Jackson Jambalaya

 Vice magazine published a rather interesting version of the reign of Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, Sr. - from the viewpoint of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.  JJ posted some excerpts of the April 2016 article below along with some color commentary from yours truly. 


As Akuno, off camera, watched Lumumba give his interview with Flanders that February, he felt like his boss was ready to stop playing nice with the Establishment, as he had been so far. The honeymoon was over; the gloves were coming off. 

"Mayors typically don't do the things we're trying to do," Lumumba said. "On the other hand, revolutionaries don't typically find themselves as mayor." 

They were definitely coming off.  The Mayor spent six months putting his people in place.  He was beginning to flex his muscle when he died.  Developers were starting to complain that the administration was trying to tell them who to hire or what the racial percentage of their workforce had to be if they wanted to get those precious building permits.  Forgive the developers for being confused.  They are used to shakedowns for dollars from politicians.  This new tactic was something totally different.   Mayor Lumumba hired Detroit goons such as Kwame Kenyatta.  Goons who had blown up one city and didn't mind blowing up another. Mr. Kenyatta told one meeting of the staff that the administration was into Malcom X and not all that Martin Luther King _____. Sho' nuff.

At the center of Jackson's civic district, Mississippi's former capitol building looms over Capitol Street, which has been subject to a variably successful renovation effort seeking to replicate the urban revival that has lately been sweeping hollowed-out cities across the country. Intersecting Capitol Street to the north, the segregation-era black business district, Farish Street, now stands nearly empty. Historical signs are more plentiful than pedestrians. The Old Capitol Museum presents slavery and Indian removal—the city was named after Andrew Jackson, in gratitude for his role in the latter—as quandaries to be pondered rather than obvious moral disasters. After all, these were law; there were treaties and contracts. The same could also be said of the predatory mortgages that, in the Great Recession, wiped away what gains civil rights had brought to African American wealth, especially in places like Jackson.

Predatory mortgages wiped away African-American wealth? Um, if you were upside down on your house, did you really have any wealth? Does this guy even know what real wealth is? The problem is the mortgages in question should have never been given to those who couldn't afford them.  However, remember that the friends of these guys over at Fannie Mae fought every attempt to protect blacks from getting  mortgages they couldn't afford to repay.  Of course, those who tried to protect them were called racists who opposed so-called affordable housing. 

 Capitol Street changes abruptly after crossing the railroad tracks on the west end of downtown as it heads toward the city zoo. Lots are empty and overgrown, right in the shadow of the refurbished King Edward Hotel. Poverty lurks; opportunity for renewal beckons. And right there, at the gateway of this boarded-up frontier, is a one-story former day-care building newly painted red, green, and black: the Chokwe Lumumba Center for Economic Democracy and Development. Standing guard against the gentrification sure to come, this has become the most visible remnant of the mayor's four-decade legacy in the city.

Standing guard against gentrification? Um, is cleaning up the area a bad thing? Do these people want everyone to live in pigsty's?  Example #___ of why we can't have nice things.

Lumumba first arrived in Mississippi when he was 23 years old, in 1971. He had been born Edwin Finley Taliaferro in Detroit, but like many who discovered black nationalist movements in the 1960s, he relinquished his European names and took African ones—each, in his case, with connotations of anti-colonial resistance. While at Kalamazoo College, in southwest Michigan, he joined an organization called the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). Its purpose was not to achieve integration or voting rights, but to establish a new nation in the heartland of US slavery, one where black people could rule themselves, mounting their own secession from both the Northern and Southern styles of racism alike. This quest was, to its adherents, a natural extension of the independence struggles then spreading across Africa.

So is this new homeland supposed to be a secession a la The Confederacy? Will it have a bill of rights similar to the U.S. Constitution? Will it just be a major shift in demographics or actual withdrawal from the United States?   One suspects they mean actual independence as the Confederates wanted but they are being a little careful in saying so.

The change that came over Jackson after Lumumba's first sojourn in the 1970s was a cataclysmic but also entirely familiar story of American urban life. ("As far as I am concerned, Mississippi is anywhere south of the Canadian border," Malcolm X once said.) The advent of civil rights inclined most of the city's white residents to flee for the suburbs, while maintaining their hold on political power and the economic benefits of city contracts. To many of them, the city's subsequent decline was a case in point. To Hollis Watkins, a local civil rights hero, the story of the city's transformation after white flight was simple: "intentional sabotage."

Um, ok.   The white flight began, as it did elsewhere, when forced busing began.  However, a substantial part of Jackson was still white in the early 1990's.  Then the crime explosion took place.   97 homicides in one year.  The number of for sale signs went up along with the crime.  People started noticing the lower taxes in the burbs. There was also quite a bit of race-baiting in the black community as well.  E.C. Foster's fate was a perfect example of the how the race card was used. He was Uncle Tommed right out of office by a young punk who later went to jail because, gasp,  he actually tried to get along with white people.  Whites may have had a racist past and fled the city but there was a segment of the black community that wanted nothing to do with whites and was happy to kick them out of Jackson and woe to any black politician who was friendly to them. That same segment was also more than happy to take their money through taxes. 

Lumumba had helped found the New Afrikan People's Organization, in 1984, and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement grew out of that in 1990. MXGM, whose first chapter was in Jackson, set out to bring black nationalism to a new generation of activists; adults organized and strategized, while kids joined the New Afrikan Scouts and attended their own summer camp. 

Safiya Omari, Lumumba's future chief of staff, came to Jackson in 1989. At rallies, they chanted the old RNA secessionist slogan, "Free the land!"—three times, in quick triplets with call-and-response—followed by, in dead-serious unison, its Malcolmian addendum, "By any means necessary." Their names and message were foreign to local black folks, and scary to many whites, but as years passed, they became part of the landscape.

Really? So why don't you tell us what "Free the Land By Any Means Necessary" really means? We are waiting.

Oh, and Safiya Omari lived in Ridgeland while she was Mayor Lumumba's Chief of Staff.  The administration required all city employees to live in Jackson but.... do I really need to quote Animal Farm?

 Since Lumumba's passing, Kali Akuno has become the chief spokesman for what remains of their movement. As I sat with Akuno at his makeshift desk at the Lumumba Center's large multipurpose room last summer, he described his world as a confluence of "forces." In a generation whose radicals tend toward impossible demands and reactive rage, he is the rare strategist. He thinks in bullet points, enumerating and analyzing past mistakes as readily as future plans, stroking the goatee under his chin as his wide and wandering eyes look out for forces swirling around him.....

Would someone show me where his strategy has actually worked? 

Hurricane Katrina brought him down to the South. When it became evident how the storm had devastated black neighborhoods of New Orleans, and the government response only made matters worse, MXGM mobilized. Lumumba's daughter Rukia, then in law school at Howard, began flying down every chance she could to organize volunteers. Akuno moved from Oakland and took a position with the People's Hurricane Relief Fund. 

"We were trying to push a people's reconstruction platform," said Akuno, "a Marshall Plan for the Gulf Coast, where the resources would be democratically distributed." But mostly they had to watch as the reconstruction become an excuse for tearing down public housing and dismembering the public schools. It was not rebuilding; it seemed more like expulsion.

Yup. Katrina only destroyed black neighborhoods.  The public schools were already dismembered and incapable of educating.  An auditor was unable to audit the public school system earlier in the year.  The system was rift with graft, fraud, and double-payments.  The auditor said the system needed to be blown up and start from scratch because it was so dysfunctional it could not be fixed.

"Katrina taught us a lot of lessons," Rukia Lumumba said. The group started to think about the need to control the seats of government, and to control land. "Without land, you really don't have freedom." 

She is correct about that and one might be forgiven for thinking she  is agreeing with Milton Friedman or Frederich Hayeck.  However, one gets the idea that she is not talking about private property ownership but instead ownership of land by a group of people.

