I just don’t see anything to be substituted for having people understand their position and understand their potential power and how to use it.
In October 2016 a friend and I went to get some barbecue in Ferguson, Missouri. It was the day after the St. Louis presidential debate—one of the most bizarre encounters I’d ever witnessed. In the wake of the Access Hollywood tape, on which Trump is heard boasting of his success as a sexual predator thanks to his celebrity and his willingness to “grab ’em by the pussy,” his campaign moved to neutralize the issue by inviting three women who’d made allegations against Bill Clinton, including Juanita Broaddrick, who claims the former president raped her back when he was running for governor of Arkansas, to the debate, where they were seated in the front row. As Trump stalked Clinton around the stage at Washington University, two dispiriting thoughts occurred to me almost simultaneously. The first was that Trump was incredibly fortunate to be running against the one candidate least able—precisely because of the way she’d defended her husband—to use Trump’s sexual history against him. The second was that even though we were only a few miles from the spot where an unarmed African American teenager named Michael Brown had been shot and killed by the police, this debate, like all the previous debates I’d attended, was not going to confront the topic of race.
The killing of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, and the subsequent decision by St. Louis county and federal authorities not to prosecute Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who fired six bullets into Brown, a suspect in the robbery of a box of cheap cigars, set off violent protests in Ferguson, a formerly white suburb now with a black majority but where the police force and municipal government remained overwhelmingly white. Brown’s death, along with that of Eric Garner, killed by New York City police after being arrested for selling “loosies” (single cigarettes) in Staten Island, and Sandra Bland, found hanged in a Waller County, Texas, jail after she was pulled over for failure to signal a lane change, had been taken up by Black Lives Matter, the group formed after the 2012 shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin by a Neighborhood Watch volunteer.
In Ferguson and elsewhere Black Lives Matter had shown itself capable of mobilizing an effective, outspoken response. Yet the shootings continued—perhaps because America’s conscience had become calloused, thickened by decades of indifference to the more intractable aspects of racial injustice that persisted long after the elimination of de jure segregation. A country more susceptible to appeals to conscience would have responded to the argument for reparations for slavery—a case that was in my view morally unassailable, regardless of the practical difficulties, and historically as strong as any appeal for restorative justice—with something other than an ill-tempered and impatient shrug of the shoulders. In North Carolina the Rev. William Barber’s “Moral Mondays”—weekly demonstrations at the state capitol protesting the Tea Party–dominated legislature’s assault on the poor and minorities—had impacted the 2016 governor’s race, helping defeat the Republican incumbent. But Barber’s effort to take up the banner of the Poor People’s Campaign—Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final effort to build a populist movement uniting poor whites and blacks—was struggling to gain traction.
So I went to Ferguson, to see what had changed—and what hadn’t. It wasn’t a very original move—as I realized when, entering J & C BBQ and Blues, I recognized New Jersey senator Cory Booker leaving with his entourage. Still, finding myself in St. Louis it seemed like a kind of obligation. The co-owner, Jerome Jenkins, said the restaurant had twenty-six of its twenty-seven windows broken in the disturbances. But just a few doors farther down South Florissant Road, at Cathy’s Kitchen (a more upscale spot named for his wife, who does the cooking), after a single window was broken protesters had linked arms to prevent further damage. A born entrepreneur, Jenkins had expansive plans. But as he described trying to grow his business in an area where blacks had been systematically denied political agency for decades, he didn’t bother to disguise his bitterness. “Nothing here has really changed,” he said, evincing little faith in protest—or elected officials.
But then he, like the rest of us, had seen the way America had seized upon the election of Barak Obama as the occasion for countless calls to “move on” from race. As if transcending our own history was ever going to be that easy.
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” W. E. B. Du Bois had written. In the twenty-first century, race remains the central fissure in American life. For all his good intentions, Bernie Sanders’s inability to reach across racial lines doomed his candidacy. Not, as some of his young white supporters insisted with impervious certainty, because the older black voters who resisted the Vermont senator’s call for a political revolution were uninformed—or hadn’t been sufficiently attentive to his rhetoric. But because his own tenacious focus on economic inequality, and his reluctance to engage with race—a reluctance that only diminished following a confrontation with protesters from Black Lives Matter—showed he still didn’t fully appreciate the scale or the nature of the problem.
Older black voters had seen white liberals come and go, and while it was arguably perverse that Hillary Clinton, whose husband’s presidency ushered in the era of mass incarceration for young black men, should be the beneficiary of that skepticism, that didn’t excuse Sanders from the obligation to earn a trust he seemed to feel already entitled to claim.
