlines or mythic hindsight
allow. And they were never far from economics.
</p>
<p class="pullquote">Cooperatives have a long history in
black American life. There were co-ops for sharecroppers
seeking better markets for their produce, co-ops for
townspeople who wanted better prices for basic
commodities, and cooperative communes that tried to
create a new world apart from white supremacy.</p>
<p>Twenty years ago, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, a political
economist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
began to notice a hidden economy at work in African
American life. Again and again, people were organizing
themselves in creative forms of cooperative enterprise,
democratically owned and managed by those who took part.
Starting with the co-ops listed in W. E. B. Du Bois's
1907 book Economic Cooperation Among Negro Americans,
she began reconstructing a history, eventually published
in her 2014 book Collective Courage: A History of
African American Cooperative Economic Thought and
Practice, that, before, had only been told in bits and
pieces, passed down through families but rarely seen as
significant. There were co-ops for sharecroppers seeking
better markets for their produce, co-ops for townspeople
who wanted better prices for basic commodities, and
cooperative communes that tried to create a new world
apart from white supremacy. Where white banks wouldn't
lend money, credit unions arose. These efforts faced
sabotage and repression. But they were always around.
"There's really no time in US history when African
Americans were not doing cooperative projects," Nembhard
told me.
</p>
<p>In the mid 1960s, Black Power first became a force
among a group of landowners and co-op members in Lowndes
County, Alabama, before expanding to the country's urban
centers. "The Black Power concept came into being
because of those farmers who were independent in and of
themselves and understood the value of collective
organizing and collective ownership," Wendell Paris, a
civil rights activist and cooperative developer in
Alabama and Mississippi at the time, told me. In cities,
the movement took the form of the Black Panthers'
rifle-toting demonstrations, along with their food,
housing, and health programs.
</p>
<p> For years, Paris traveled around the South helping
black farmers hold on to their land and build wealth
cooperatively. Black farmers in Louisiana weren't
getting paid fairly for their sweet potatoes, so they
started a sweet potato cooperative and found their own
markets—in many cases up north. In Alabama, farmers who
were getting a raw deal on fertilizer formed a co-op to
buy it in bulk from elsewhere. Paris assisted in forming
the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in 1967. Black
activists during that period visited co-ops in Africa
and Israel. After years of agitating for voting rights,
Fannie Lou Hamer organized the Freedom Farm, a
cooperative meant to secure the gains of civil rights
with—to use the now-fashionable term—food sovereignty.
Today, this tradition is in a period of renaissance.
</p>
<p>"Since the Great Recession, there has been a huge
amount of interest," Nembhard told me. "Everybody's
figuring out that there's not a lot for them in the main
economy and that they need to find some viable
alternatives." Cooperatives, she has found, can thrive
at the economy's margins, at the sites of market failure
and exclusion. Their participant-ownership structure
keeps wealth in local communities and acts as a bulwark
against financial crises. "Co-ops can address almost
every economic challenge we have," Nembhard said.
</p>
<p>Elandria Williams is an organizer at the Highlander
Center in Tennessee, a historic base camp for agitators
and activists. (A photo of King at Highlander, with a
caption describing it as a "Communist Training School,"
became a notorious piece of anti-civil rights
propaganda.) Williams studies examples like the
Emilia-Romagna region in Italy, where co-ops enjoy tax
benefits and have flourished in sectors from agriculture
and handicrafts to high-tech industry. Cooperatives
don't just happen one business at a time; they require
an infrastructure to thrive, an ecosystem. That's why
she has been working to create the Southern Reparations
Loan Fund, an investment vehicle for the new generation
of co-ops.
</p>
<p>"We're trying to figure out what an economy would look
like, not just what enterprises look like," Williams
told me. That's part of why Lumumba's election mattered
so much.
</p>
<p class="photo-credit has-image"><span
class="body-image-wrapper"> </span></p>
<p>"When we thought we had the mayor in Jackson, and that
we were going to have a real example of a black
municipality that was embracing the totality of a
cooperative commonwealth, we were really excited,"
Nembhard told me. It encouraged black-led co-ops around
the country.
</p>
<p>For instance, followers of the late James and Grace Lee
Boggs have been planting a network of cooperative
enterprises on the abandoned lots of Detroit. In New
York, the city government is investing $3.3 million in
creating new worker cooperatives alongside the existing
ones in industries like home care and catering. A
cooperative security company has started in a Queens
housing project. Charles and Inez Barron, longtime
movement friends of Lumumba's, want to use their
positions in the state assembly and the city council in
New York State to set up co-ops in some of New York
City's poorest neighborhoods.
</p>
<p>Cooperatives take time, and this new economy is coming
along too slowly for those who need it most. The
generation of farmers that organized under the
Federation of Southern Cooperatives in the 1960s and 70s
is aging out of existence, and the new generation of
black co-ops is still emerging. The story of black
cooperatives, as much as it is one of "collective
courage," in Nembhard's words, is a story of loss. The
loss once came in the form of Governor George Wallace's
Alabama state troopers pulling over a truck full of
cucumbers until they turned to mush in the summer sun;
then it was a police raid with a tank; then an aortic
aneurysm.
