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<h1 id="reader-title">The Socialist Experiment</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Katie Gilbert -
September 5, 2017<br>
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<p class="h3"><em>A new-society vision in Jackson,
Mississippi</em></p>
<hr>
<p><span class="s1 dropCaps">C</span><span class="s1">hokwe
Lumumba had been the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi,
for five months when, in November 2013, he stood
behind a lectern and addressed a group of
out-of-towners with a curious phrase he would soon
explain with a story: “Good afternoon, everybody, and
free the land!” </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">On his tall,
thin frame he wore a bright blue tie and a loosely
fitting suit, extra fabric collecting around the
shoulders of his jacket. Wire-rimmed glasses rested
over a perpetually furrowed brow on his narrow,
thoughtful, frequently smiling face. A faint white
mustache grazed his upper lip. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">In welcoming
the attendees of the Neighborhood Funders Group
Conference, a convening of grantmaking institutions,
Mayor Lumumba was conversational and at ease, as he
tended to be with microphone in hand. His friends had
long teased him for his loquaciousness in front of a
crowd. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Lumumba
informed the room that on the car ride over he’d
decided he would tell them a story. He explained that
big things were happening in Jackson—or, were about to
happen—and his story would offer some context. It was
one he had recounted many times. Polished smooth, the
story was like an object he kept in his pocket and
worried with his thumb until it took on the sheen of
something from a fable, though the people and events
were real. “It was March of 1971 when I first came to
the state of Mississippi,” Lumumba began. “It was
several months after the students at Jackson State had
been murdered,” he said, referring to the tragedy at
the city’s predominantly black college, which left two
dead and twelve injured after police opened fire on a
campus dormitory in May 1970, less than two weeks
after the Kent State shootings. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Lumumba had
traveled to Mississippi with a group called the
Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika.
He was twenty-three at the time and was taking a break
from his second year of law school in Detroit. He had
put his training on hold for the work of new-society
building. After the assassination of Martin Luther
King Jr., Lumumba had been increasingly drawn to what
he considered the radical humanism of the Provisional
Government’s plan to create a new, majority-black
nation in the Deep South. The PG-RNA planned to
peacefully petition the United States government for
the five states where the concentration of black
population was largest: Mississippi, Louisiana,
Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Leaders framed
their demand for this transfer as a reparations
payment after centuries of enslavement and degradation
that black people had experienced in America. As part
of a symbolic effort to break with a painful past and
announce a new way forward, the PG-RNA encouraged New
Afrikans to shed names with European origins in favor
of African ones. Edwin Taliaferro became Chokwe
Lumumba: Chokwe, he said, for one of the last tribes
to successfully resist the slave trade and Lumumba for
Patrice Lumumba, who led Congo to independence and
became its first democratically elected prime
minister. The Republic of New Afrika’s Declaration of
Independence announced that its socialist society,
arranged around cooperative economics, would be
“better than what we now know and as perfect as man
can make it.”</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">By March of
1971, when the mayor’s story began, Lumumba was an
officer in the Provisional Government. The
organization had made an oral agreement to buy twenty
acres of land from a black farmer in Bolton,
Mississippi, a small town about twenty miles west of
Jackson. They had hired a contractor to build a school
and dining hall on the property. The site would be
named El Malik after the name Malcolm X had taken for
himself: El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. March 28, a Sunday,
had been chosen as Land Celebration Day, when the
group would inaugurate the site at El Malik. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Lumumba was in
the caravan’s lead vehicle as they approached Bolton
that afternoon. Forty-two years later, he described to
the conference attendees in Jackson how the Klan drove
up and down the road in their trucks, brandishing
weapons, and how state, local, and federal police
formed a barricade across the road. Mississippi’s
attorney general, <br>
A. F. Summer, had declared that there would be no Land
Celebration Day. Akinyele Omowale Umoja, an
African-American Studies professor at Georgia State
University, writes in his book <em>We Will Shoot
Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom
Movement </em>that the day before the scheduled
event, PG-RNA leaders had seen a hand-painted sign
near the property that the KKK had posted: <span
class="small">NIGGERS, THERE WILL BE NO MEETING HERE
SUNDAY. FREE SIX-FOOT HOLES.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Mayor Lumumba
paused, and when he spoke again his voice had moved up
a register. “This was a different day about to break,”
he said. “And even though sometimes we break our days
somewhat recklessly, it was certainly gonna break.
There were five hundred of us”—other records say there
were one hundred fifty—“and we said, ‘We come in
peace, but we come prepared.’ We had old people, we
had young people, we had babies. We were praying. Hard
revolutionaries, driven back to prayer!” He laughed.
“Looking for God wherever we could find Him.” </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">The day might
well have combusted. What happened instead, Lumumba
told the audience, was something that seemed, even as
it unfolded, like a miracle best left unexamined. “I
know it’s hard for a lot of you to believe this—that
roadblock opened up. Just like the Red Sea.” </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Past the
barricade, the New Afrikans traveled five miles. They
had arrived. Two months later, the Bolton farmer would
renege on his agreement to sell, and support for the
PG-RNA and its efforts would wane over the next few
years, as FBI and state and local police pushed
successful counterintelligence programs to undermine
the group’s efforts. But in looking back, Lumumba
focused on the energy of that Sunday, when the people
around him fell to the ground in such profound joy
that they began to eat the dirt, he recalled, out of a
spontaneous desire to take into their bodies the
freedom they believed they’d found. “That’s where that
slogan came from,” Lumumba said. “‘Free the land.’” </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">In Lumumba’s
successful campaigns for city council in 2009 and for
mayor in 2013, “Free the land” had been a common
refrain of his supporters. His platform, too, echoed
the vision he and his fellow New Afrikans had harbored
for their new society on Land Celebration Day. He
pledged that his office would support the
establishment of a large network of cooperatively
owned businesses in Jackson, often describing
Mondragon, a Spanish town where an ecosystem of
cooperatives sprouted half a century ago. In debates
and interviews, he promised that Jackson, under the
leadership of a Lumumba administration, would flourish
as the “Mondragon of the South”—the “City of the
Future.” </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">As Mayor
Lumumba neared the end of the story of Land
Celebration Day, his voice faltered. He turned his
head and squeezed his eyes closed to regain composure.
The memory of Land Celebration Day was still a live
wire running through him and through his plans as
mayor of Jackson. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">“The reason I
started off with that little prelude,” he told the
Neighborhood Funders Group Conference attendees, “is
that I wanted to say that what has not changed is the
vision of that new society, that new way of thinking.
That new way of engineering and governing a society,
where everyone would be treated with dignity. Where
there would be no class, no gender, or color
discrimination. Even though it didn’t happen in that
little community which we called El Malik, now it’s
about to happen in Jackson, Mississippi. And would you
believe it?”</span></p>
<p><span class="s1 dropCaps">A</span><span class="s1">s a
child, Chokwe Lumumba’s son Chokwe Antar sometimes
wished for another name, one that sounded more like
those of his friends. But Antar also trusted his
parents, and he looked up to them. He knew his f</span><span
class="s2">ather’s work as a civil rights–oriented
lawyer was important, and </span><span class="s1">he
used to sneak out of his bed at night to lie on the
floor of his parents’ room and listen as they
discussed his father’s cases. He shared his father’s
name, and he would grow up to share his profession. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">After Land
Celebration Day in 1971, Chokwe Lumumba returned to
Detroit and finished his law degree. In 1976, he
joined the Detroit Public Defenders Office, and two
years later he opened his own law firm. In 1986,
Chokwe and his wife, a flight attendant born Patricia
Ann Burke who changed her name to Nubia Lumumba, moved
their family to Brooklyn so Chokwe could better
represent his high-profile clients there, including
black nationalist Mutulu Shakur and his stepson, Tupac
Shakur. Even after the PG-RNA dissolved, Lumumba had
never stopped thinking about how a group of determined
activists could build a new society where black people
could escape racism, racist violence, and deprivation.