African Americans—especially African American women—had long been the Democratic Party’s most dependable voters. Yet ever since 1964, when the party convention refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in place of that state’s official all-white delegation (all of whom were opposed to President Lyndon Johnson’s newly passed Civil Rights Act, and most of whom had already endorsed his opponent, Republican Barry Goldwater), such loyalty had seen scant repayment. Fannie Lou Hamer, who’d been beaten and jailed for trying to register voters, was pushed to the side in a sordid maneuver that saw the MFDP offered two seats as “guests” while the official delegation kept the votes. Despite pressure from white allies such as Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers, and Hubert Humphrey—concerned that continued fighting might endanger his nomination as vice president—the MFDP rejected the deal.
Because it wasn’t just about representation. It was about power. Frederick Douglass observed long ago that “power concedes nothing without a demand.” As a white man, I’d found that note of demand uncomfortable to listen to. And it was always tempting to think that maybe there was another way—a cure for America’s long history of racial oppression that didn’t inconvenience anyone very much. That had been a part of Obama’s appeal—at least to white voters—and was, I suspected, a considerable element in Booker’s popularity among the same group.
Wary of my own bad faith as much as anything else, I resolved to try to avoid comforting solutions. Even so, when Stacy Abrams, an African American woman with impeccable progressive credentials, announced she was running for governor of Georgia in 2018, I was intrigued. Instead of campaigning as a moderate—as Doug Wilder had already done in Virginia—Abrams refused to water down her message to appeal to conservative voters, or Republicans offended by Donald Trump’s manners. Yet the strikingly charismatic Abrams also seemed to base her candidacy on the assumption that, at least in Georgia, the Rising American Electorate of minorities, millennials, and unmarried women had arrived and would be sufficient to elect her.
Perhaps it would. Running a smart populist campaign Abrams won a stunning primary victory over a white, centrist opponent. And the symbolic importance of electing an African American woman in the heart of the old Confederacy was undeniable. Yet I knew that the very possibility of such a thing happening meant that Georgia was not the place I needed to go.
Instead I went to Mississippi—a state that, since slavery, has always been the hardest place. A state where, a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, genuine equality between the races—equality of power—remains the radical idea it has always been. The challenge is not just to demand an end to the wholesale murder of black youth—though that of course is essential. Nor would it be enough to gain elective office—though that, too, is necessary. The challenge is to keep racial justice where it belongs—at the center of any movement for social change—and to move from protest to power. If the stirrings in Georgia and North Carolina are to be sustained, they’ll eventually have to be sustained here. And if those efforts fall short, they’ll fall short here.
And so it is good to remind ourselves how things here once stood. On July 2, 1949, Malcolm Wright, a Mississippi tenant farmer, was driving his wife and children to town in their mule-drawn wagon when three white men in a Ford truck, enraged because they had to slow down to pass on the narrow road, pulled Wright from his seat and beat him to death with a bumper jack in front of his family. Well known in the area to both blacks and whites (Wright’s father was white, as were his two half-brothers), Wright was exceptional only in that his killers, who’d turned themselves in to the local deputy sheriff, were arrested and charged with murder. They were speedily acquitted by an all-white jury.
On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, was kidnapped, mutilated, and murdered for the alleged crime of whistling at a white woman (though a half century later the woman, Carolyn Bryant, admitted she’d fabricated her account). Despite testimony from witnesses to the abduction—who’d been convinced to come forward by Medgar Evers, Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP—it took the all-white jury little more than an hour to acquit Roy Bryant and his friend J. W. Milam.
Evers himself, a World War II veteran who’d fought in both France and Germany, was shot in the back in the driveway of his own home in Jackson on June 12, 1963, by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens’ Council. De La Beckwith, too, was set free after all-white juries deadlocked twice. Twenty years later, prompted in part by Myrlie Evers, who pressed authorities to reopen her husband’s case when new evidence surfaced of jury tampering by the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a state agency, De La Beckwith was brought to trial again in 1994 and finally convicted of first-degree murder.
“This is where Medgar fell,” said Frank Figgers, as we pulled up in front of a tan brick and pale green bungalow. I’d met Figgers in the local NAACP office. A fourth-generation Jacksonian who’d long been active in “the movement,” he’d offered to give me a sense of the city’s racial geography. “See the way the houses here don’t have sidewalks? That’s how you know this was a black area,” he said. A minute later, and a block away, we pulled over again; the lawns were all bounded by a neat ribbon of concrete. “This is where the shooter was. In 1963, white folks lived in all these houses.”
