After Jackson Loses Its Radical Mayor, a Movement Spreads in the South
Still mourning Chokwe Lumumba, progressives gather to push his vision for worker-owned co-ops.
The Jackson Rising: New Economies Conference, held on the campus of Jackson State University, went off without a hitch the first weekend in May. That, in itself, was testament to something new growing in the heart of the South.Conceived as part of Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba’s plan to develop Mississippi’s crumbling capital from the bottom up, Jackson Rising ended up taking place just two months after Lumumba’s sudden death, less than two weeks after the election of a new mayor, and days after the key leadership of Lumumba’s administration—including many of the conference’s organizers—found themselves out of office and out of a job.
Jackson is a pre–Civil War city whose city hall was built by slaves. With a population of 175,000, it is home to some of the poorest citizens in the nation and has a higher percentage of African-Americans (80 percent) than any other city except Detroit. Mayor Lumumba, a longtime activist, was elected in June 2013 on a pledge to reduce poverty and narrow the enduring wealth gap.
One of the ways he intended to tackle inequality was through strict contracting and procurement rules. Jackson was, and still is, under a federal mandate to upgrade its crumbling sewer system. So, despite qualms, Lumumba supported a 1 percent sales tax hike to be spent specifically on infrastructure, which voters approved this past January. While in the past a vast majority of city contracts went to businesses owned and operated by nonresidents, Lumumba assured voters that the lion’s share would be spent locally. And where there weren’t enough locally owned businesses, his administration intended to cultivate new ones, in part by incubating worker-owned cooperatives.
Yet, in some ways, the turnabout in Jackson only underscored one of the main themes hammered home by the speakers at Jackson Rising. As Saladin Muhammad of Black Workers for Justice put it, rather than an end in themselves, “Worker co-ops have to be part of a broader democracy movement.”
http://www.thenation.com/article/179878/after-jackson-loses-its-radical-mayor-movement-spreads-south
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