Lumumba cofounded two organizations to keep working
toward versions of the PG-RNA goal: the New Afrikan
People’s Organization in 1984, and, later, the Malcolm
X Grassroots Movement. According to Professor Umoja,
NAPO’s members still oriented themselves toward the
goal of a black nation. MXGM was slightly
different—members advocated self-determination for
black communities using a variety of means, including
independence, but also sought other paths that would
lead toward empowerment and liberation. In 1988, when
the couple’s daughter, Rukia, was nine, and their son,
Antar, was five, the Lumumbas relocated to Jackson,
Mississippi. In the following years, Chokwe and Nubia
would often tell Rukia and Antar that they’d come to
the South because there was work to be done there and
because they wanted to give their children the
struggle.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Lumumba’s work
as a lawyer invited renown to the family, but also
occasional vitriol. Antar and Rukia spent one
afternoon hiding in a closet with a knife clutched
between them after a death threat was breathed over
the phone while their parents were away. In high
school, on the phone with a girlfriend, Antar would
wrap up by saying, “Okay, goodbye to you, too, FBI!”
His parents always said that the house’s phones were
tapped. Years later, among the hundreds of pages of
documents that emerged from a Freedom of Information
Act request for FBI reports on Chokwe Lumumba, Antar
saw his high school graduation photo. The sight of it
there didn’t unsettle him because it confirmed what
he’d always been told.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">After Antar’s
freshman year at Myrtle High School, his father judged
that basketball was too prominent a priority in his
son’s life and decided that Antar would transfer from
his school and its championship team. Chokwe offered
him a list of new high schools to choose from. Antar
entered his sophomore year at Callaway High as a
D-average student, and he went on to graduate in the
top 10 percent of his class.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Antar recalls
that his mother used to joke, with an edge of
seriousness, that her children had better not pursue
that “same old boring lawyer thing” that took so much
of her husband’s time without bringing in as much
money as it should. She hoped her children would
pursue careers that would allow them the finer things
in life. She noted that Antar loved drawing street
plans and hearing her talk about Benjamin Banneker’s
designs for Washington, D.C., and that math seemed to
come easy to him. She pushed him to consider becoming
an engineer or an architect. Most of all, she seemed
to want to ensure that her son didn’t choose a career
just because it was his father’s. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">But once Antar
entered college at Tuskegee University in Alabama, he
never seriously considered anything but a path to law
school. After he earned a J.D. from the Thurgood
Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University,
he returned home in 2008 to help run his father’s law
practice. Within the year, he was watching his
FBI-surveilled activist father wade into the quagmire
of Jackson city politics. Chokwe had been tapped as
the public face of a long-brewing effort to continue
working toward the PG-RNA’s vision of an egalitarian,
black-led society—or at least some version of it. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">In the early
2000s, MXGM’s leadership formed a think tank to plot
out a twenty-first-century strategy to realize the
new-society dream. After some discussion, at the
organization’s annual Ideological Conference in 2005,
MXGM’s national membership determined that Mississippi
was the best staging ground for the experiment in
society building—the same conclusion the PG-RNA had
come to in the 1970s. The eighteen contiguous counties
that run along the Mississippi River on the state’s
western edge are all majority black (except one, which
is 47.8 percent black). The MXGM new-society drafters
referred to this line of counties along the
Mississippi Delta as the Kush District, as PG-RNA
leadership had, named after the ancient civilization
built along the banks of the Nile, in what is now
Egypt and Sudan. MXGM members began moving to Jackson
from all across the country. In 2012, after roughly
ten years of refining their blueprint, the think tank
posted a draft of its Jackson-Kush Plan to the MXGM
website. The document detailed steps to build a
socialist, majority-black, eco-focused model society
within Mississippi’s shrinking capital city, as well
as initiatives to mobilize communities in the Kush
district, and expand from there. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">The society
described in the Jackson-Kush Plan was a close
descendant of the one envisioned by the PG-RNA, with
some tweaks based on lessons learned and the interests
of the drafters three decades after Land Celebration
Day. Like the PG-RNA vision, a central pillar of the
new society would be economic democracy based in
cooperative ownership. Another would be the embrace of
fully participatory democracy through the organization
of self-governing organs called People’s Assemblies,
which would be the loci of real decision-making power
in the communities where they operated. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">The starkest
difference between the PG-</span>RNA’s and the
Jackson-Kush Plan’s new-society visions was in the
stance on engaging with <span class="s1">the country’s
established system of electoral politics. The PG-RNA’s
leaders had based their call for a new society on the
argument that the federal, state, and local
governments were illegitimate, since they had long
relied on broad disenfranchisement to amass their
power. MXGM revised this stance: A central goal
described in the Jackson-Kush Plan was the development
of progressive political candidates who, if elected,
could support the goals of economic democracy and
self-governing People’s Assemblies from that elected
office. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">In 2008, two
of the drafters of the Jackson-Kush Plan approached
Chokwe Lumumba about running as one of those
candidates. They also approached Antar, then
twenty-five, about running for a city council seat.
Antar demurred. The idea of running for office wasn’t
practical in his mind or, frankly, all that appealing.
He’d just returned to the city after seven years away
at school; outside of family and friends, not many
people knew him in Jackson, and, beyond that, he had
little interest in electoral politics as a form of
public service. Antar tried to dissuade his father
from running, too—Chokwe Lumumba may have been a
highly respected lawyer in the community, but that
didn’t make for a political profile prominent enough
to run a successful campaign. His father agreed; mayor
would be too much just then. He’d run for city council
instead. But he made it clear that he disagreed with
his son on the broader point: Antar needed to consider
running for office someday. Sometimes, he told his
son, the movement requires that we give of ourselves
and do something we didn’t envision.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">In 2012, as
Chokwe was finishing his term on the council and
shifting his attention to his run for mayor, MXGM
pressed Antar to run to fill his father’s vacated
council seat. He declined again. Antar had just
married his longtime girlfriend, Ebony, an English
professor at Tougaloo College, and months later,
they’d learn she was pregnant. But he dedicated
himself fully to his father’s campaign, serving as its
official spokesperson as he helped to draft the
platform on which Chokwe Lumumba would squeak into a
runoff election after a second-place finish in the
Democratic primary—and go on to win the mayorship.
Still, Antar harbored absolutely no interest in
becoming a politician himself, and he couldn’t imagine
what would ever change his mind. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">It wouldn’t be
long before he’d find out.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1 dropCaps">O</span><span class="s1">n a
Tuesday morning in late February 2014, not quite eight
months into Chokwe’s term, the mayor called his son
complaining of chest pains. Antar left court and
rushed to Chokwe’s house to d</span>rive his father to
the emergency room at St. Dominic’s Hospital. Mayor
Lumumba told <span class="s1">the hospital staff that
he thought he might be having a heart attack.
According to a 2016 lawsuit filed by Antar against St.
Dominic’s, Chokwe waited hours at the hospital before
he received any treatment. According to the lawsuit, a
cardiologist recommended a blood transfusion. Just
before 5 p.m., Chokwe died suddenly. The cause of
death was later determined to be a heart attack. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Shock and
grief coursed through Jackson with the news that the
mayor was dead. Many Jacksonians were still nursing
the morale boost that had come with Lumumba’s
election. They had faith that their city was about to
figure out new ways to address longstanding problems:
crumbling streets and dangerously outdated water
infrastructure, a depleted tax base, a lack of jobs.