By now the white folks have mostly left. In 1960, before the Freedom Riders arrived, Jackson was 65 percent white. (In May 1961, a group of Freedom Riders who tried to integrate the restrooms at the bus terminal in Jackson were arrested, but—under the terms of a secret deal between Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Senator James Eastland—not beaten. Instead they spent the next two months locked up on death row in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.) In 1970, when police fired on students protesting the Vietnam War at Jackson State, killing two of them, whites made up 60 percent of the city. Even in 1980 Jackson was still more than halfwhite. But once it tipped, whites fled in droves. In the last decade of the millennium Jackson lost thirty-five thousand whites—mostly to the suburbs of nearby Rankin or Madison Counties, which have both nearly doubled in population over the last thirty years. Middle-class and wealthy blacks were leaving, too. By 1997, when the city elected its first black mayor, Jackson was over two-thirds black. Twenty years later that figure is closer to 80 percent.
I’d come to Jackson to see the new mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba. We’d spoken briefly at the People’s Summit in Chicago—a June gathering of the Bernie Sanders tribes, who’d shouted and stamped their feet when Lumumba said he wanted to make Jackson “the most radical city on the planet.” I wanted to find out what he meant. And to see what he was up against.
Barack Obama’s presidency allowed his white supporters to imagine the country had transcended race—an illusion whose cruelty was only revealed on November 9, 2016. Yet conventional wisdom said there was no other way. For decades white liberals—usually men—have argued that any form of “identity politics,” whether based on race or gender or ethnicity, is always divisive, always an impediment to progressive action on the economic issues fundamental to any fight for social justice. Lumumba, whose parents were both black nationalists, came out of a very different tradition. I also wanted to find out what impact the mayor’s background had on his politics.
The first thing I see when I walk into the mayor’s office here is an easel with an artist’s rendering of a movie theater. At one time this city had nearly a dozen, including the Alamo, a Streamline gem on Farish Street, the center of segregated Jackson’s black business district, where a diet of Westerns and second-run features once shared the stage with B. B. King, Louis Jordan, and Nat King Cole. But Farish Street today is deserted, and Jackson—the capital of Mississippi, with a population roughly the size of Fort Lauderdale or Providence—has not a single cinema inside the city limits.
“Most people don’t see the value in what you’re trying to build until you build it. Once you build it, then people see the value in it.” Tall and slender, with a neatly trimmed beard, the mayor explains that while previous administrations have tried, and failed, to entice the national cinema chains back to downtown Jackson, he plans to tackle the problem from a different angle.
“My vision is that the city can use its bully pulpit in order to encourage the development of cooperative businesses. So it would be more than just a movie theater. The city wouldn’t own it—it wouldn’t be socialism in that sense. But we can write a check that will go into a nonprofit organization . . . If we just got thirty thousand people—that’s fewer than voted in the primary—to put twenty dollars each, which is less than the cost of taking a date to the movies, you’d have a six-hundred-thousand-dollar initial investment.
“People tend to like to eat before they go the movies, right? So it now becomes a place for someone to invest in a restaurant. Especially franchise restaurants that some people in South Jackson would like to see. And when you have people eating, preparing to watch the movie, sometimes they like to do a little shopping . . .”
When I tease the mayor about trying to build socialism in one city, he laughs, then comes back with: “I recently had the opportunity to go to Barcelona and talk with the mayor there about the cooperative businesses that they’ve developed over time.” FC Barcelona, as every soccer fan knows, is owned and operated by its supporters. It also happens to be one of the most valuable and successful sports franchises in the world.
“I actually played soccer,” he continues. “I was a fat kid. My father put me in soccer to run and to work out. They were like, ‘He takes up a lot of space. We’re going to put him in goal.’ I was good at it, but I never liked it.”
Lumumba tells me he’s more of an American football fan. His political inspiration, too, lies a lot closer to home. “Cooperatives are not a new idea. Fannie Lou Hamer [a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activist who went on to help found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party] used to talk about cooperative businesses, cooperative farms, as one of the ways poor people could pool their resources to further their goals. And when you look at the United States, Ace Hardware is a cooperative. Land O’Lakes Butter is a cooperative. And what’s the greatest community-owned cooperative business? The Green Bay Packers!”
Green Bay, Wisconsin, Lumumba points out, is only two-thirds the size of Jackson. “So my view is that if the city of Green Bay can figure out how to own their own professional football team, we can figure out how to own a movie theater!”