Akuno and MXGM's theorists around the country began working on a plan. What they developed would become public in 2012 as The Jackson-Kush Plan: The Struggle for Black Self-Determination and Economic Democracy, a full-color, 24-page pamphlet Akuno authored, with maps, charts, photographs, and extended quotations from black nationalist heroes. It calls for "a critical break with capitalism and the dismantling of the American settler colonial project," starting in Jackson and Mississippi's Black Belt, by way of three concurrent strategies: assemblies to elevate ordinary people's voices, an independent political party accountable to the assemblies, and publicly financed economic development through local cooperatives. Each would inform and reinforce the others. 

By 2008, the scheming led to talk of running a candidate. MXGM had been organizing in Jackson for almost two decades, and it had a robust base there. Akuno suggested that MXGM should run Lumumba and begin training Chokwe Antar—who was then finishing law school in Texas—to run for office in the future. Both father and son were reluctant, but Lumumba came around.

One is so tempted to make a comparison to The Manchurian Candidate......

In 2009, he ran for a city council seat in Jackson, and with the help of MXGM's cadres and his name recognition as an attorney of the people, he won. On the council, he cast votes to protect funding for public transit and to expand police accountability. But it became clear that, in Jackson, the real power—in particular, power over infrastructure contracts—lay with the mayor's office. Those contracts were still going largely to white-owned firms in the suburbs. Black people had long been the majority of Jackson's population, but the MXGM felt its land wasn't really free until it benefited financially, too.

 Reallly? Waggoner Engineering is in Jackson.  Yates Construction has an office in Jackson.  Southern Consultants has an office in Jackson.  Neel-Schaffer has an office in Jackson and worked with Mayor Lumumba on passing the 1% sales tax.

Few among Jackson's small, collegial elite bothered to notice the Jackson-Kush Plan when Lumumba ran for mayor in 2013. He was just one in a crowded pool of candidates. And the plan was still little more than a series of ambitions. The co-ops didn't exist; the assemblies, when they actually happened, were small and populated mostly by true believers. Yet Lumumba understood his role as an expression of the popular will, which the co-ops and assemblies would someday represent. At important junctures, he would often say, "The people must decide." 

Trust me, they noticed the plan.  They all read this website.

The mayoral race was a testament to what Lumumba had built in Jackson and elsewhere. Rukia Lumumba gathered support from MXGM supporters across the country. The $334,560 raised in 2013 by Jonathan Lee, the young black businessman Lumumba faced in the runoff vote, was still much more than the $68,753 Lumumba's campaign raised that same year. Lee, however, was mostly unknown in town, except to his friends on the state's chamber of commerce. MXGM's organizing efforts, combined with Lumumba's long-standing reputation, resulted in a landslide. On May 21, he won 86 percent of the Democratic primary vote, guaranteeing him the mayoralty. The Lumumba campaign's slogan, "One city, one aim, one destiny"—an homage to an old Garveyite saying—seemed to be coming true. 

This is a flat-out lie by the author.  Mayor Lumumba did not win 86% of the Democratic primary vote.  He made it to a runoff with 25% of the vote.  Jonathan Lee got 34% of the vote.  Mr. Lumumba won the runoff with 54% of the vote.  He got 86% of the vote in the general election. Yuuuge difference.  Call it Vice's alternate facts.

 "The spirit behind Chokwe was high," said Walter Zinn, a local political consultant. "It was probably the highest it had been in twenty years."

Political consultant? Um, he was Mayor Lumumba's employee.  

Not everyone was on board, however. "I remember getting all these calls when he was elected mayor from white business owners—they were terrified," City Councilman Melvin Priester Jr. told me. "They were afraid that he was going to treat them like they had treated a lot of black people, like a Rhodesia situation."

Like I wrote earlier, what did "Free the Land" mean? How did they think it would be interpreted?


For Lumumba and his new administration—full of MXGM partisans—the first order of business was damage control. The city's roads and pipes had been allowed to deteriorate to the point of disfunction. An EPA consent decree loomed over the crumbling wastewater system. Funds needed to be raised for repairs; perhaps, afterward, the money could be used to seed cooperative businesses for doing the necessary work. Lumumba used the political capital he'd won in the election to pass, by referendum, a 1 percent sales tax increase. He raised water rates. Practical exigencies won the day.