During his brief tenure, the late mayor had asked the
city to vote on a new 1 percent sales tax to help
begin to pay for the infrastructure fixes the city
desperately needed. He’d helped organize People’s
Assemblies to provide forums to answer Jacksonians’
questions about the proposal. Voters approved the new
tax with 90 percent in favor. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">“There was a
sense of loss greater than just his passing,” Antar
told me later. “People said to me, ‘We felt like we
were on the right track. What do we do now?’”</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">At Chokwe’s
funeral, former Mississippi governor William Winter, a
Democrat, admitted that during the mayoral campaign,
he’d feared that as mayor Lumumba would divide the
capital city. “I could not have been more wrong,” he
said, adding, “The strong leadership of Chokwe Lumumba
has opened the door to a bright future for us.” </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s3">On the night
that Chokwe died, Antar was the only family member
present. His mother had passed away ten years before
from a brain aneurysm, and Rukia was rushing to
Jackson from her home in New York. As he waited for
Rukia and extended family in Detroit to arrive, Antar
asked the friends who had gathered in the hospital
room to give him some time alone with his
just-deceased father. In that quiet moment, before the
shock of Lumumba’s death had spread through Jackson,
Antar resolved to run for mayor. He would keep the
decision to himself until he told his wife the next
morning, giving himself the night to turn it over in
his head. But as soon as the idea came to him in that
hospital room, he knew he wouldn’t separate himself
from it again. He thought of his father’s mandate:
Sometimes the movement requires that you give of
yourself and do something you didn’t envision as part
of your plan. A more practical concern was bearing
down on him, too. The new-society vision needed a new
protector, a new vessel. Who else could it be but him?</span></p>
<p><span class="s3"></span><span class="s1">Chokwe Antar
Lumumba was thirty at the time, and he looked younger.
In his public appearances he shifted between a
lawyerly, knitted-brow seriousness, often repeating
the last few words of a sentence to underline his
point, and a readiness to amiably tease a friend or
fellow candidate and break into his boyish laugh. I
would come to learn that with strangers and familiars
alike his charisma takes the form of a warm
accessibility, the sense that he has time for
everyone, and doesn’t begrudge anyone who asks for
it. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">I traveled to
Jackson for the first time in March 2016, two years
after Chokwe Lumumba died. In Chicago, where I live,
the protracted winter still lingered, but I found
Jackson was already in full leaf, deep into spring. My
hotel on North State Street was across from a middle
school whose grounds included space for a modest
football field, faded tennis courts, and a scuffed
soccer field. Across the street to the north was the
sprawling campus of the University of Mississippi
Medical Center, the city’s largest employer after the
State of Mississippi, with about ten thousand
employees. Up the road was the Fondren District, the
site of a dedicated revitalization effort led over the
past two decades by nearby residents, where coffee
shops’ signs bore thoughtful fonts and a tapas
restaurant and oyster bar made new use of a shuttered
public school. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Antar met me
in the lobby of my lodge-themed hotel on one of my
first evenings in town. He strode in wearing a black
hoodie and a flat-brimmed Detroit Tigers ball cap. He
had waves for the people he knew behind the front desk
and a handshake for me. We sat at one of the lobby’s
round wooden tables and Antar told me about the last
couple of years, affirming his continued dedication to
the work his father had left unfinished. His wedding
ring clanged against the table’s glass top when he
struck it to emphasize his points, which he did when
he brought up cooperatives. “What we have to establish
are businesses that are in the business of making
money but <em>also </em>have an interest in serving
the community—not in picking up and moving out,” he
said. He laid out an analysis of why the solutions
delineated in the Jackson-Kush Plan were still
necessary, quoting Malcolm X, Gandhi, and his father.
He spoke of the importance of oppressed people leading
self-determined lives, resurrecting the parlance of
the Republic of New Afrika. But other parts of his
analysis were more current, like when he talked about
mass incarceration and the proliferation of prisons as
a Band-Aid over the U.S.’s industrial decline and
stagnant economy. “On many levels, this economic
experiment that we have in this country is a <em>failed</em>
<em>model,</em>” he said with another strike to the
glass. “And it’s a failed model in particular for
oppressed people.”</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Six weeks
after his father’s death, Antar ran in the April 2014
special election for mayor. He lost in a runoff to
Tony Yarber, founder and pastor of the majority-black
Relevant Empowerment Church. As mayor, Yarber had
scrapped the most notable parts of the Lumumba
administration’s agenda, including plans for the
city-supported cooperative businesses, the People’s
Assemblies, and the goal to turn Jackson into a
zero-waste city. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Antar’s loss
was another setback for the new-society goal, so the
MXGM members most connected to the Jackson-Kush Plan
shifted their route forward yet again. That May,
members of Lumumba’s former administration and MXGM
went ahead with what had been planned as a
city-supported event called the Jackson Rising: New
Economies Conference. The three-day summit sought to
provide an educational foundation for attendees in
building the pieces of a democratic, cooperative
economy. At the end of the conference, a few core
members of MXGM announced a new organization called
Cooperation Jackson to continue the co-op–building
goal. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">In late 2015,
I had emailed Cooperation Jackson and a few days later
I was on the phone with Sacajawea Hall, a cofounder of
the organization who had moved to Jackson from Atlanta
in December 2013. I’d been doing some traveling,
guided by an interest in alternative economic models
inside the United States. The prehistory of this
interest might be traced to 2006 when, at twenty-two
years old, I took a job as a researcher for <em>Institutional
Investor’s</em> <em>Alpha,</em> a magazine that
analyzes hedge funds, which I knew next to nothing
about. I was to help coax information from secretive
hedge fund managers about the billions of dollars
under their management. I had no idea that I’d taken
the job on the eve of the strangest moment in nearly a
century to be covering the financial industry. By
2008, I was reporting for <em>Alpha </em>and that
year the public, U.S.-based pension funds I covered
collectively lost more than one-fourth of their value
after the collapse of the global financial market.
Suddenly, knowing nothing became our shared national
condition as we watched our economic system flail in
the precise ways we were told it never would. The
revoking of this system’s untouchable status granted
us permission to peer into our enormous, tangled
economic apparatus and ask: In what ways has this
system long been failing us? And, more crucially: What
might we build that’s better? Radical economic
experiments have proliferated in the U.S. since the
2008 collapse—but then, they feel radical only if
you’ve lived your life, as most of us have, believing
that profit maximization, endless economic growth, and
the individual’s mandate to consume are circumstances
as intrinsically human as hunger and childbirth. I
count myself among those who struggle to imagine
living within any other economic arrangement, but by
the time I called Saki Hall I was starting to
understand that other people’s imaginations have
granted them more leeway, and some were living out
economic experiments that embody alternatives. At the
end of our conversation, Saki invited me to come see
for myself what Cooperation Jackson was doing.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">The month
before my trip, I spent a week living and working at
Twin Oaks Community in Louisa, Virginia. Twin Oaks is
a fifty-year-old fully egalitarian mini-society of
roughly one hundred members, where labor and
governance systems are modeled from the utopia
described in B. F. Skinner’s novel <em>Walden Two.</em>
At Twin Oaks, I hauled soil on a vegetable farm,
snipped strawberry bushes, and hosed down equipment in
the tofu factory. I helped two affable men named Tony
and Ezra prepare a Sunday dinner of split pea soup,
smoked pork belly, and baguettes. I was apprised of
the joys of polyamory, the necessity of requiring the
group’s permission for pregnancy in a community where
children are supported by the whole, and the freedom
in not being defined by a lifetime in a single job or
role. During my week at Twin Oaks, the pebble I
couldn’t loose from my shoe was the place’s
overwhelming whiteness. It was also true that the
preponderance of people at Twin Oaks came from middle-
and upper-class backgrounds. Here was a vision for a
drastically new way of thinking about our economic
arrangement, and yet its population lacked
representation from the racial minorities who had for
so long been kept away from the levers of economic
control in our country. I didn’t know if this
constituted a failure of Twin Oaks’s model—but it made
me less interested in the experiment being run there.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">In the course
of my research, I had never heard Chokwe Lumumba or
any member of MXGM or Cooperation Jackson describe the
Jackson-Kush Plan as a utopian vision. Still, when I
arrived in Mississippi, a line from utopian scholar
Ruth Levitas rattled in my head: “Utopia’s strongest
function, its claim to being important rather than a
matter of esoteric fascination and charm, is its
capacity to inspire the pursuit of a world
transformed, to embody hope rather than simply
desire.” If I wanted to plot for myself the
coordinates of the line between fantastical and real
societies; between unheard-of ambitions for change and
perfectly familiar ones; between a fable told for
comfort and a plan for real change on the ground
somewhere, I felt that I needed to better understand
what was happening in Jackson. I hoped being there
would offer some insight into how those lines are
drawn, and how fixed they really are.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Toward the end
of our conversation in the hotel lobby, Antar departed
from the scholarly analysis and made a declaration
that struck me as uncharacteristically dramatic: He
saw Jackson, Mississippi (and he never said the city
without the state), as a last chance. This was a place
where long-marginalized black communities could build
a new economy for themselves, a democratic and fair
society, a foundation for good lives to grow from. In
his mind, this black-majority city that sat in the
middle of the state with the highest concentration of
black people in our country <em>had</em> to be the
staging ground for this particular experiment in
moving past economic and governance systems that
weren’t working for so many. Antar told me he was
grateful he hadn’t won the special election in 2014.