Assuming he gets his movie theater, what would “the most radical city on the planet” look like in ten years? “In ten years, what we should see is a city that was not only able to correct its ills, but one that could serve as a model for other cities—by abandoning the traditional model of how you develop a city.”
Jackson has many of the same resources that have allowed northern cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland to reinvent themselves. Besides the State of Mississippi—the city’s largest employer—Jackson is home to several major hospitals, and a half-dozen colleges, including Jackson State and Tougaloo. Of course, the “eds and meds” magic may not work when the colleges are historically black. Even where it has worked, the price has been displacement—already an issue in Jackson along the “medical corridor” connecting the hospitals to the downtown area.
Nsombi Lambright, a Jackson native who used to be the executive director of the Mississippi ACLU, and currently runs One Voice, a public-policy shop focusing on economic and community development, points to Atlanta as an example of a city where “you have a lot of development. And a lot of displacement.”
“Traditional models speak to creating great edifices and nice new housing and pricing people out,” says Lumumba. “Moving people from one state of misery to the next. Instead of moving people away, we’re going to lift them up. As we look at initiatives, we’re asking, ‘How are we going to create jobs in this process? How are we going to match an underskilled work force with the work that we need to do? How do we turn our crumbling infrastructure into an economic frontier? How do we create incubator funds to support small, homegrown businesses?’
Cooperation Jackson has spent the past four years trying to answer exactly those questions. Kali Akuno, the group’s co-founder, told me that his members have been slowly taking over abandoned buildings and vacant lots, planting fruit and vegetables and creating a community land trust, and opening a catering kitchen to train workers for the restaurant and hospitality sector.
“Black politicians in major cities had to go with the neoliberal program to get resources—which left a lot of folks disillusioned,” says Akuno. He, too, thinks Jackson can become a showcase for a whole new economy, a Mondragon* in Mississippi leading the way out of capitalism and exploitation.
Alongside economic self-sufficiency, the other big idea the mayor keeps coming back to is co-governance. Rukia Lumumba, who co-chaired her brother’s election campaign, explains: “The idea is that the people retain power, which the government responds to. So that the residents control the city. Not my brother sitting on the hill.”
According to both Rukia and her brother, the main vehicle for achieving this is the People’s Assembly. Held every quarter, these assemblies are meant to be opportunities for the community to both critique and inform their elected officials. “Three minutes on a microphone does not make community participation,” the mayor acknowledges. “Instead it should be an information exchange, where we go to the community and say, ‘This is what’s going on. This is what’s going to impact your community.’ And the community can say, ‘This is what is happening on the street. This is what you need to be concerned about.’ It’s literally the process of connecting pothole to pothole to pothole—and community to community.”
“Antar has very radical ambitions,” says Lambright, who like all the mayor’s friends and colleagues refers to him by his middle name. “But he’s not going to get there without the support of the community.”
If the new mayor’s ambitions offer a surprising perspective on politics in the Magnolia State, the obstacles in his path are depressingly familiar: rotting infrastructure, failing schools, and a white power structure that has been hollowing out Jackson for decades.
You don’t have to go very far here to see the scale of the problem: driving south on Mill Street toward my hotel a few blocks from the Governor’s Mansion I counted a dozen potholes in as many minutes, many of them deep enough to swallow an entire wheel—or, in some cases, a small car. In Belhaven, the leafy historically white neighborhood that served as a location for the film The Help, the potholes even have their own Facebook page.118
The same Yazoo clay whose shifts undermine Jackson’s streets also wreaks havoc on the city’s aging water pipes and culverts. Throughout the fall, Jackson residents regularly received “boil notices” from the state health department warning them not to drink the tap water. Back in 2012, Jackson entered into a consent decree with the US Environmental Protection Agency requiring $400 million in repairs to bring the city’s water and sewer systems into compliance with federal standards. According to the EPA, during the previous five years Jackson’s sewers overflowed more than 2,300 times, sending untreated waste into the Pearl River.
Five years—and a 100 percent rise in sewer rates—later, the city is desperately trying to renegotiate both the time allowed for the work to be completed and the method used to finance it.119 At the same time, Rankin County, which has been paying Jackson upward of $4 million a year for access to the city’s water and sewers, recently won permission from the state to build its own treatment plant on the Pearl River.