</p>
<p>***
</p>
<p>When Chokwe Antar first looked at his father's body in
the hospital room, he made the decision to finish what
had been begun. He didn't say anything; there still had
to be discussions in MXGM about the next move. His wife
was pregnant. Some still felt he wasn't experienced
enough, but ultimately, the movement's decision echoed
his own, and he ran on a promise to continue what his
father had started. Throughout the country, MXGM members
mobilized again. But by the time of Lumumba's death, the
Jackson-Kush Plan was secret no more, and the city's
business class was better prepared to oppose it.
</p>
<p>Socrates Garrett is Jackson's most prominent black
entrepreneur. He went into business for himself in 1980,
selling cleaning products to the government; now, he and
his nearly 100 employees specialize in heavy-duty
environmental services. The story of his success is one
of breaking through Mississippi's white old-boy network,
and to do that his politics have become mainly reducible
to his business interests. He is a former chairman of
the chamber of commerce and serves on the boards of
charities. He's a self-described progressive who
supported the last Republican governor, Haley Barbour.
He became a political force—by necessity, and with less
ideological freight than the partisans of MXGM.
</p>
<p>"I had to have relationships with politicians," Garrett
told me. "If you're not doing business with the
government, you're not in mainstream America."
</p>
<p>Garrett became a Lumumba supporter when it became clear
who was going to win the election, but he grew
disillusioned quickly. The MXGM-led administration
didn't play his kind of politics. "They started putting
people in from different walks of life," he recalled.
"They had a lot of funny names, like Muslim names." He
was informed that he should not expect special
treatment. Safiya Omari, Lumumba's chief of staff,
insisted that he was being treated like any other
contractor, but Garrett perceived it as a snub—right
when the militant black mayor seemed to be bending over
backward to assuage the White Establishment.
</p>
<p class="has-image"><span class="body-image-wrapper"> </span></p>
<p>"Here you are, a black man—you start from scratch and
work your way up, thirty years out here struggling—and
there's something wrong with my business model?" he
said.
</p>
<p>Garrett couldn't wrap his head around how cooperatives
were going to take on big city contracts, with all the
bonding and hardware such work requires. Mississippi law
doesn't even have a provision for worker or consumer
cooperatives; those that do exist must incorporate out
of state. "In my opinion, it was going to produce
chaos," he said. He set about looking for a new mayor to
raise up, and before long came upon Tony Yarber, a young
bow-tied black pastor and city council member from a
poor neighborhood. (Yarber's LinkedIn profile still
lists his profession as a motivational speaker.) What he
lacked in age and experience was more than made up for
in his willingness to collaborate.
</p>
<p>Garrett and Yarber quietly set out to organize a run
against Lumumba in 2017, but when the mayor died, their
chance came sooner than expected. The white business
class that had tolerated and even liked Mayor Lumumba
wasn't ready to risk his young and little-known son.
Jackson Jambalaya, a straight-talking conservative blog,
ridiculed him as "Octavian." Chokwe Antar's posters,
between plentiful exclamation points, made promises of
"continuing the vision"; Yarber, for his part, told the
Jackson Free Press, "I don't make promises to people
other than to provide good government." Garrett was his
top individual donor.
</p>
<p>The result was a reversal from the election a year
earlier. Jackson's population is 80 percent black, and
Chokwe Antar won a solid majority of the vote in black
neighborhoods. But the white minority turned out in
droves, urged by last-minute canvassing in more affluent
areas, which voted 90 percent for Yarber. Narrowly, on
April 22, Yarber won.
</p>
<p>Yarber removed almost all the members of the previous
administration. Even Wendell Paris, who'd been working
part time to develop community gardens on city land
since before Lumumba's administration, was dismissed.
When I visited city hall a year later, Yarber's sister,
a police officer, was sitting by the metal detector at
the entrance, pecking on the same iPhone that was once
issued to Lumumba.
</p>
<p>"The whole sense that we're going to do something great
has sort of dissipated," Safiya Omari told me.
</p>
<p>Sitting on his front porch, wearing a faded T-shirt
from the first mayoral campaign and a black cap with Che
Guevara inside a small red star, Akuno tried to explain
to me the experience as he slathered his two small
children in natural bug repellent. With the 1 percent
tax and the water-rate hikes, they'd alienated part of
their base. But capitalism didn't leave them a choice.
He was following the news of Syriza, the leftist party
in Greece, as it tangoed with the Troika. "I feel like I
know exactly the conversations they are having behind
the scenes," he said. "I've been there."
</p>
<p>Across town, Garrett was feeling blessed. Mayor Yarber
put things back to what he was used to. "Every time, God
sends an answer," he told me. "But I can assure you that
that movement is alive and well. And I can assure you
that unless Yarber is razor sharp, they'll be back."