He wasn’t ready then, he’d realized. But now he was.
Though he hadn’t publicly announced it, he said he
would run for mayor of Jackson again in 2017.</span></p>
<p><br>
<span class="s1 dropCaps">A</span><span class="s1">n
abundance of deep, wide potholes was my first
indication that something wasn’t quite working in
Jackson. After an earlier rainstorm, the pockmarks
dotting the capital city’s streets shimmered with mock
placidity. “I was trying to miss<em> </em>that one!”
Saki exclaimed after her car lurched through a pothole
pond spanning two lanes, throwing us against our seat
belts and jostling the car seats embracing her
five-year-old daughter and two-year-old son in the
back seat. A red plastic plate dotted with the crumbs
from her daughter’s breakfast hopped from Saki’s lap
to her feet. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Saki wanted to
talk about the potholes: Did I see all of them? See
that one there, how deep it is? To Saki, the potholes
stood for something more than a threat to her car’s
underbody. To Saki, and, I would soon learn, to many
other Jacksonians, the proliferation of unfilled
potholes was a clear sign of a downward spiral in full
effect. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Saki had
picked me up from my hotel on my first day in town
with an offer of a driving tour of Jackson. I
enthusiastically accepted. We trundled southward over
the potholes until we reached downtown.
Well-maintained grounds studded with magnolias and
tupelos spread out around the grand, Greek Revival
State Capitol, Governor’s Mansion, and City Hall.
These were interspersed with muted, modern, concrete
and steel buildings housing government agencies like
the Mississippi Gaming Commission and the Parole
Board. A few local restaurants operated out of the
downtown storefronts, but many of the storefronts
stood tenantless. Faded signs indicated the businesses
that had since departed or dissolved, imparting a
feeling that the past remained cloyingly close by.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">In the decades
before the Civil War, the newly crowned capital city
had prospered as cotton made Mississippi a wealthy
state. That changed in 1863 when Union armies
destroyed Jackson; its skeletal remains allegedly
earned it the nickname “Chimneyville.” The city has
been struggling to claw back to its former economic
abundance ever since. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">During
Mississippi’s eleven years of Reconstruction, the
Freedmen’s Bureau established by the U.S. Congress
helped lay the foundation for the state’s public
school system. Black citizens’ participation in
democracy was higher than in any other Southern
state—more than two hundred black people were elected
to public office during the period. But a concerted
effort to alter the trajectory of societal reshaping,
called the Mississippi Plan, was devastatingly
successful. Developed in 1875 by the conservative
Democrats desperate to eject Reconstruction-supporting
Republicans from office, the Mississippi Plan employed
organized violence to intimidate and kill those
working toward a society in which races were equal.
Democrats had regained political power by 1876; in
1890, they passed a new state constitution that
concretized the exclusion of black citizens from the
democratic process. In two years, the number of black
Mississippians registered to vote fell from 142,000 to
68,117. Generations later, Mississippi’s public
schools managed to delay real desegregation for
sixteen years after the <em>Brown </em>v. <em>Board
of Education</em> decision in 1954. According to the
Mississippi Historical Society, one-third of the
districts in the state had achieved no desegregation
by 1967 and less than three percent of the state’s
black children attended classes with white children.
It took another Supreme Court decision, in 1969, to
force real desegregation in Mississippi.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Jackson was 60
percent white in 1970, and by the 2010 census, 18
percent white. The city’s population decreased from
nearly 200,000 in 1990 to under 170,000 in 2016. As
the majority-white suburbs expanded, they turned into
a kind of sticky ring around the city center, pulling
economic development out of Jackson. The Mississippi
Department of Revenue reports that the city of Jackson
brought in approximately $117 million in gross sales
tax in fiscal year 1990 and $177.6 million in fiscal
year 2016—worse than stagnant when accounting for
inflation. And as the tax base has crumbled, so has
the city’s infrastructure. The <em>Clarion-Ledger</em>
wrote in March 2017 that a report from an engineering
firm in 2013 found that more than 60 percent of
Jackson streets had four years or less of serviceable
life left. In 2017, that life is about spent. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Saki steered
us a few blocks west of downtown, to a silent stretch
of streets lined with one- and two-story buildings.
These were more like memories of buildings, with empty
window frames, unkempt overgrowth outside, and
encroaching wilderness inside. Saki told me we were in
the middle of the Farish Street Historical District.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Farish Street
was built by slaves and after emancipation it came to
be used primarily by the formerly enslaved. A new
business district emerged during Reconstruction, and
it thrived in Jim Crow’s “separate-but-equal” South as
an alternative to the Capitol District blocks away,
where black Jacksonians weren’t welcome. Farish Street
was one of the largest African-American districts in
the South; it held legal firms, doctors, dentists,
jewelers, banks, retail stores, and hospitals. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">In the 1950s,
black activists mobilized black and white protestors
to put pressure on white-owned businesses across the
city to allow access to black customers. A sit-in at a
Jackson Woolworth’s turned violent. When the Civil
Rights Act passed in 1964, mandating the desegregation
of public places, many African Americans in Jackson
celebrated their victory by taking full advantage of
it, bringing their spending to previously inaccessible
white businesses. The African-American business owners
on Farish Street suffered. Integration didn’t work
both ways; as black people moved into previously white
spaces, white spending failed to flow into Farish
Street. Integration hadn’t happened between two groups
with equal economic footing and control, a fact for
which Farish Street’s slow implosion offers lingering
evidence. Businesses closed like falling dominoes and
new ones stayed away as the area became known as a
magnet for drugs and prostitution. Revitalization
efforts of various kinds were killed by infighting and
funds insufficient to the area’s growing needs. What I
saw outside of Saki’s car window in March 2016 was the
result of this history: an abandoned community, a
failure on the part of the city.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Saki rattled
over the train tracks that bisect the capital and we
passed into West Jackson, another part of the city
entirely. The population here is almost completely
black, and, according to the Hinds County Economic
Development Authority, unemployment in West Jackson is
double both the county and state averages. In 2014,
Duvall Decker, a local architecture firm, worked
alongside neighborhood residents and eighteen
Jackson-based organizations to compile a “West Jackson
Planning Guidebook” for a section of West Jackson
around Jackson State University; according to their
findings, residents in the area had a choice of three
grocery stores in comparison to sixteen check-cashing
businesses, and almost half of the properties were
officially vacant. In the past year, the number of
grocery stores dropped to just two. On this side of
the tracks, Capitol Street—which originates in front
of the Old State Capitol on the east side—is a quiet,
winding road, flanked by rows of abandoned structures.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Saki’s
daughter announced from the backseat that she had to
go to the bathroom, and Saki pulled a U-turn. We were
just a few minutes from Cooperation Jackson. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">In the spring
of 2015, Cooperation Jackson moved into the building
now dubbed the Chokwe Lumumba Center for Economic
Democracy and Development. A group of volunteers set
to work renovating the building, a former daycare
center, to better fit its new purpose. Pastel murals
were painted over and mildewed carpeting ripped out,
and a fresh paint job brightened the building’s
exterior. The color was the deep green of the kale and
collards that would soon populate a cooperatively
owned farm in the backyard.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">We parked in a
long driveway, and I helped Saki unload the children.