Though couched in the antiseptic language of suburban growth and urban decay, the dispute is really about race. Phil Bryant, Mississippi’s current governor, is a Tea Party Republican who used to represent Rankin County in the state legislature—whose upper and lower houses both have Republican majorities. In Jackson, as in other cities where a history of racial strife preceded the election of black or Hispanic office holders, the state’s response to the city’s challenges can be summed up in the phrase “We broke it; now you fix it.” It’s a forced choice familiar from Detroit, or Cleveland: raise taxes on already hard-pressed businesses, or preside over continuing decline. What sets Lumumba apart is his refusal to play by the old rules.
Despite Jackson’s status as state capital it has been left to the city’s shrinking tax base to remedy decades of neglect and disinvestment. At the same time the state has not been reluctant to interfere, for example by expanding the number of exemptions to the 1 percent sales tax Jackson voters approved in 2014 to fund infrastructure repairs, cutting the city’s expected proceeds in half. Of the ten members on the commission overseeing how sales tax proceeds are spent, the city gets just three nominees, while the governor, lieutenant governor, and the speaker of the state House of Representatives—all white Republicans—are given one each. The remaining four places are filled by the Jackson Chamber of Commerce.
The state also recently moved to seize control of Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport. Built on land the city bought and annexed in 1963, the airport contributed $3.76 million to the city’s bottom line in 2015. The bill—drafted by a Rankin County state senator who is also a commercial real estate broker, and signed by Bryant in 2016—would give the governor, rather than the city, control over the airport board, while also reserving seats for appointees from Rankin and Madison Counties.
The most bitter, most blatant instance of the way Mississippi’s long history of racial oppression continues to shape events is the battle over Jackson’s public schools. Before the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, Mississippi maintained two separate and decidedly unequal school systems. Not only were black students shunted into ramshackle facilities with inadequate equipment, the Mississippi school calendar was built around the cotton season, with black schools only in session five months of the year.120
Brown was handed down on May 17, 1954—labeled “Black Monday” on the floor of Congress by Rep. John Bell Williams, who fourteen years later was elected governor of Mississippi; the Jackson Daily News called the ruling “the worst thing that has happened in the South since carpetbaggers and scalawags took charge.”121 In December 1954 the Mississippi legislature voted to close the state’s public schools—all of them. That year also saw the founding of the White Citizens’ Council. In addition to pursuing, as the historian Charles M. Payne put it, “the agenda of the Klan with the demeanor of the Rotary Club,” the group opened Council McCluer High in Jackson. Governor Bryant is a Council McCluer graduate.122
Though such schools were privately run, the state provided tuition grants for white students. After the 1965 Civil Rights Act made it clear that de jure segregation was a hopeless cause, Mississippi adopted “freedom of choice”—giving all students the right to choose which school to attend. Black parents who tried to send their children to allwhite schools were no longer arrested. They merely faced the loss of their jobs, cancellation of mortgages or evictions, cross burnings, and other “unofficial” violence—often at the hands of city and state police.
After the Supreme Court ruled—in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969)—that the South had to desegregate its schools without further delay, whites in Mississippi simply abandoned them. In 1963 there were only seventeen private schools in the whole state; by 1970 there were 263. They also did everything they could to avoid paying for public education. The Mississippi Adequate Education Program—a 1997 state law supposedly mandating an “adequate education” for every child in the state—has been fully funded just twice in the past twenty years. In 2015, Proposition 42, a citizen-driven ballot initiative that would have given the courts the right to enforce full funding, was defeated—thanks in part to Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers group that donated $239,000 to the campaign against it.123 Which means that while wealthy areas can make up their funding shortfall out of property taxes, pupils in Jackson schools must continue to do without.
That hasn’t stopped the state from declaring Jackson—the second-largest school system in the state—a failing district. Nor did the fact that a previously agreed Corrective Action Plan still had months to run prevent the state from threatening to take over the Jackson schools. To Nsombi Lambright, the whole process is a sinister farce.
“For years the state has been taking over majority-black districts, which have been given failing ratings while, at the same time, those districts have never received full funding,” she said. “What they want is something like the Recovery School District in Louisiana,” where all the schools in New Orleans were removed from local control and turned into charter schools.
In Mississippi, says Lambright, talk of charter schools, vouchers, and “school choice” all add up to “the same thing”—a covert campaign to rig the system “so white families won’t have to pay private-school fees anymore.”
Edwin Taliaferro’s parents both came to Michigan as part of the Great Migration of blacks leaving the South. Studying at Kalamazoo College in the late 1960s, he’d been involved in protests over the paucity of black faculty members and the absence of African American studies programs. The young activist changed his name to honor the Chokwe people of Central Africa and the murdered president of the Belgian Congo, Patrice Lumumba. He also joined the Republic of New Afrika (RNA).
