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<div style="display: block;" id="reader-header" class="header"> <b><small><small><small><a
href="http://atlantablackstar.com/2016/04/18/mississippi-a-state-of-white-power-and-black-self-determination-in-conflict/"
id="reader-domain" class="domain"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://atlantablackstar.com/2016/04/18/mississippi-a-state-of-white-power-and-black-self-determination-in-conflict/">http://atlantablackstar.com/2016/04/18/mississippi-a-state-of-white-power-and-black-self-determination-in-conflict/</a></a></small></small></small></b>
<h1 id="reader-title">Mississippi: A State of White Power and
Black Self-Determination in Conflict - Atlanta Black Star</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">David Love - April 18,
2016<br>
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<p>What is wrong with Mississippi? It is a question that
people are asking as the latest news unfolds in that
Southern state.</p>
<p>Gov. Phil Bryant declared April <a
href="http://atlantablackstar.com/2016/02/25/mississippi-governor-declares-april-confederate-heritage-month-slavery-ignored/">Confederate
Heritage Month</a> in Mississippi. And yet, as other
states have distanced themselves from the Confederate
flag following the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina
massacre, whites in the Magnolia state cling to that
symbol of domestic terrorism and white supremacy. And a
Black civil rights lawyer, Carlos Moore, has asked a
federal court to <a
href="http://atlantablackstar.com/2016/03/10/black-lawyer-receives-death-threats-after-filing-federal-lawsuit-to-remove-confederate-flag-from-mississippi-capitol/">remove
the Mississippi flag</a> from the state capitol, and
has received death threats in the process.</p>
<p>Mississippi is an example of contradictions. It is the
Blackest of the states of the Union, with a population
that is nearly 40 percent African-American, according to
U.S. Census figures. And yet — or rather because of this
reality — Mississippi is the most conservative state,
beating out Alabama and Louisiana in a 2015 Gallup poll.
A recently enacted Religious Freedom Restoration Act
allows businesses and religious groups to refuse service
to gay couples. Further, Gov. Bryant just signed
the Church Protection Act, which allows guns in
churches.</p>
<p>When asked what is wrong with Mississippi, particularly
from the standpoint of white racism, experts point to
white fear and paranoia. Simply stated, white folks in
Mississippi have a fear of a Black planet. They wonder
what will happen when the formerly enslaved take over —
a question that whites have asked themselves since the
days of slavery. And with Mississippi poised to become
the first majority-Black state in coming years, white
backlash against Black power will only worsen and
intensify.</p>
<p>“A lot of this is historical. The thing that strikes me
is how whites were vastly outnumbered, particularly in
the Delta. That happened in Alabama but not as much as
in Mississippi, where African-Americans vastly
outnumbered whites,” Mark Potok, senior fellow at the
Southern Poverty Law Center and editor-in-chief of the <em>Intelligence
Report</em>, told <em>Atlanta Black Star.</em> “When
the slaves were freed, whites feared they would be
murdered, and white women would be raped, so it was a
form of war. These whites oppressed Black people for
quite some time, and they were afraid of what Black
people would do when they get power,” said Potok, who is
one of the country’s leading experts on extremism.</p>
<p>Potok also noted that Mississippi was the worst state
during the civil rights movement. The Whites Citizens’
Councils, also known as the “white-collar Klan,” had its
origins in Mississippi, which is where the resistance to
desegregation began.</p>
<p>“Also, Mississippi had some of the most vicious
legislators such as James Eastland, who had no problem
using racial epithets,” Potok noted.</p>
<p>White fear leads to terrorism, Potok argues, which
leads to defensiveness. He blames the way history is
taught in the South as part of the problem.</p>
<p>“It is remarkable how many whites believe the Civil War
had nothing to do with slavery, that tens of thousands
of Blacks fought for the Confederacy, and that the races
got along just fine,” he said, noting that many whites
coming out of the state school system believe, “slavery
was not a wonderful thing but its horrors were
overstated.”</p>
<p>To make things worse, people such as former Gov. Haley
Barbour “spent time palling around with the Council of
Conservative Citizens, which was based on the Whites
Citizens’ Councils,” Potok told <em>Atlanta Black Star.</em>
He noted the progress that was made in taking down the
Confederate flags in South Carolina and in Alabama, as
well as the statue of Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan
Bedford Forrest in Memphis. But then, according to
Potok, “the backlash against the Confederate flag led to
backlash.”</p>
<p>According to the SPLC, since the Charleston massacre,
there have been 364 pro-Confederate flag rallies, the
majority held in Deep South states such as Mississippi.</p>
<p>“I think we’re headed for a rough time because even as
Mississippi is heading toward becoming a majority Black
state, the country is headed toward a no-majority state,
so it is part of the same process, but it is more
extreme in Mississippi.”</p>
<p>“I think there’s a good reason Mississippi is crazy.