From the outside, the single-story structure looked
like it had been snapped from a strip mall and dropped
into its grassy one-acre lot. Saki pressed a doorbell
and a young man wearing a lip ring and a light brown
cap to hold his dreadlocks opened the door. He led us
across a linoleum floor into the cool darkness of the
Lumumba Center. Saki and her daughter headed for the
bathroom, which had a hand-drawn sign on the door: <span
class="small">GENDER IS A UNIVERSE</span>. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">The man who
had let us in introduced himself as Brandon King. He
was another cofounder of Cooperation Jackson and a
member of MXGM. Brandon had moved to Jackson a little
over a year ago, a month before Chokwe Lumumba died. I
would soon learn that, like Brandon and Saki, many of
Cooperation Jackson’s twenty cofounders had moved to
Jackson from cities outside of Mississippi. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Saki had
recently decorated the beige cinder-block walls of the
Lumumba Center with photo collages. One featured
Chokwe. She showed me the industrial kitchen where the
group planned to open a cooperatively owned café
called Nubia’s Place. In the center’s biggest room,
she pointed to the areas that would eventually hold a
stage for open mic nights, seating for the café, and
couches. A door led to the wide backyard, where
seedlings of cooperatively owned Freedom Farms were
pushing upward under the soil. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Typing at a
desk in a small office off the main room I recognized
Kali Akuno, another founding member of Cooperation
Jackson and its apparently tireless de facto
spokesperson. He was also Saki’s partner. I’d seen
videos of him speaking about their work at conferences
around the world. Kali had drafted the public version
of the Jackson-Kush Plan and, I would later learn, he
had been one of the first to approach Chokwe Lumumba
about running for office. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">A year after
my first visit to the Lumumba Center, Antar would run
again for the mayor’s seat. As had been the case for
his father’s bids for office and Antar’s previous run
in the special election, the campaign’s messaging and
platform would be developed with input from members of
MXGM. One of his most regularly invoked campaign
slogans—“When I become mayor, you become mayor”—would
be rooted in the Jackson-Kush Plan’s vision of
self-determination and self-governing. In his debates
and speeches, Antar would regularly seize
opportunities to champion cooperatives as part of the
prescription for the city’s economic malaise. He would
also mention the Lumumba Center, a place where that
work of establishing economic democracy was slowly
getting started.</span></p>
<p>The Jackson-Kush Plan had reached a moment in which it
had an established base in the former daycare center on
Capitol Street and a charismatic young attorney seeking
to offer more support for the plan from inside City
Hall. But for something to come of this moment, so long
in the making, Antar would need to convince voters that
his vision—especially his economic vision—was the one
they should vote for at a desperate moment for their
city, despite the more familiar solutions competing for
the role. </p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1 dropCaps">T</span><span
class="s1">he first big showdown between Jackson’s top
mayoral candidates was in March 2017—two months before
the primary election and a year after my initial trip
to Jackson. (Antar had officially announced his
candidacy on May 19, Malcolm X’s birthday, with a
press conference on the steps of Jackson’s City Hall,
where the assembled crowd had chanted: “Free the land!
Free the land! Free the land!”) Grace Inspirations
Church, in West Jackson, hosted the forum on a Sunday
evening and the roughly two hundred attendees who
gathered in the sanctuary were still dressed in their
Sunday best. I noticed men in suits with matching ties
and pocket squares, and women in long dresses, a few
in swooping hats. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">It was a
welcome occasion for civic sociability and also for
indulging in some lofty plans to fix Jackson. The
city’s infrastructure problems continued to nose their
way into the lives of every Jacksonian. Many of the
forum’s attendees had come from houses that were under
notices to boil tap water before it was safe to drink;
the next day, city officials would announce that water
in a large swath of the city would be turned off for
forty-eight hours the following weekend in order to
replace pipes in a portion of Jackson’s out-of-date
water distribution system. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">The church’s
pastor, Danny Ray Hollins, opened the forum with a
word of prayer. As it turned out, it was a prayer for
Jackson. “It’s our home,” he said. “It’s a city that
we love—a city with a myriad of issues. Problems.
Problems not brought about as a result of any one man,
or one administration. . . . We have <em>sent out the
call!</em> To those who would be <em>mayor!</em>
And we’ve invited them here—to church.” His tongue
delivered that last word to the room like it was
wrapped in silk. “And we’re here to hear them share
their vision for this city.” </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">The five most
popular candidates among the sixteen running for the
mayor’s seat had been invited to participate in the
forum. All five were Democrats, and all five were
black. On Grace Inspirations’ altar stage, six empty
chairs were arranged in a semicircle. The moderator,
Pastor CJ Rhodes, took a seat toward the center and
called the candidates to the stage one by one. Along
with his brief introductions, he noted each person’s
placement in the polls—Antar was in the lead—until a
woman of grandmotherly age in one of the front pews
called for him to stop it with the polls. “Yes, thank
you, ma’am,” Rhodes said, admonished, and followed her
directive as he welcomed the last three men. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">A poll
released a few days after the debate would confirm
that Antar stood comfortably in first place. His
support was sharply racialized, and despite his
overall favorable numbers, he had garnered a net
negative impression among the white Jacksonians
polled. But the white contingent was small enough and
his favorability among black voters was high enough
that his lead in the race was a stable one. Brad
Chism, a white political analyst in Jackson, declared
that his own polling data indicated it was Antar’s
race to lose.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Antar’s
biggest competition was John Horhn, a veteran state
senator. Horhn had run for mayor twice before, and
both times he failed to garner enough support to
qualify for a runoff. This year, he had refined his
argument. “We’re at a point in our city where we’ve
got to make sure we get it right the next time,” he
said at one point during the forum. “We’re only going
to get one more bite at the apple in my opinion.” I’d
heard people speak with similar finality about Jackson
in recent months (including other references to
near-finished apples). They usually meant the same
thing: If the city’s finances didn’t take a few steps
back from the edge of potential bankruptcy, if crime
didn’t abate and the schools didn’t improve their
outcomes, Jackson was vulnerable to takeover from the
State of Mississippi. Though Horhn presented state
takeover as an implicit threat, he also positioned
some level of help from the state as Jackson’s last
possible saving grace—and himself, with a
twenty-four-year tenure in the Senate, as the one
person who could broker that salvation. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Another close
contender for the likely Democratic primary runoff was
Robert Graham, who spent most of his speaking time on
litanies of his own experience as Hinds County
Supervisor and his thirty-five years as a civilian
employee of the Jackson Police Department. He stressed
his involvement in a deal to bring a Continental tire
plant to the Jackson area, slated to open in 2018 with
twenty-five hundred jobs on offer. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Ronnie Crudup
Jr. was a long shot, in fourth place. He was the only
candidate who didn’t register particularly strong
opinions among those polled, in a positive or negative
direction. His father, Bishop Ronnie Crudup Sr., is
senior pastor of a church serving over three thousand
in South Jackson. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Incumbent
mayor Tony Yarber was a distant fifth in the polls,
the only candidate in the top five with a net negative
favorability rating, at -39.2 percent. A perception of
mismanagement along with a spate of sexual harassment
cases had pulled his reputation into a sharp downward
plunge over the course of his three years in office.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">In one of his
first questions to Antar, Rhodes bored directly into
the discomfort that plenty of Jacksonians still felt
about the Lumumbas, pointing to the history of the
PG-RNA and the sense that Antar’s platform had been
born out of some sort of bigger plan—or “agenda,” as
the more suspicious tended to put it. “One of the
concerns that came up in the last election,” Rhodes
said, his eyes on Antar, “was about whether or not,
for lack of a better way of saying it, Antar Lumumba
is going to be an anti-white mayor, and push away
white folks, and gonna bring in nationalists, and it’s
going to be <em>Jafrica</em> and all these kinds of
things.” Some murmuring and laughter broke out around
the room. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">“I appreciate
you asking that question, Pastor Rhodes,” Lumumba
began. In his job as a criminal defense attorney, he
said, he worked with many people who don’t look like
him, and had plenty of success. But his voice was
climbing stairs, building up to something higher.