Chokwe Lumumba senior often told the story of the day—March 28, 1971, more than ten years before his son Antar was born—he was in the lead car of a caravan from Detroit to Bolton, Mississippi, a small town about twenty miles west of Jackson, where the RNA had agreed to buy twenty acres of land. There the group planned to establish a base from which to spread the RNA message that African Americans should resettle in the five Black Belt states of the Deep South—Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina—demand reparations for slavery, and, eventually, petition the United Nations for recognition as an independent country. Lumumba was the RNA’s vice president.
When the procession arrived in Bolton that afternoon they found local, state and federal law enforcement blocking the road. All were armed—as were the RNA. Yet in a turn of events Chokwe Lumumba always recounted with amazement, “that roadblock opened up. Just like the Red Sea,” allowing the planned Land Celebration Day festivities to go ahead.124 Five months later, however, Jackson police, accompanied by the FBI—and with a tank parked outside for emphasis—raided the RNA’s Jackson headquarters, setting off a gun battle that left one officer dead and two more wounded. Chokwe Lumumba, who was away that day, returned to law school in Detroit, where he worked in the public defender’s office, and eventually set up his own practice. His clients were a who’s who of black nationalism, including Geronimo Pratt—a Black Panther who spent twenty-seven years in prison before receiving a $4.5 million settlement for wrongful imprisonment—Assata Shakur, and Tupac Shakur.
The Lumumba children were born in Detroit. “When I was around two years old,” the mayor told me, “my father moved us to Brooklyn. He represented Mutulu Shakur, Tupac Shakur’s stepfather, in the Brink’s truck robbery.” The family lived on DeKalb Avenue, in an apartment so small, recalled Rukia Lumumba, five years older than her brother, “that our dresser had to be in the living room.”
After the Brink’s trial ended, Lumumba told his children, “We have unfinished business in Mississippi,” and the family moved to Jackson. For ten-year-old Rukia the culture shock was immediate. “Jackson then was very segregated. There was an underlying fear that I recognized early on. You couldn’t talk about race, because it was offensive.
“I was used to being in a city where you could see yourself in successful positions. If I went with my father to court in Detroit, the judge looked like me. In New York, I saw people that looked like me in positions of power. Down here they weren’t even going to let my father take the bar exam.”
It took three years for Chokwe Lumumba to be admitted to the Mississippi Bar. Yet the family never felt alone. “My mother really believed in this concept of community as family and family as community. When I was in high school, two of my friends lived with us. So Antar grew up in a house full of teenagers,” she said.
Their mother, Nubia, was a flight attendant for Northwest Airlines. “My mother wore high heels every day. She was very stylish,” says Rukia, adding that “Antar inherited our mother’s fashion sense.” Which she regards as fortunate, since “my father was still wearing an Afro in the 1980s.”
Their mother was also the stricter parent. “If she gave you a dollar, she’d say, ‘I want my dollar back tomorrow.’ My father was more ‘I trust you until you give me a reason not to.’ If he saw someone hitchhiking on the highway he’d stop and pick them up. With me or my brothers in the car. Which would drive my mother crazy!”
Though both siblings grew up steeped in the politics of black nationalism, Rukia insists, “My parents didn’t force anything on us. You could go to the meeting—or not.”
Her brother tells it a bit differently, remembering “Kwame Ture [formerly Stokely Carmichael] coming to the house. When I was in junior high, we had Rosa Parks eat dinner at the house. I used to talk to Tupac about Sega Genesis. Did I make a conscious decision that I’m going to be an activist? I don’t think that I ever felt I had a choice.”
I asked the mayor how his parents described the movement that took up so much of their lives. “I think they saw it as a movement for self-determination. How to have more control over our lives. The goal wasn’t: ‘One day, we’re going to run for political office.’ In fact, you could say that we were kind of antagonistic to the electoral piece.”
Over time, Chokwe Lumumba attracted a critical mass of activists to Jackson, where, working with like-minded locals, he helped found the Malcolm X Grassroots movement. It was the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina—when evacuees in the Mississippi Coast Coliseum were bussed out of state to make room for a Disney On Ice production of Finding Nemo—that prompted Jackson’s activists to reassess their dismissal of electoral politics. After Katrina the group issued something called the Jackson-Kush Plan, named for the ancient African kingdom. In many ways reminiscent of the Republic of New Afrika, it called for “regional self-determination” starting in the eighteen contiguous counties of western Mississippi with majority-black populations. The aim was to develop “a network of people’s assemblies” and eventually move the region to “a broad-based solidarity economy.”125 But there was no mention of secession. And this time the group decided to run candidates for electoral office. In 2009 Chokwe Lumumba was elected to Jackson City Council. Four years later, he became the city’s mayor. Nine months after the election he was dead.