The reason they’re so retrograde is there’s such a high
percentage of African-Americans there,” said Edward
Sebesta, co-author of <em>The</em> <em>Confederate and
Neo-Confederate Reader</em>. Sebesta, an expert on the
Neo-Confederate movement, agrees with Potok about the
problem with white supremacy in that state.</p>
<p>“That’s why the Council of Conservative Citizens is in
Mississippi, because that’s where it could be the first
majority African-American state. So I think there’s a
siege mentality, and I think it’s very similar to the
mentality about having Obama elected president. The
reaction to that is the same thing, that this may be a
multiracial society, and no one group would be in the
cat bird’s seat,” he told <em>Atlanta Black Star.</em></p>
<p>Sebesta also emphasizes the role of sexuality in white
supremacist sentiment.</p>
<p>“There is a big thing with the neo-Confederates about
violent masculinity. They talk about having more
hormones, and they’re Scottish, they’re violent and
they’re impulsive, and all that stuff,” he said. “And it
does relate to racial control and everything going back
to slavery — and this idea that they have to be ready,
to be violent and maintain the order they want, and it
goes back…and the Ku Klux Klan is just one manifestation
of that.”</p>
<p>Further, Sebesta connects the dots between white
supremacist support for the Confederate flag and the
anti-LGBT law in Mississippi: “I think the application
to LGBT is the fact that they conceptualize dominance to
white patriarchy — Christian men running the whole show
and, of course, these are people who are not fitting
into that sort of patriarchal role — LGBT,” Sebesta
said. “Additionally, I think the thing is that white
supremacy organizes itself around the control of
sexuality. Because I think one of its primary needs is,
of course, to make sure there’s the next generation of
white people to support this. And without this rigid
system of control, they always have this lurking fear
that that generation won’t exist,” he added.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the continued support among whites for the
Mississippi state flag is telling. The flag, the only
remaining state flag to incorporate the Confederate
battle insignia, was adopted in 1894 to coincide with
the enactment of Jim Crow segregation laws, as the <em>Jackson
Free Press</em> reported. This was also the case in
states such as Alabama and Florida in those days.
Similarly, states such as Georgia adopted the
Confederate logo in their state flags in the 1950s, in
defiance of desegregation and the U.S. Supreme Court
decision in <em>Brown v. Board of Education.</em> In
2001, Mississippi voters voiced their support for the
flag in a nonbinding resolution, and this year state
lawmakers determined there were not enough votes to
remove the flag, meaning the flag will remain for the
foreseeable future.</p>
<p>Aunjanue Ellis, an actress who starred in the film “The
Help,” stars in ABC’s “Quantico” and co-stars in the
upcoming Nat Turner film, “The Birth of a Nation,” wrote
an op-ed in <em>Time</em> calling for President Obama
to remove the Mississippi flag from all federal grounds.</p>
<p>“If we do nothing, our nation’s Capitol will continue
to bear the litter of the Confederacy and the KKK, and
our moral battle, if not our physical battle, with the
groups like ISIS will remain hollow,” said Ellis, a
Mississippi native. “If we do nothing, we will not only
continue to be complicit with Mississippiʼs terrorism
and its manifestation in mass murderers like Dylann
Roof, we will also be an accomplice.”</p>
<p>“The recent Mississippi flag vote is beyond the reaches
of sanity and makes the case for a collective sociopathy
of toxic narcissism and the critical absence of memory
and empathy,” said John Sims, a Black artist who last
year led an effort to burn and bury the Confederate flag
throughout the South. “This vote indicates very
powerfully the depth and counter-intuitive complexity of
the Confederate flag as it relates to white supremacy,
visual terrorism and African-American road to
psychological independence,” he told <em>Atlanta Black
Star.</em></p>
<p>“This is why I think is it necessary to confront the
Confederate flag directly and unequivocally and demand
its removal from governmental spaces and branding, with
the exception of history and art presentations,” Sims
said.</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>“With this in mind and with the realization that the
Confederateflag is here to stay, I am advocating as I
did last year with my project, 13 FlagFunerals, for the
annual burning and burying of the Confederate flag for
Memorial Day. It is important to create an annual