“I’ve been labeled as a radical,” he continued. “My
father was labeled as a radical. You were told that he
would divide the city and what was demonstrated was
something entirely different.” Antar would tell me
later that he and the MXGM members helping to run the
campaign had made the concerted decision to embrace
the loaded “radical” descriptor that had been hurled
at his father and at him in his previous campaign. His
pace quickened a few steps, riding on its own
momentum. “Honestly, when people call me a radical, I
take it as a badge of honor. Because Martin Luther
King was radical.” Applause spread through the room.
“Medgar Evers was radical.” The applause intensified,
and so did Antar. “Jesus <em>Christ</em> was
radical.” The applause didn’t break, so he spoke
louder to be heard. “The reality is that we have to be
prepared to be as radical as circumstances dictate we
should be. If you look outside these doors and you see
a need for a change, then you should all be radical.”
I heard shouts of “Amen!” He went on, “And the reality
is that we haven’t found ourselves in the condition
we’re in because someone has been too <em>radical</em>
for us.” He inflected these last few words. “I would
argue we haven’t been radical enough.” The applause
carried on like an unbroken wave. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">The audience’s
response made me think about a question that had been
posed during Chokwe Lumumba’s campaign: Was it
possible for a person to be both a revolutionary and a
politician? Throughout the debate, the candidates
piled on the Yarber administration’s apparent inaction
in fixing the streets, and the mayor’s responses
tangled into long paragraphs explaining the technical
details that had complicated the solutions. I found
myself wondering if the mundane, full-time job of
running a city with long-neglected infrastructure
could leave any room for helming a revolution. Because
Chokwe Lumumba’s tenure was so truncated, it remained
an open question. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Still, it was
true that the people in the church that afternoon
became most animated when Antar shifted from the role
of knowledgeable attorney into that of revolutionary.
And he didn’t withhold his more progressive
ideas—rooted in the Jackson-Kush Plan—for reimagining
how economic revitalization could happen in Jackson.
“Oftentimes we find ourselves engaged in merely a
discussion of how we entice businesses to come here.
We have to also consider where there is a need that we
can fill, where we can develop the businesses
ourselves. And look at <em>cooperative business </em>models
where the people who live in the community own the
business, and the people who work in that business not
only determine what their labor will be, but they have
a say-so in what the fruits of the labor will be.”</span></p>
<p>In addition to being central to the PG-RNA’s
new-society ideal, cooperatives had been an important
part of other visions for true racial equality in the
state. In 1969, in Sunflower County, Mississippi, the
voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer helped develop
the Freedom Farm Cooperative—the namesake of the beds
behind Cooperation Jackson. In her 2014 book <em>Collective
Courage: A History of African American Cooperative
Economic Thought and Practice, </em>Jessica Gordon
Nembhard, a political economist who researches
African-American collective economies, argues that
co-ops have existed as a necessary counterweight to this
country’s economic violence against black communities
from the beginning of slavery here. “There seems to be
no period in U.S. history where African Americans were
not involved in economic cooperation of some type,” she
writes. Cooperatives, though never a critical mass, have
offered an alternate mindset, a means of insulating the
economic participation of a group pushed out of the
dominant system. </p>
<p><span class="s1">Cooperatives are a main tenet of the
Jackson-Kush Plan. The framers of this new-society
experiment viewed them as a way to help people unlearn
the lessons their economy taught them and train them
to be democratic in every aspect of their lives. They
knew that the individual, foundational work of
building buy-in for a whole new type of economy would
be even harder than winning an election.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"><span class="dropCaps">A</span> </span><span
class="s1">few days after the mayoral forum at Grace
Inspirations Church, I stopped by the Lumumba Center
for a class. It was a Wednesday at noon, just in time
for that week’s installment of the Economic Democracy
Learning Series, led by Kali Akuno. In a large room
with a wall of street-facing windows, eight folding
tables were arranged in a rectangle. The ten or so
attendees took their seats around it with the ease of
people who had done this many times before. Saki sat
at the front of the room next to Kali, who clicked
final preparations into his laptop. Slides lit up a
projector screen on the wall behind him as students
unwrapped sandwiches, flipped open Styrofoam
containers of chicken wings, and forked fruit salad
out of Tupperware.</span></p>
<p>In Kali’s mind, Cooperation Jackson is an experiment;
his hypothesis is that living and working in fully
democratic communities will change the people involved.
One of the experiment’s first steps, he believes, is for
people to realize how capitalism has shaped them and to
recognize how alternatives could refresh their
perspectives. </p>
<p>He picked up on this week’s slide and began. The class
was continuing its guided tour through Marx’s <em>Capital</em>.
Under discussion today was Marx’s concept of
exchange-value. Kali asked if someone would volunteer to
read the first slide. After a silence, a woman wearing a
green cloth headband over graying dreadlocks and strings
of beads around her neck complied. She read:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><span class="s1"><em>The exchange value of a
commodity is what one receives in exchange for
this commodity.</em></span></p>
<p><span class="s1"><em>Statement A: One chair is the
exchange-value of two pairs of pants.</em></span></p>
<p><span class="s1"><em>Statement B: Two pairs of pants
are the exchange-value of one chair. </em></span></p>
</blockquote>
<p><span class="s1"><em></em></span><span class="s1">When
she had finished reading, her brow didn’t unfurrow and
her mouth kept silently working. Kali waited. “How
will we, in this new environment we’re creating,
fairly determine exchange-value?” the woman asked. She
pointed to the woman next to her, half of a young
white couple dividing their attention between the
front of the classroom and their two small children
playing behind them. The young woman was a skilled
seamstress. If a seamstress has been developing her
skill for twenty years, the woman in the green
headband reasoned, a pair of pants she produces would
be worth more than one chair, wouldn’t it? </span></p>
<p>Kali shook his head and turned the question back to
her. “Is that just profit in your thinking?” </p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">She considered
this and eventually nodded once, her brow still
knitted.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Kali continued
through the slides. Before moving to Jackson, Kali had
worked as a high school teacher and he knew when to
slow down, reword something, and expand where it might
help. The overriding question he returned to again and
again, in different forms, was: See how this
capitalist economic system has shaped you when you
weren’t looking? </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">As the class
passed its second hour, eyes fell downward. I noticed
a glow of cell phones nestled in many laps. It was a
clear, sunny day, but through the thick sheets of
adhesive window tint lining the windows onto Capitol
Street, the view of outside was abstracted, a soupy
blue. After an afternoon with this view, the laborious
deconstruction of exchange-value made the city outside
seem blank and theoretical—like an empty place
requesting something to be built in it.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Toward the end
of the three-hour class, Kali paused and looked
around, noting the man next to me who’d finished his
chicken wings and lain his head on the table. Kali
acknowledged the denseness of the material and
admitted that it had taken him three passes through <em>Capital</em>
before he really started to grasp it. He recited the
socialist dictum stripped down to its simplest
articulation: From each according to their ability, to
each according to their need. “No democracy has
achieved that yet,” he added. It was clear that he
didn’t share this anecdote to caution anyone in the
room against working toward the achievement. After
all, he labored for three hours every Wednesday
afternoon to make his lessons understood. The implicit
challenge was to figure out a way to do what no one
else had done.</span></p>
<p>Kali had been brought up in Los Angeles during the
tumultuous 1970s and ’80s. His parents were active in
the black power movement, and he grew up going to the
movement’s meetings and reading its literature. Most of
his parents’ peers ascribed to a Marxist-socialist
orientation. As a young boy, Kali told his mother, in
all earnestness, that he wanted to know everything. He
read hungrily, and as a teenager he particularly looked
forward to packages in the mail from an uncle who wrote
for black newspapers and music journals in Toronto. In
these publications, he read about people like Maurice
Bishop and groups like the People’s Revolutionary
Government of Grenada. His political education came,
too, from what was happening around him in L.A. Starting
from the early eighties, the crack epidemic pummeled
Kali’s neighborhood with a force he didn’t understand.
It hit most of the families in his neighborhood, and
eventually his own, and its effects were devastating.