Chokwe Antar Lumumba inherited his father’s name—and his unfinished political agenda. But he did not inherit his office. In the special election to complete Chokwe Lumumba’s term his son, barely five years out of law school, ran—and lost. After three years of an administration dogged by allegations of corruption, with little evidence of improvement either in the city’s infrastructure or in the lives of its citizens, he ran again. Endorsed by both Our Revolution and the Working Families Party—which sent two organizers to Jackson—Lumumba defeated nine challengers in the 2017 Democratic primary, cruising to victory in the general election with 92 percent of the vote.
Given the challenges he faces, Antar Lumumba’s attempt to foster what used to be called “sewer socialism”—the kind of municipal experiments that once flourished from Reading, Pennsylvania, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin—can seem heartbreakingly modest. “People want to know he’s really gonna fix those potholes,” says Safiya Omari, the mayor’s chief of staff—a job she also held under Chokwe Lumumba. But his ultimate goal is the same as his father’s: building power. “We want to make Jackson an example of what government for the people can be.”
Kali Akuno, who served as Chokwe Lumumba’s director of special projects, worries that with so many fires to fight on the horizon—schools, water, infrastructure, the airport—Antar Lumumba’s administration might be too pinned down to ever begin anything radical. Still worse, he says, would be what he calls “the Syriza trap, which is having a left-wing government come in to administer the worst forms of austerity.”
Lumumba clearly recognizes the scale of the challenge. “When people ask me, ‘How do you feel about Donald Trump being president?,’ I tell them, ‘On the Wednesday after the election, I woke up in Mississippi.’ No matter whether Donald Trump is the president or Barack Obama was the president, we’ve always been at the bottom.”
And the implacability of the opposition: “The United States is infected with a disease called racism. The anti-racism movement has had some seminal victories. But you have a racist movement that is fighting at the same time. When we win something, they don’t go home and say, ‘Oh, we lost’ and go to sleep. So we can’t rest.”
Michelle Colon, a clinic escort at Jackson Women’s Health—the last abortion provider left in the state—told me, “We fight like hell in Mississippi. We don’t have the luxury of some other states.” We met in Fondren, Jackson’s tiny hipster district, where she described the state legislature’s continuing efforts to pass a “personhood amendment,” giving legal force to the view that human life begins at conception.
In 2011, Colon said, “we had no money. I traveled the state from one end to the other.” The amendment lost, with 58 percent voting against it—only to have the same bill reappear in 2015. “They haven’t given up,” she says.
Yet she, too, felt a flickering of possibility from the new administration. “Everyone thinks of Mississippi as being so backwards. It would be great if Jackson could be a model.”
Were such hopes more than just wishful thinking? Safiya Omari moved from California to Jackson to join the fight for racial justice, then left a tenured position teaching psychology at Jackson State to work in the city hall that slaves had built—and where their descendants were now in charge. “We want a shot” at fixing Jackson’s schools, she told me. Rukia Lumumba spoke passionately about alternatives to incarceration for young offenders and her own eagerness to “transform the way we deal with justice.” Frank Figgers took me on a tour of abandoned factories to demonstrate the industrial base the city once had—and could have again.
That seemed unlikely. I also wondered whether restoring an industrial economy built on cheap labor was really the high road to economic independence. Yet as I left Jackson I kept thinking about Figgers, a soft-spoken man who’d graduated from Lanier High School in Jackson—as we drove by the school he counted off the many classmates who’d also joined the movement, taking special pride in those who “stayed with the work.” Not at all coincidentally, during the 1980s Lanier had been the proving ground for the Algebra Project, former SNCC field secretary Robert Moses’s pioneering effort to give low-income students and students of color the mathematical literacy they need to exercise full citizenship in a technologically based society. Selling paint and office supplies to support his family, Figgers taught at the Georgetown Liberation School, tutored in the Algebra Project, and served two terms as county election commissioner.