</p>
<p>In May 2014, just months after Lumumba's death,
hundreds of people came to the Jackson State University
campus from around the country and the world for a
conference called Jackson Rising. They learned the
history of black-led cooperatives from Nembhard and took
stock of what might have been in Jackson—and what might
be. Lumumba's image appeared on the cover of the
program, and on the first page, he spoke from the grave
with a signed-and-sealed resolution from the mayor's
desk. "Our city is enthused about the Jackson Rising
Conference and the prospects of cooperative
development," it said, as if nothing had changed. In
fact, city hall's expected support for the event lasted
no longer than Lumumba's tenure.
</p>
<p>MXGM was meanwhile hatching a new organization,
Cooperation Jackson, to carry on the work that had been
started. Akuno enumerated a four-part agenda: a co-op
incubator, an education center, a financial institution,
and an association of cooperatives. Plans were soon
underway to seed, first, three interlocking co-ops: an
urban farm, a catering company named in honor of
Lumumba's wife, Nubia, who died in 2003, and a
composting company to recycle the caterers' waste back
into the farm. Akuno raised money from foundations,
entertainers, and small donors, and the Southern
Reparations Loan Fund would be pitching in as well.
Cooperation Jackson started buying up land for its own
community land trust. Its members restored and painted
what would become the Lumumba Center.
</p>
<p>Jackson's hot summer seemed especially apocalyptic last
year. In South Carolina, Dylann Roof had murdered nine
African American worshipers in a Charleston church; day
after day, there was news of black churches across the
South burning. Calls were mounting to take down the
Confederate battle flag flying over the South Carolina
Capitol, but comparatively few were talking about the
stars and bars that still cover a substantial portion of
the Mississippi state flag everywhere it appears. The
Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage the law of the
land, overturning the Mississippi Constitution's
marriage amendment, and the preachers who heavily
populate the radio spectrum in Jackson declared the
United States of America definitively captive in the
talons of the devil. In the Lumumba Center's backyard,
Cooperation Jackson's Freedom Farm consisted of a few
rows of tilled earth, and in the kitchen, Nubia's Cafe
was having its first test run. Akuno and others were
planning a trip to Paris for the UN climate summit. Down
the road at the Cooperative Community of New West
Jackson, Nia Umoja and her neighbors had bought 56
properties for their land trust. "We've taken almost all
the abandoned property off the speculative market,"
Umoja said.
</p>
<p class="pullquote">Socrates Garrett was Jackson's most
successful black entrepreneur when Lumumba became mayor.
"Here you are, a black man—you start from scratch and
work your way up, thirty years out here struggling—and
there's something wrong with my business model?" he
said.</p>
<p>In the wake of Roof's shooting spree, Chokwe Antar
helped organize a rally at the state capitol to demand
changing Mississippi's flag, alongside local
politicians, activists, and hopefuls. The actress
Aunjaune Ellis, flanked on either side by guards in
black MXGM T-shirts, called for "rebranding our state"
and "a different way of doing business." Chokwe Antar
led a chant: "Stand up, take it down!" "Free the land!"
followed. Then, of course, "By any means necessary."
</p>
<p>Chokwe Antar's name was in the national news a week
later. In Clarke County, a police officer stopped
Jonathan Sanders, a black man with a horse-drawn buggy,
and he wound up dead after the cop put him in a
chokehold. Chokwe Antar took the case. The incident
became a possible flash point for the Black Lives Matter
movement's roving attention, but the story soon faded,
and in January, a grand jury declined to indict the
officer. The rebel flag still flies over Mississippi.
The state, also, has been vying to wrest control over
Jackson's valuable airport—another blow to self-rule for
the black-majority city. And the decision has been made:
Antar will run for the mayor's office again in 2017.
</p>
<p>The flag campaign was the subject of conversation over
grilling vegetables and chicken for dinner at the
Lumumba Center in late June. Akuno, pacing back and
forth over the grill, led the discussion. "I think with
some of this Confederate stuff—that's a distraction," he
said. "Is that really our agenda? Did we define it, or
did the media define it, saying that this is within the
limits?" He'd been saying as much to Chokwe Antar. Akuno
wanted to keep the focus on the co-ops and the
assemblies and elections—real counter power, backed by
self-sufficiency.
</p>
<p>"Nothing don't change, whether the flag comes down or
not," said New Orleans housing activist Stephanie Mingo,
from the other side of a picnic table. "There's still
going to be red, white, and blue."
</p>
<p>"I'm not a fan of the Black Lives Matter thing—because,
to be honest with you, they don't," Akuno went on. "Your
life did matter, when you were valuable property. You
were very valuable at one point in time. We're not
valuable property anymore." His pacing took him and his
gaze back to the grill, where he flipped over a hunk of
chicken.
</p>
<p>"My argument is to tell other black folk, let's start
with the reality."</p>
<p><i>This article appeared in the <a target="_blank"
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