Death of a Radical Southern Mayor

Chokwe Lumumba, who died suddenly on February 25, had an ambitious vision for the deeply impoverished Jackson, Miss.

Chokwe Lumumba as a Jackson City Councilmember in 2011. Credit: AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis

This is your first of three free stories this month. Become a free or sustaining member to read unlimited articles, webinars and ebooks.

Become A Member

Chokwe Lumumba, the sitting mayor of Jackson, Miss., died suddenly at the age of 66 on February 25. His name may be unfamiliar to those outside Mississippi or leftist circles, but his brief tenure in office — he was elected last summer — is a testament to both the possibilities and limits of progressive governance in resource-starved cities.

Lumumba was a Detroit native who, radicalized by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., began his career as a political activist and leader of a black separatist movement calling for a black-majority country in the American South. A graduate of Roman Catholic high school and Kalamazoo College, Lumumba went on to become a successful lawyer and represented numerous high-profile defendants, including Tupac Shakur. He moved to Mississippi in 1988, a time when many middle-class people, white and black, were moving to the suburbs.

The results were familiar: Jackson’s shrinking tax base received little outside support as the federal government left the urban aid field to a rural-suburban (and white) dominated legislature. By the time Lumumba took office, Jackson’s streets had long been pitted and scarred, while its water was often discolored and sometimes unsafe to drink. (The city is under a $400 million consent decree with the Environmental Protection Agency because of Clean Water Act violations involving improperly treated and overflowing sewage.)

For many years Lumumba did not engage with the electoral arena, preferring the politics of protest, dissent and courtroom defense. But in 2009 he won a seat on the Jackson City Council and last year went on to defeat both the incumbent mayor and a former Chamber of Commerce president in the Democratic primary, the only municipal election that matters in a city where Republicans didn’t even bother fielding a mayoral candidate.

The election of this radical yet pragmatic black attorney was welcomed as a sign of progress for Jackson. His predecessor, Harvey Johnson, Jr., was competent but perceived, after three terms in office, as too mild a force against the powerful cycles of endemic poverty — more than 28 percent of the city’s population lives below the poverty level — and disinvestment stunting the city. Johnson’s third term came after the disastrous reign of Frank Melton, who died of a heart attack while still in office, facing criminal charges for burglary and various civil rights abuses. (Melton had broken into the home of an alleged crack dealer with a sledgehammer in effort to clean up the city on his own terms.)

Upon taking office, Lumumba quickly got down to business, pushing for a one-cent local sales tax needed to support the city’s overwhelming infrastructure needs. The tax increase is expected to raise roughly a fourth of the amount necessary to comprehensively overhaul the antiquated infrastructure.

But the former community activist had greater ambitions than simply repairing old pipes. He saw upgrading infrastructure as part of much larger project in self-determination. Jackson is 80 percent black, and Lumumba explained his political tactics in an interview with The Nation’s Bhaskar Sunkara a few weeks before his death: “One of the routes to…self-determination is to use the governmental slots in order to accumulate the political power that we can, and then to demand more, and to build more.” He was one of the founders of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, which promotes the “Jackson Plan” to engage with electoral politics in the hope of building a power base for economic democracy. Long-term goals include overturning right-to-work laws, instituting participatory budgeting and creating a network of worker cooperatives.

The idea was to engage and empower people both economically and politically. To encourage citizen participation outside the ballot box, Lumumba held “People’s Assemblies” throughout his council district, where he would listen to constituent demands and bring in hard-to-reach bureaucrats that unorganized neighborhoods would have a hard time accessing on their own.

His near-term policy goals were focused on reviving Jackson’s economy and fighting to ensure that the city’s African Americans got their share of the jobs. He told numerous interviewers about the need to ensure that a significant percentage of municipal contracts went to locally owned businesses, or at least incentivize companies that receive public aid to hire an established percentage of their employees from within city limits. Before taking office, Lumumba condemned the city’s equal business opportunity guidelines, which merely expected that 8 percent of a publicly assisted company’s employees should be black. (He was insistent that his aggressive push for local hiring would establish guidelines, not requirements: “You can’t make it a quota.”)

To reinvigorate the city’s economy more broadly, he wanted to try to attract more immigrants, undocumented or not — a strategy that has worked well for many struggling Midwestern and Northeastern cities. To that end he championed a successful anti-profiling ordinance that bars law enforcement from using race as a reason to check a person’s citizenship status.

The most radical of his near-term goals was the establishment of worker cooperatives. As Sunkara writes in The Nation: “Lumumba wanted to use city contracts and economic leverage to foster worker ownership… they hoped to transform a full 10 percent of Jackson’s economy into cooperatives by the end of his first term alone.” Without Lumumba’s leadership, it is uncertain whether such an ambitious goal will be broached, let alone reached. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement is still a force, but the other candidate with its backing in last year’s election, June Hardwick, lost her council race in a landslide.

Lumumba was undoubtedly a committed radical leader. The moderation of his policy goals speaks to the fragility of his position as mayor of a deeply impoverished city in one of the most deeply impoverished states in the nation. If Jackson is to get anywhere, it must have an economy worth redistributing. At this stage, he seemed to realize the tenuousness, to borrow and alter a phrase, of progressive islands in a deeply reactionary ocean. (“We aren’t trying to create more enemies,” he told Al Jazeera America last year.) His death may have forestalled the inevitable clashes over his vision of economic democracy, which downtown elites and Republican legislators would have probably fought against. Still, considering the dire straits that Jackson finds itself in, clean water will be a real victory, and a worthy progressive legacy.

Jackson City Council President Charles Tillman has become the city’s acting mayor. It now falls to the council to set a date for a special election.

Like what you’re reading? Get a browser notification whenever we post a new story. You’re signed-up for browser notifications of new stories. No longer want to be notified? Unsubscribe.

Jake Blumgart is a senior staff writer at Governing.

Follow Jake

Tags: povertymayorsracewater

×
Next City App Never Miss A StoryDownload our app ×
×

You've reached your monthly limit of three free stories.

This is not a paywall. Become a free or sustaining member to continue reading.

  • Read unlimited stories each month
  • Our email newsletter
  • Webinars and ebooks in one click
  • Our Solutions of the Year magazine
  • Support solutions journalism and preserve access to all readers who work to liberate cities

Join 1096 other sustainers such as:

  • Gabby at $5/Month
  • Abigail at $10/Month
  • Gloria at $5/Month

Already a member? Log in here. U.S. donations are tax-deductible minus the value of thank-you gifts. Questions? Learn more about our membership options.

or pay by credit card:

All members are automatically signed-up to our email newsletter. You can unsubscribe with one-click at any time.

  • Donate $20 or $5/Month

    20th Anniversary Solutions of the Year magazine

has donated ! Thank you 🎉
Donate
×