When Kali saw how, in preparation for the 1984 Olympics,
the city cleaned up much of the drug trade, he concluded
that they could have stopped the destruction of his
community much earlier and had chosen not to. He began
to notice a ruthlessness in the various systems around
him. </p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Kali joined
MXGM’s Los Angeles chapter in 1996, just six years
after Lumumba had cofounded it. By the time the
organization began to discuss plans to stage an
experiment in Mississippi, he was MXGM’s national
organizer. He moved to Jackson permanently in 2013 to
devote his life to the Jackson-Kush Plan. He would go
on to serve in Chokwe Lumumba’s administration as its
Director of Special Projects and External Funding.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Talking with
Kali after the Economic Democracy class, I learned
that his thinking has shifted in subtle ways over the
last decade, as Jackson’s economic and infrastructure
problems have continued to mount. He’s seen that
elections can, in his opinion, become a distraction
from the real work of transforming society. “I’m sure
Antar doesn’t want to be mayor forever,” he said. “So
what are we setting up for beyond that? And beyond
that, in my mind, is not just making sure we have
someone in office for the next fifty years. If that’s
the best we can do, then we’ve failed, in my opinion.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">“Because I
think we’re ultimately trying to get to the point
where we’ve changed the rules of society—both formally
and informally—where we’ve created a more democratic
society, a more equitable society. And if there’s a
fully engaged citizenry, then the need for a city
council and a mayor starts to become fairly moot.”</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">I asked him
what the movement stood to gain if Antar were indeed
elected mayor in the fast-approaching election. After
all, MXGM had decided as a body to run Antar as the
face of the Jackson-Kush Plan. He pushed back in the
metal folding chair and leaned his wide upper body
onto the table. “That is a good question,” he said.
His head rested heavily in his hand, and his knee
bobbed as he thought. “Woo. That’s a good question.” I
realized I’d expected he’d have his thoughts on the
topic crafted and close at hand, given his involvement
both in the campaign and in the building of the
Jackson-Kush Plan. He sighed. “Honestly,” he admitted,
“I’m a minority voice who didn’t want Antar to run
this time.” </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Kali’s
conception of a successful realization of the plan
goes far beyond four years of Antar in the mayor’s
office. He imagines People’s Assemblies—the bodies
open to all citizens that drive self-government and
undergird the fully democratic society described in
the Jackson-Kush Plan—coming together to, for example,
defy the state’s orders against sanctuary cities for
undocumented immigrants, and training people in
Jackson to protect immigrants from ICE raids. He
imagines the creation of an alternative currency in
Jackson, so that the city government could use the
U.S. dollar to pay off its debts and pay city workers
part of their salaries in a “soft” currency to use at
the corner grocery. For each part of this vision, the
stakes would rise higher with Antar’s election. I had
figured that two subsequent electoral losses might
have been a fatal blow to the current version of the
Jackson-Kush Plan. But now I saw that, if Antar did
win, it would be the next four years that would become
the high-stakes last chance. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Kali then
ticked off Jackson’s problems and listed the municipal
operations facing privatization or takeover by the
state: the water system, the schools, the whole of
downtown. “We’re setting ourselves up to administer
the most severe austerity the city’s seen probably
since the Civil War. . . . We have to be clear that if
we fail, that’s not just MXGM failing, or Chokwe Antar
failing. That’s a failure for the left in this
country.”</span></p>
<p><span class="s1">K</span><span class="s1">ali’s fears
are not without precedent. In a 1992 article, “Black
Mayors: A Historical Assessment,” historian Roger
Biles explained a trend: Simultaneous with the
changing laws and demographic shifts that finally made
possible the election of black mayors in major cities
around the United States, white flight and the decline
of industry were draining those cities’ wealth and
resources. These factors conspired to make black
mayoral victories, as Biles quotes from H. Paul
Friesema, “a hollow prize.” Biles writes:</span></p>
<blockquote>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">As the tax
base available to big city governments shrank, the
same could not be said of the demand for public
services. Rising costs for welfare, law enforcement,
and maintenance of an aging infrastructure
exacerbated the problems awaiting neophyte black
mayors. An embattled Kenneth Gibson, mayor of
Newark, concluded resignedly: “Progress is
maintaining the status quo.”</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Biles, who is
completing a book on Harold Washington, the first
black mayor of Chicago, told me that the hollow-prize
problem persists to this day. The problem is most
pointedly felt, he observed, by leaders who come into
the mayor’s office on a wave of expectations that are,
perhaps, “unrealistically high.” </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s3">During Chokwe
Lumumba’s truncated term, the combination of Jackson’s
tight municipal resources and massively expensive
problems created rifts within his administration. The
Environmental Protection Agency had served the city
with a consent decree in 2012 to force it to fix the
antiquated sewage system that was spilling into the
Pearl River. A 2013 estimate put the cost of the
infrastructure fix at around $1 billion. Infighting
festered over how to raise the revenue. Eventually,
the city increased water rates and passed a 1 percent
sales tax—a regressive tax, in that it could burden
low-income Jacksonians more than high-income earners.
In a report reflecting on Chokwe’s eight-month tenure,
Kali wrote: “The most critical lesson we learned is
that our practice has to be as sound as our theory.
While in office, our practice of governance did not
always equate to our previous work of building an
alternative base of political power rooted in a
democratic mass movement.” The very real problem of
insufficient resources highlighted a central rub
inherent in the Lumumba administration: Were they
aiming to capably govern a city, or to altogether
reimagine it? Insiders didn’t agree on the answer.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1 dropCaps">I</span><span class="s1">n
the week leading up to the primary election on
Tuesday, May 2, Jackson was crackling with the full
focus of the competing campaigns. Yard signs bearing
the faces of the main candidates—Lumumba, Horhn,
Graham, and Yarber—clustered in abandoned lots like
weeds competing for sunlight. It was the primary, not
the general election in early June, that came
freighted with the suspense of determining the city’s
next mayor. In the thoroughly blue city, a Democratic
candidate was guaranteed to win the final race, and
the only serious contenders fell on that side of the
ballot. Antar ran in a crowded field of nine
Democratic candidates, and pollster Brad Chism was
certain that their support would be too divided for
any one person to earn more than 50 percent of the
vote. A runoff between the two top Democratic
candidates was all but inevitable. By the weekend the
local papers had unveiled their endorsements like the
sharing of long-guarded secrets. All three
publications endorsed Lumumba, even the long-running,
conservative-leaning daily the <em>Clarion-Ledger</em>. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s3">On Saturday
morning, I stopped by Cooperation Jackson, where I
found Brandon King </span><span class="s1">in the
backyard, working on Freedom Farms. From the gate, I
saw him near the far edge of the fence, plunging a hoe
into the ground, alone. When he noticed me
approaching, he rested his hoe in the soil and smiled
a hello. He was dressed like a farmer, but one who had
gone to art school. Layers of necklaces strung on
leather bands rested their shells and stones above his
sternum, and a solid tattoo band wrapped around his
left arm, opening into the shape of a star on his
elbow. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">The day hadn’t
yet unleashed its full heat, but Brandon was sweating
from the work of turning a grassy patch into a new
bed. He indicated another fifteen feet along the fence
and told me it would be a bed for sweet peas. In the
grass beside us lay a coil of chain-link fencing that
he planned to install against the wooden fence so the
pea shoots could climb and curl their way up toward
the sun.</span></p>
<p>“How’s it going?” I asked, lifting my hands to
indicate, how’s it <em>all </em>going—the farming, but
also the mounting of the new society experiment which
had brought him here to Jackson. Brandon grabbed the
hoe, lifted it high, and drove it down into the soil. He
knew what I meant, and he answered for all of it. “Oh,
you know me!” He let out a laugh, tinged with
exasperation. “I’m impatient.” </p>
<p><span class="s1">In our conversations over the previous
year, Brandon had never struck me as impatient. His
voice had a soft edge of something like shyness, and
he always revealed a willingness to be deeply
introspective and an ability to rest in the
contradictions he noticed in himself, in other people,
and in circumstances. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Brandon had
lived in New York before moving south, and he had