“When black power hit, in 1966, that caught hold of me,” Figgers told me. Like most white liberals, I’d grown up thinking of black power as at best a historical curiosity, at worst a dead end on the road to a post-racial society. Charles Payne writes persuasively about the need to reexamine “the idea that Civil Rights and Black Power represented two fundamentally different movements, the one to be lionized—at least in retrospect—the other vilified.”126 One of the things I learned in Jackson was that in Mississippi it had never been like that.
The civil rights struggle in Mississippi had little to do with the textbook story of Martin Luther King Jr. and other charismatic clergymen enduring beatings and arrests to end segregation. To begin with, it was obvious that segregation in Mississippi had never ended. Nor had local activists completely embraced nonviolence. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed was the title of one Mississippi veteran’s memoir—and an attitude shared widely by those who worked in the state.127
And while there were some Mississippi ministers who welcomed the movement, most were too afraid. Which didn’t surprise Ella Baker, the veteran activist who’d founded SNCC—in part out of frustration with what she saw as an excess of caution by traditional black leaders. “Strong people,” Baker used to say, “don’t need strong leaders.” In Jackson, as elsewhere in Mississippi, the movement instead relied on a partnership between older activists—often either farmers who owned their land, and were harder to intimidate, or skilled workers—and young people who hadn’t yet learned to be afraid. Like Hollis Watkins. As a seventeen-year-old high school student Watkins had been recruited by Medgar Evers to join the NAACP Youth Chapter. Two years later, Watkins came to a meeting above a supermarket in Macomb where he thought Martin Luther King would be speaking. Instead he met Robert Moses, and became one of the first Mississippians to join SNCC.
His memoir, Brother Hollis, is a bracing corrective to anyone who believes that persuading white college students to come south for a “Freedom Summer” was the secret of SNCC’s success. “The term ‘black power’ was as much a question as a declaration,” writes Watkins. “Most people don’t realize that . . . ‘black power’ was aimed as much at the old guard Negro leadership as it was aimed at white America.”
Fifty years later, Watkins is still in Jackson, still raising awkward questions. In his book he describes “packing, cracking, and stacking”—the three methods used to dilute the black vote: “Packing” crams black voters into a single district to minimize black representation. “Cracking” draws lines to fragment or displace black voters. “Stacking” links black voters with white communities who do not share their concerns. Watkins was lead plaintiff in the 1991 lawsuit challenging the state’s redistricting plan.128
A friend to Chokwe Lumumba and a mentor to his son, Watkins told me that for him the struggle—the movement—has always been a fight for self-determination. “The threat is ‘You can’t do it without us.’ If you buy into that—‘It can’t be done’—you’re locked into the self-exploiting process. Because you believe it can’t be done, it won’t be done.”
Jackson, Mississippi, may seem like an unlikely place to look for the seeds of the next republic. But as I talked with Watkins and other activists there, I noticed two things. One was negative: almost everywhere else in America—especially among communities of color—the issue of police violence was at the top of the agenda. In Jackson it simply never came up. When I asked Nsombi Lambright why that was, she replied that Lee Vance, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the force named chief of police by the previous administration, “has been doing a pretty good job.” Coming from a former head of the ACLU, that was practically an endorsement.
The topic of race, on the other hand, was part of every conversation I had here. That may have been because I was a white man asking questions. Mostly, though, I think it was because the people I spoke to in Jackson knew exactly who they were, what they—and their community—had been through, and what they had accomplished.
They were under no illusions that further progress would come easily. Discussing the state’s threat to take over Jackson’s schools, Kali Okuno said, “We may need to use their own racism against them” by threatening to send Jackson’s students to suburban schools. Perhaps coincidentally, a few days later the mayor and governor announced an agreement—brokered by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, a Michigan-based educational charity—that lets Jackson maintain local control of its schools.
It was a small victory, on a battlefield where most of the successes have been modest, and the odds have never been favorable. Yet the same could be said of many of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Who would have thought then that the right to eat at a lunch counter, or keep your seat on a city bus, were levers that would change the world? Because while racism is “baked in” to our history, from the three-fifths clause in the Constitution to racial gerrymandering and the prison-industrial complex, so too is the legacy of resistance, from the slaves who revolted and the abolitionists—black and white—who defied the Fugitive Slave Act, to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Black Lives Matter.
“It’s a war on many fronts,” said Hollis Watkins. “But it’s not a war that can’t be won.”
* Founded in 1956 in the Basque region of Spain, the Mondragon Corporation today is the country’s tenth-largest enterprise, a federation of worker cooperatives manufacturing everything from bicycles to elevators, as well as owning a supermarket chain, an insurance business, and its own bank.