That evening, Akuno himself started feeling something strange in his chest. He'd been having heart problems of his own, a clotting issue. He checked himself into St. Dominic near 10 PM and was taken not far from where the mayor's body lay. As Akuno waited to be seen for whatever was happening in him, he heard voices down the hall."I'm glad he's dead," Akuno remembers hearing someone say the day Mayor Chokwe Lumumba died. "I don't know what the hell he thought he was doing. He was trying to turn this place into Cuba."
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.Lumumba proposed a "critical break with capitalism" through 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.
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."This article appeared in the April issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.
Twenty years ago, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, a political economist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, began to notice a hidden economy at work in African American life. Again and again, people were organizing themselves in creative forms of cooperative enterprise, democratically owned and managed by those who took part. Starting with the co-ops listed in W. E. B. Du Bois's 1907 book Economic Cooperation Among Negro Americans, she began reconstructing a history, eventually published in her 2014 book Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, that, before, had only been told in bits and pieces, passed down through families but rarely seen as significant. There were co-ops for sharecroppers seeking better markets for their produce, co-ops for townspeople who wanted better prices for basic commodities, and cooperative communes that tried to create a new world apart from white supremacy. Where white banks wouldn't lend money, credit unions arose. These efforts faced sabotage and repression. But they were always around. "There's really no time in US history when African Americans were not doing cooperative projects," Nembhard told me.Cooperatives have a long history in black American life. There were co-ops for sharecroppers seeking better markets for their produce, co-ops for townspeople who wanted better prices for basic commodities, and cooperative communes that tried to create a new world apart from white supremacy.
In the wake of Roof's shooting spree, Chokwe Antar helped organize a rally at the state capitol to demand changing Mississippi's flag, alongside local politicians, activists, and hopefuls. The actress Aunjaune Ellis, flanked on either side by guards in black MXGM T-shirts, called for "rebranding our state" and "a different way of doing business." Chokwe Antar led a chant: "Stand up, take it down!" "Free the land!" followed. Then, of course, "By any means necessary."Chokwe Antar's name was in the national news a week later. In Clarke County, a police officer stopped Jonathan Sanders, a black man with a horse-drawn buggy, and he wound up dead after the cop put him in a chokehold. Chokwe Antar took the case. The incident became a possible flash point for the Black Lives Matter movement's roving attention, but the story soon faded, and in January, a grand jury declined to indict the officer. The rebel flag still flies over Mississippi. The state, also, has been vying to wrest control over Jackson's valuable airport—another blow to self-rule for the black-majority city. And the decision has been made: Antar will run for the mayor's office again in 2017.The flag campaign was the subject of conversation over grilling vegetables and chicken for dinner at the Lumumba Center in late June. Akuno, pacing back and forth over the grill, led the discussion. "I think with some of this Confederate stuff—that's a distraction," he said. "Is that really our agenda? Did we define it, or did the media define it, saying that this is within the limits?" He'd been saying as much to Chokwe Antar. Akuno wanted to keep the focus on the co-ops and the assemblies and elections—real counter power, backed by self-sufficiency.Socrates Garrett was Jackson's most successful black entrepreneur when Lumumba became mayor. "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.