Chokwe Lumumba's Solidarity Economics: Not Black or White, Just Smart - a podcast by Laura Flanders

It’s one of the exasperating things about our not-so United States.

When white people in the North protest inequality outside city hall, it may take a while but eventually they’ll get noticed. Remember Occupy?

When black people in the South, by contrast, organize for years, elect one of their own and actually take over City Hall with a concrete plan, they can be in office for months without most Americans having heard of them.

Which makes it makes it particularly sad that Mayor Chokwe Lumumba of Jackson Mississippi passed away last week, before most people had any chance to hear what he was up to.

Mayor Lumumba wasn’t your run-of-the-mill mayor. He came up through the furnace of the 1960s as a defense attorney, a community organizer and a founder of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.

In our race-trained world, we’d call his ideology Black Power, and maybe that’s why so few even in our progressive/left media have paid attention, but what do those words even mean? After years of civil rights laws, we’ve done away with legal apartheid, but we still live in a bitterly divided society. Lumumba’s goal was colored black and rooted deep in the blood-soaked Mississippi soil, but it was a vision of power: building some, and then using it, not to fit in, but to transform a flawed society.

And wouldn’t that have made it of interest to a whole lot of Americans?

What made this moment ripe for change was the readiness of the people, Mayor Lumumba told me in one of his last interviews. His slogan was an old one: The People Must Decide.

After a term on the City Council, Lumumba’s people organized their hearts out to elect him mayor and he took office last July not just talking about reducing poverty and inequality, but with an innovative plan to do just that through public works carried out by local firms, and government support for new, low-barrier-to entry worker-owned businesses and cooperatives.

What Lumumba called solidarity economics isn’t a black thing or a white thing. It’s a smart thing. Owned and managed by the workers, co-ops permit poor members to pool resources and share risk; they tend to provide higher wages and better benefits and create stability in their communities. Around the country, lots of people wish their city officials would integrate worker owned co-ops into their plans and policies. But Jackson, under Lumumba, was actually doing it.

There’s a conference this May, called Jackson Rising. By then the city will have a new Mayor. Will Lumumba’s vision survive him? He’d be the first to say the People Must Decide. But I bet they’d appreciate some financial support. There’s something in Jackson’s experiment that’s good for everyone. Black or white; it’s a power thing.

To read a transcript of my interview with Lumumba, recorded February 12, go to GRITtv.org or Yes Magazine.

I'm Laura Flanders, for GRITtv.

Further episodes of The F Word with Laura Flanders

Further podcasts by Laura Flanders

Website of Laura Flanders