![]() As Akuno waited to be seen for whatever was happening in him, he heard voices down the hall. Dominic near 10 PM and was taken not far from where the mayor's body lay. He'd been having heart problems of his own, a clotting issue. That evening, Akuno himself started feeling something strange in his chest. He was trying to turn this place into Cuba." "I don't know what the hell he thought he was doing. "I'm glad he's dead," Akuno remembers hearing someone say the day Mayor Chokwe Lumumba died. The administration, together with Akuno's job, was already all but over. He saw clerks rummaging through the mayor's office, and downstairs the city council was already jockeying to fill the power vacuum. He set in motion the local and national security protocol of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the organization to which he, Lumumba, and many of the others in the administration belonged. Akuno had been one of the mayor's chief deputies. Less than eight months after he had taken office, Lumumba was dead.Īs word of what had happened began to spread through city hall, Kali Akuno made calls. After they finished, he leaned back on the bed, cried out about his heart, shook, trembled, and lost consciousness. Nurses brought Lumumba into a room for a transfusion around 4 PM. Chokwe Antar, an attorney like his father, was in court, but he rushed over to the house, eased his father into the car, and drove him over Jackson's cracked and cratered roads to St. But those paying attention were coming to see Jackson as a model, the capital of a new African American politics and economics, a form of resistance more durable than protest.įour days after the outage at Lumumba's home, he phoned his 30-year-old son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba. Implied in this kind of talk was a very tangible transfer of power from the white suburbs to the region's urban black majority.Īt the time, Black Lives Matter was still nascent, more a hashtag than an on-the-ground movement, and DeRay Mckesson-the activist now running for mayor of Baltimore-was still working for the Minneapolis Public Schools between sending off tweets. He also spoke of the idea of the Kush District, starting with 18 contiguous counties with large black populations around Jackson, which he and his closest allies wanted to establish as a safe homeland for African American self-determination. He discussed the principle of cooperative economics in Kwanzaa, Ujima, which guided his plans for upending how the city awarded its lucrative infrastructure contracts he wanted to redirect that money from outside firms to local worker-owned businesses. Flanders pressed him on his goals on camera, and the mayor was more forthcoming than he'd been since taking office that previous July. He built a nationwide network of supporters and a local political base after decades as one of the most radical, outspoken lawyers in the black nationalist movement.Įarlier that February, Lumumba had given an interview to the progressive journalist Laura Flanders, host of GRITtv. ![]() In a time of outcry for black lives across the United States, Lumumba had come to office in a Southern capital on a platform of black power and human rights. He gave a speech at the grocery store that day. He'd been coughing more than he should've maybe, and his blood pressure was running high, but he was very much alive. ![]() At the grand opening of Jackson's first Whole Foods Market a few weeks earlier, a white woman said she'd been told at her neighborhood-association meeting that the mayor was dead. They called the power company, and waited, and as they did, they talked about the strange notions that had been circulating. They couldn't figure out the problem at first. He phoned friends for help, including an electrician, an electrical engineer, and his longtime bodyguard-each in some way associated with his administration. The outage affected only his house, not any others on the block. On February 21, 2014, 49 years to the day after Malcolm X's earthly form fell to assassins' bullets in Harlem, Chokwe Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, came home to find the power out. This article appeared in the April issue of VICE magazine. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |