Antar Lumumba, Mayor of Jackson, Mississipi. Wikicommons/ NatalieMaynor. Some rights reserved.In June last year, the young black attorney Antar Lumumba was elected the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Securing more than 90% of the vote, Lumumba’s platform was based on making Jackson “the most radical city on the planet”, something one might not expect from the capitol of a former slave state. Yet this wasn’t the first time a committed black radical had won the mayoral contest of Jackson. Antar’s father – a veteran of the New Afrikan Peoples Organisation (NAPO) and co-founder of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) – was elected as mayor in 2013, prior to his untimely death at the beginning of 2014.
It’s familiar to report on electoral successes as if they’re the end-point of politics, yet, ‘the new municipalism isn’t about winning elections; it’s about building, transforming and distributing power’. To interpret what’s happening in Jackson through the lens of electoral politics is to be blind to the much broader political strategy that’s been taking shape. Behind the media-grabbing headlines of the election of a ‘radical Mayor’ lies the tireless work of educational programmes, the building of cooperatives, the buying-up of land, and the development of alternative democratic structures. This isn’t just the usual ‘movement building’ work we’re all used to talking of. Jackson is a city with a plan. Jackson is a city with a plan.
The Jackson-Kush Plan
The Jackson-Kush Plan is a strategy for building an unapologetically revolutionary movement that doesn’t just make promises about the future, but has a method for delivering in the present. Developed by the MXGM from the early 2000’s and made public in 2012, the Plan draws on centuries of political organising, reaching back to the National Negro Convention Movement (between 1831-1864), the establishment of the Freedom Farm Cooperative in 1969, and the efforts in local self-governance driven by NAPO and the Republic of New Afrika (RNA).