cathartic ritual to reflect on the pathological legacy
of the symbols, language and culture of American racism
and history of slavery, while honoring the valiant
soldiers of social justice and freedom who came before
us.”</p>
<p>According to Sims, “the Civil War continues, and there
is much work to do.”</p>
<p>The efforts to keep the Confederate flag flying in
Mississippi are more than mere symbolism, but rather
part of a greater effort to kill Black power and keep
African-Americans in their place. The effort by the
state’s white, conservative Republican power structure
to disempower the majority-Black population of Jackson —
the state capital — is a case in point.</p>
<p>In 2013, attorney, human rights activist and Black
nationalist <a
href="http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/02/26/activist-crusading-attorney-mayor-jackson-ms-chokwe-lumumba-dies-66/">Chokwe
Lumumba</a> was elected mayor of Jackson, with 87
percent of the vote. Lumumba — who co-founded the
Republic of New Afrika and the Malcolm X Grassroots
Movement — was a lifelong advocate of Black
self-determination and called for an independent Black
nation in the Blackbelt South. As mayor, he had an
agenda of increasing investment in downtown Jackson,
which had lost 12 percent of its population since 1980
due to white flight to the suburbs. Further, he wanted
to preserve the autonomy of the predominantly Black city
— 80 percent Black and 27 percent in poverty — and
prevent the type of emergency takeover and privatization
measures that befell his native Detroit, as was reported
on WBAI’s “Behind the News.”</p>
<p>Eight months after his ascendancy into office, Lumumba
died. Then, according to Kali Akuno of the Malcolm X
Grassroots Movement and Cooperation Jackson — who worked
with Lumumba — white racist, reactionary and Republican
interests moved in, using the mayor’s death as an
opportunity to control and privatize the city’s
municipal assets, privatize the city’s assets, and cut
off parts of the Black community from each other by
creating Bantustans.</p>
<p>“We’re at a critical stage of the battle,” Akuno told
WBAI. “The Republican Party… racist to the core, have
fundamentally gotten their act together and united on a
program of basically just dismantling” Lumumba’s
agenda. Further, Akuno said these forces are “trying to
advance in such a manner that another Chokwe or someone
similar with same politics… cannot emerge to utilize the
strength of the numbers of the Black community and the
assets controlled by the city of Jackson — which they
could potentially yield in a transformative process.
They want to make sure that does not happen again.”</p>
<p>The Mississippi legislature passed a bill to create a
regional authority to control the now-city
owned Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport
and Hawkins Field Airport. According to the <em>Clarion-Ledger</em>,
the legislation — which awaits Gov. Phil Bryant’s
signature — will increase the number of members of the
airport authority from five to nine, and include
appointees of the governor, lieutenant governor and
interests from outside the city. Black community
activists regard this as a move to place control of the
airports in the hands of the governor and white
supremacist Republicans.</p>
<p>A documentary from the Coalition for Economic Justice —
“The Assault on Black Political Power in Jackson, MS” —
argues that the planned takeover of the airports will
pave the way for economic development opportunities that
will benefit the white establishment and not serve the
economic interests of Black Jackson. Further, the board
of the Capitol Complex Improvement District — which will
turn large sections of the city into an improvement
district — will mirror the airport authority in terms of
state control.</p>
<p>Now, people of good will in Jackson are fighting
against the Confederate Spring, under the hashtags <a
data-ft="{"tn":"*N","type":104}"
href="https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/defeattheconfederatespring?source=feed_text&story_id=10153560769887960"
class="_58cn"><span class="_58cl"></span></a><span
class="_58cm">#DefeatTheConfederateSpring and </span>#OperationJacksonRising.
The documentary points out that while many Black people
have acquired political positions in Jackson, the right
people were not always groomed or elected. Some have
internalized the white supremacist mindset, undermining
the aspirations of the Black community as a result. If
the Black community can galvanize and elected officials
are held accountable, in this Blackest area of the
country, then Black power will be realized and serve as
a template for the nation.</p>
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