"We didn't win power in Jackson," Akuno said. "We won an election. It's two different things."

True enough.

 To pass the 1 percent tax, Lumumba had to accept oversight for the funds from a commission partly controlled by the State Legislature—a concession that not even his more conservative predecessor would accept. He hoped that, later on, he could mobilize people in Jackson to demand full control over their own tax revenues, but the city was in an emergency, so for the moment the commission would have to do. 

This was one of the smarter things Mayor Lumumba did while in office.  He swallowed his pride and went for the money instead of whining about the mean ole white boys at the legislature.   He put ego aside to pursue a goal.  Not many politicians can do that.

From his new position, as director of special projects and external funding, Akuno tried to keep the Jackson-Kush Plan on track. However long the administration would last, he wanted to set up structures that would outlive it. He drew up plans for a $15 million development fund for cooperatives, using money from the city, credit unions, and outside donors. He wanted to create worker-owned co-ops for all the city's needs—for collecting garbage, for growing the food served at schools, for taking on the plentiful engineering challenges. To help, Lumumba called for rules to direct more contracts to local businesses. And there were plans to roll out a participatory budgeting process, based on experiments in Brazil and New York, through which Jacksonians could decide how to allocate public funds directly.

So what happens if the local contractors charge more money because you removed their out-of-town competition? Oh, I forgot, this crowd doesn't believe in economics.  Brazil is turning out very nicely right now, isn't it?

 Ben Allen, president of the city's development corporation, started getting to know the new mayor, and he was pleasantly surprised. When he invited Lumumba to a garden party at his country club, the mayor made an appearance. "Our fears were gone," remembered Allen, who is white. "He wanted to work with us." 

Jackson's troubles, by 2013, were more than black and white. An investment firm in Santa Monica had bought up more than half of the private buildings downtown. Israelis and Chinese were getting in on the action, too. Far from the RNA's old secessionist strategy of the 70s, Lumumba was forming coalitions where he could, with whoever would work with him. Co-ops and assemblies took a backseat to balancing the budget, at least as far as official business went.

You know what these guys are really dying to write, don't you?  Only this crowd would see investing in downtown as a problem.  The dollars come from the wrong people, you see.  Heaven forbid the Jews should see something positive in Jackson.  We all know what the Farakhan crowd thinks of them. The author almost let it slip.

Two miles from downtown along Capitol Street, however, just blocks from the entrance to the zoo, another germ of the cooperative vision was beginning to sprout. In early 2013, MXGM members Nia and Takuma Umoja moved with their children from Fort Worth, Texas, into a small wooden house next to a local dumping ground. Slowly befriending their new neighbors, they started clearing the garbage away, replaced it with raised soil beds, and declared an eight-block section of the neighborhood the Cooperative Community of New West Jackson. They began putting their neighbors, many of whom grew up as sharecroppers, to work on a construction crew and growing food. Discreetly, the cooperative bought up more and more property within the territory, intending to transfer it to a community land trust. They renovated abandoned houses and painted them with bright colors. It was all part of the plan—the same plan that put their old friend Lumumba into office. And, like the mayor, the Umojas were making new friends as well.

Look, if you can make a productive use out of abandoned properties, I'm all for it.   Experimentation is not a bad thing in and of itself.

"Our enemy saw an opportunity," he said. Both the mayor and MXGM's flagship cooperative project were teaming up with the likes of Ben Allen. If divide and conquer was the intent, it succeeded; a rift between Akuno and the Umojas deepened until they were acting more like competitors than comrades. According to Allen's email signature, "Downtown redevelopment is like war." (Last month, Allen was indicted for embezzlement of his organization's funds.) 

"We knew, when we got here, what we'd have to do to make sure that we're at the table when decisions about development are being made," Nia Umoja told me. "Our folks are never at the table......"

Getting help from whitey is a bad thing.

When Chokwe Antar first looked at his father's body in the hospital room, he made the decision to finish what had been begun. He didn't say anything; there still had to be discussions in MXGM about the next move. His wife was pregnant. Some still felt he wasn't experienced enough, but ultimately, the movement's decision echoed his own, and he ran on a promise to continue what his father had started. Throughout the country, MXGM members mobilized again. But by the time of Lumumba's death, the Jackson-Kush Plan was secret no more, and the city's business class was better prepared to oppose it.