moved to Jackson to live in the City of the Future
that Chokwe Lumumba had described. He’d never stopped
wanting to live in that place. Here in the backyard,
perspiring as he lifted and pulled his hoe, he was
still working toward it.</span></p>
<p><span class="s3">Brandon’s mother was one of the first
black women to work as a machinist in the Norfolk
Naval Shipyard near Chesapeake, Virginia, the town
where Brandon and his brothers had grown up. She
frequently confronted racism and sexism on the job. At
home, she introduced her children to radical black
thinkers like Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey. When
Brandon was sixteen, she put down those books in favor
of a Bible and became a devout Christian. He picked up
her books and fell deeper into them. He respected his
mother, but he didn’t want her life. The nine-to-five
grind was anathema to him. In every conversation I had
with Brandon, he repeated his insistence that he hopes
to never become a “status quo manager,” like an
incantation that can keep that life away. He fears the
numbness, the existential stuckness—and the resigned
acceptance of society the way it is</span></p>
<p>During college—Brandon studied sociology and art at
Hampton University in Virginia—he took two trips to New
Orleans to provide support for the survivors of
Hurricane Katrina. While there, he met members of the
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. After graduating, he
moved to New York to work as a union organizer and DJ,
and he joined the local MXGM chapter. In the three years
since Brandon had moved to Mississippi, the Jackson-Kush
Plan had seen some progress—in the founding of
Cooperation Jackson, for example, and the securing of
the land on which we stood—but it had also slammed up
against obstacles. Nubia’s Place had struggled to obtain
the food license necessary to serve food out of its
space in the former daycare center, though it had been
catering for local organizations and events for two
years. City worker furloughs, instituted under Mayor
Yarber to save the city from bankruptcy, have made for a
lean city staff and the resulting interminable wait
times for securing business licenses.</p>
<p><span class="s1">In December 2016, Brandon, Kali, Saki,
Antar, and Rukia traveled to Barcelona to observe, in
a more fully developed form, elements of the society
they were working toward in Jackson. Barcelona’s
deputy mayor took them on a tour of the city’s
cooperatives, including stops at a cooperatively owned
bar and a cooperatively owned bookstore. They also
visited the Green Fab Lab, a place to tinker and
research new ways to produce renewable energy and use
3-D printers, laser cutters, and other machines to
make all manner of stuff. It was a chance for Brandon
and the others to see an on-the-ground, functioning
version of some of the plans struggling to move past
dream-stage in Jackson.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">A boarded-up
building across the street from the Lumumba Center was
meant to be the location of Jackson’s own Fabrication
Laboratory, where collectively owned 3-D printers and
other machines would turn out items the community
needs: everything from car chassis, piping, copper
wire, and insulation for houses, to dishware and
utensils for Nubia’s Place. But Cooperation Jackson’s
purchase of the building was being held back by legal
snafus, and the organization was struggling to raise
the money for the 3-D printer and other technology. A
fifteen-minute walk away on Ewing Street, Cooperation
Jackson owned a grassy lot where Brandon pictured an
affordable eco-village, with housing built in the Fab
Lab and a collection of cooperatively tended farms.
The first step was establishing the urban farm that
would provide food to residents. But that work had
been held back, too. The empty lot had long been used
as a dumping ground, and the soil was poisoned with
the old paint, garbage, and construction debris of the
society Brandon is trying to move away from.</span> </p>
<p><span class="s4">On the eve of Jackson’s mayoral
primary, Brandon was suffering these various mundane
hindrances pointedly. It was all just moving so
slowly, and the new society they were building wasn’t
feeling sufficiently set apart from the old one. “I
didn’t move here to help build a bunch of big
cooperative businesses,” he said. “When are we going
to break off and do our own thing?” He leaned on his
hoe, and the dreams tumbled from him: When will we be
making and distributing products from the Fab Lab?
When will we have a self-feeding network of
cooperatives? When will we have an alternative
currency mediating our new economy? </span></p>
<p><span class="s4"></span><span class="s1">I told Brandon
I’d help with the farming while we talked, and he
grabbed another hoe. I asked if he’d been helping with
Antar’s campaign. A bit, he said. “But I’m not going
to vote,” he added. When I didn’t hide my surprise, he
explained that he didn’t want to participate in what
he considered to be an “illegitimate system.” While
Kali was anxious about the pressure the election could
impose, Brandon was skeptical of the entire
enterprise. A system relying on People’s Assemblies to
select the next mayor, he offered, would do a better
job of bringing more voices and perspectives into the
democratic process. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">A few hours
later, we put away the gardening equipment and shifted
to loading subwoofers, folding tables, and eight
crates full of records into Brandon’s pickup truck. He
had been asked to DJ a community cookout at Antar’s
campaign headquarters that afternoon. The parking lot
in front of the A&D Tax Services office that
housed the campaign’s daily operations was taken over
by a bouncy castle, grills, and tables of food. Antar
and Ebony moved among their friends and supporters,
laughing and teasing. They seemed eager and excited
about the potential that the next few days would usher
in. Under fast-moving clouds, dozens of Jacksonians
mingled in the lot, holding their plates of grilled
meat and fresh fruit, or they sat in folding chairs
along the building’s front windows. I watched people
form lines to do the Cha Cha Slide in front of the
table where Brandon stood, lining up his tracks. It
wasn’t the work of new-society building, but it might
turn out to be related.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1 dropCaps">T</span><span class="s1">hree
days later, Chokwe Antar won ten thousand more votes
in the primary than his father had. His 55 percent
support in the Democratic primary meant there was no
need for a runoff in a Jackson mayoral race for the
first time in twelve years. In the general election
the next month, he secured 93 percent of voters’
support.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Around the
country, pockets of attention snapped toward this
decisive win of the young mayoral candidate running on
a plan to establish a society with socialist roots in
the Deep South. Antar’s landslide primary win came on
the heels of President Trump’s one-hundred-day mark. A
post-election analysis released by Millsaps College
and Chism Strategies noted that the “Trump Factor”
might have helped mushroom support for Antar late in
the race: “To the extent undecided voters wanted to
express a protest vote against the status quo, Lumumba
was that vessel.” </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Antar
indicated on a national stage a willingness to accept
the role when, in early June, he appeared as a speaker
at the People’s Summit in Chicago alongside Bernie
Sanders, author Naomi Klein, and environmental
activist Bill McKibben. With his speech, Antar made
headlines in Jackson and in a smattering of national
publications by declaring that his administration
would make the capital of Mississippi “the most
radical city on the planet.” He called for other
cities to join him, name-checking Washington, D.C.;
Gary, Indiana; and Chicago.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">Inauguration
Day was July 3, a hot and sunny Monday in Jackson.
Museums and city offices were closed for Independence
Day. The people who streamed into one of downtown’s
newest structures, the hulking Jackson Convention
Complex, for the swearing-in ceremony wore
lumumba-for-mayor t-shirts, suits, dashikis, and
sundresses. After he had lain his hand on a Bible and
sworn to protect the constitutions of the United
States and Mississippi, Chokwe Antar Lumumba took to
the podium and asked the hundreds of Jacksonians
present to look past the inevitability of the present
society with him.</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">“This is the
building of the <em>new</em> society,” he said,
adding later: “For so long Mississippi has been known
as the symbol of limits. It has been known as a haven
for oppression, for some of the most horrible
suffering in the history of the world. So it is only
fitting that we should become the leaders of that
change.”</span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1"> The inaugural
address was an opportunity to posit a possible future,
and Antar embraced it. What would happen next with
Jackson’s roads and water systems, with the People’s
Assemblies, with the cooperatives and the Fab Lab,
wasn’t certain. But on this Inauguration Day just
before Independence Day, Antar was helping a city and
a country to see past the present, and that, in
itself, was radical. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">“Free the
land!” he called out three times as he concluded his
address, raising his right fist high above the rose
boutonniere pinned to his lapel. </span></p>
<p><span class="s1"></span><span class="s1">“Free the
land!” the city of Jackson called back to him. </span></p>
<hr>
<p><em></em><span class="s1"><em></em></span></p>
<br>
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