I'll take credit for that one. 

Socrates Garrett is Jackson's most prominent black entrepreneur. He went into business for himself in 1980, selling cleaning products to the government; now, he and his nearly 100 employees specialize in heavy-duty environmental services. The story of his success is one of breaking through Mississippi's white old-boy network, and to do that his politics have become mainly reducible to his business interests. He is a former chairman of the chamber of commerce and serves on the boards of charities. He's a self-described progressive who supported the last Republican governor, Haley Barbour. He became a political force—by necessity, and with less ideological freight than the partisans of MXGM. 

"I had to have relationships with politicians," Garrett told me. "If you're not doing business with the government, you're not in mainstream America." 

Garrett became a Lumumba supporter when it became clear who was going to win the election, but he grew disillusioned quickly. The MXGM-led administration didn't play his kind of politics. "They started putting people in from different walks of life," he recalled. "They had a lot of funny names, like Muslim names." He was informed that he should not expect special treatment. Safiya Omari, Lumumba's chief of staff, insisted that he was being treated like any other contractor, but Garrett perceived it as a snub—right when the militant black mayor seemed to be bending over backward to assuage the White Establishment.

In other words, Soc, you got played.  They went to send Jackson money to local black businessmen but only those who are on their team or who might think for themselves. You might support them but you are not of them.  Big difference.

 Here you are, a black man—you start from scratch and work your way up, thirty years out here struggling—and there's something wrong with my business model?" he said. 

Garrett couldn't wrap his head around how cooperatives were going to take on big city contracts, with all the bonding and hardware such work requires. Mississippi law doesn't even have a provision for worker or consumer cooperatives; those that do exist must incorporate out of state. "In my opinion, it was going to produce chaos," he said. He set about looking for a new mayor to raise up, and before long came upon Tony Yarber, a young bow-tied black pastor and city council member from a poor neighborhood. (Yarber's LinkedIn profile still lists his profession as a motivational speaker.) What he lacked in age and experience was more than made up for in his willingness to collaborate.

Mr. Garrett ran into the wall that faces all businessmen who play the political game to get contracts.  At some point, your candidate loses and then you are screwed. 

Garrett and Yarber quietly set out to organize a run against Lumumba in 2017, but when the mayor died, their chance came sooner than expected. The white business class that had tolerated and even liked Mayor Lumumba wasn't ready to risk his young and little-known son. Jackson Jambalaya, a straight-talking conservative blog, ridiculed him as "Octavian." Chokwe Antar's posters, between plentiful exclamation points, made promises of "continuing the vision"; Yarber, for his part, told the Jackson Free Press, "I don't make promises to people other than to provide good government." Garrett was his top individual donor. 

The result was a reversal from the election a year earlier. Jackson's population is 80 percent black, and Chokwe Antar won a solid majority of the vote in black neighborhoods. But the white minority turned out in droves, urged by last-minute canvassing in more affluent areas, which voted 90 percent for Yarber. Narrowly, on April 22, Yarber won. 

I also called Priester "Junior".  Mayor Yarber got 40% of the black vote.  This article also leaves out the fact that Priester led among white voters in the primary.  

Yarber removed almost all the members of the previous administration. Even Wendell Paris, who'd been working part time to develop community gardens on city land since before Lumumba's administration, was dismissed. When I visited city hall a year later, Yarber's sister, a police officer, was sitting by the metal detector at the entrance, pecking on the same iPhone that was once issued to Lumumba. 

"The whole sense that we're going to do something great has sort of dissipated," Safiya Omari told me.

 Notice what isn't mentioned in this article.  Nothing about improving schools or crime.  Nothing about improving neighborhoods.  Infrastructure is mentioned some but almost always in the same breadth as awarding jobs and contracts.  Of course, the Detroit connection thought nothing was wrong with Detroit as it went under.

Read the rest of the loooooooooooooong article here.