Mississippi is the poorest state in the US, with the highest percentage of Black people and a history of vicious racial terror. Black resistance at a time of global health, economic, and climate crisis is the backdrop and context for the drama captured in this new and revised collection of essays, Jackson Rising Redux: Lessons on Building the Future in the Present.
Cooperation Jackson, founded in 2014 in Mississippi’s capital to develop an economically uplifting democratic “solidarity economy,” is anchored by a network of worker-owned, self-managed cooperative enterprises. In 2020, Cooperation Jackson became the center for national and international coalition efforts, bringing together progressive peoples from diverse trade union, youth, church, and cultural movements. This long-anticipated anthology details the foundations behind those successful campaigns. It unveils new and ongoing strategies and methods being pursued by the movement for grassroots-centered Black community control and self-determination, inspiring partnership and emulation across the globe.
Purchase Jackson Rising Redux: Lessons on Building the Future in the Present here.
“Organizing for Self-Determination and Liberation: Beyond the Basics in the Black Liberation Movement” by Sacajawea “Saki” Hall
Living in Jackson, Mississippi, and building Cooperation Jackson has been a huge struggle. Our work here in Jackson is filled with complexities, contradictions, successes, failures, and everything in between. As we continue to document that history it is important that we provide a clear analysis that allows people to see how we moved this project and what the future can hold for its success. This essay is not meant to review our self-criticisms; that important reflection is developed elsewhere. Here I share the unspoken struggles, those less directly dealt with difficulties, which more often than not provide lessons we must glean for building our movements. These are based on life in Jackson over the past decade, and I hope they will contribute to strengthening our people, empowering our community, and informing the wide range of communities and movements reading this book. Based on twenty years of educating and organizing throughout the US, it is intended to pose some critical questions more than provide clichéd answers.
My time in Jackson has often led me to question if all the hard work was worth it. In a much more visceral way than I’ve experienced before at different points in my life, I wondered whether we had gained as much as we had lost. During one of the most difficult times, between 2017 and 2018, I was separated from my political home—the organization I had joined at the start of what I call my conscious participation in the Black liberation movement, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM). Cooperation Jackson was asked to divorce itself from the family of Chokwe Lumumba and the Lumumba administration led by Chokwe’s son. Friendships, comrades, and political relationships were strained and a significant number of them completely lost. Many people declared they would not take sides as a matter of principle and then slowly disappeared.
Moving Beyond
When I first read “Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories: Response to Ultra-Left Attacks on the Lumumba Administration in Jackson, Mississippi” by Akinyele Omowale Umoja for the National Coordinating Committee of the New Afrikan People’s Organization (NAPO), I was angry and felt politically and personally attacked. After writing a response that I never published, I honestly reflected on my time in Jackson up until that point. I sat with the “ultra-left sectarian” label. Akinyele wrote: “Cooperation Jackson has not been able to develop a base of support among indigenous Black people in Jackson, particularly Black workers. . . . This group has failed to mobilize and organize Black workers in a city which is 80% Black and working class.” I could concede to this statement three years into Cooperation Jackson. None of us thought we had the membership we could have had or needed to have for the future we envisioned. It did seem a little unfair, though, to charge an organization three years old with having failed to organize some unknown percent that would represent a base of roughly 160,000 people. We thought we were coming into an MXGM base that could be increased and strengthened but soon realized that outside of the mobilization for elections, there was no ongoing campaign work to maintain a minimal base or rebuild a base that had existed decades before. In essence, we had to start from scratch. One of Akinyele’s criticisms required several readings. “Ultra-left politics,” he wrote, “is an orientation that overestimates the level of consciousness and organization of the people and capacity of the revolutionary movement, while often engaging in sectarian politics divorced from the people’s struggle.” This one confused me, and I debated it, tried to fit it on and wear it, and found it particularly hard having been politically trained through MXGM—the NAPO mass-based group. One of my favorite Ella Baker quotes came to mind: “Oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, have the ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the world for what it is, and move to transform it.” This is the basis from which I have always operated, and that is enough to give me solace.
While all of the intense critiques stung, this sting may have lasted the longest and echoed the most in my head: “Cooperation Jackson has Organizing for Self-Determination and Liberation 83 relied on the legacy and used the name and image of Baba Chokwe and the Lumumba family and the history of NAPO/MXGM organizing in Jackson, to gain and maintain support locally, nationally, and internationally. Cooperation Jackson can no longer undermine the contribution and political commitment of Baba Chokwe Lumumba, while cloaking itself in his political and organizational legacy.” We were being accused, here and in less politically eloquent ways, of “pimping” off Baba Chokwe’s name. . .that we had been doing this from the start. Wow!
Another person took it upon himself to wage an ongoing campaign, telling anyone and everyone he could (including funders) that Cooperation Jackson had “no real work,” were misusing money, had a “pattern of dishonest and poor leadership,” and should not be “artificially” held up or endorsed, because it damages the effort to “build a powerful movement.” Now I believe strongly in the practice of criticism/self-criticism and believe that the practice is vital to correcting mistakes and improving practice both individually and collectively. I’ve learned that it takes being willing to have your ego bruised and requires having trust that a comrade (not any ol’ person) is acting in good faith to keep at it. It takes working through differences and struggling for alignment and political clarity. Sometimes it even requires a partway understanding that there are irreconcilable differences, hopefully coming to further understandings that allow for working together in areas where you do agree. Even if it takes some time to get there, the goal should be as much principled unity as possible, when and where possible, to work for the collective good. But some of these attacks seemed beyond principled criticisms.
So we decided from then on till the present—both as an organization and among our leadership, as individuals—that we would not engage in a war of criticism or even self-defense. As a Christian, I’ve always rejected the idea of an eye for an eye. It has been hard at times to self-censor, and I have found myself in situations where I have had to grit my teeth and nod my head. I also reject the notion of getting smacked in the face and turning the other cheek. But I know what Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. meant. We have been and still are willing to engage in honest struggle, that takes a willingness to say things that are uncomfortable and even at odds, as well as to hear them. At the end of the day, Akinyele Umoja’s essay time and time again made me want to respond in a “comradely principled revolutionary struggle” way, even though I do not believe that is the way in which it was offered to me publicly. Even when my grief went from acceptance to rage, I landed on acceptance and never published or circulated my scathing analytical reply.
I realized early on, however, that I would be telling lies by being completely silent—and that would not honor Amílcar Cabral (author of the phrase “tell no lies”) or Chokwe Lumumba. So I decided that I would be true to my experience and represent myself, my role, and my organization as best I could in the timeline of our existence in the Black radical tradition we were born into. I would, when asked, provide my own and my organization’s political analysis about the City of Jackson and our work. I have not thrown stones, shade, or glitter. Our conditions and context are that bad.
The full Cabral quote is necessary in our work. He wrote: “Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.” Moving beyond solidarity to action, beyond mobilizing to organizing, beyond cultural activity to base building, requires memorizing this full quote, and, more importantly, putting it into practice.
The Future in the Present
Cooperation Jackson as an institution grew out of the Jackson-Kush Plan, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), and NAPO. The members of MXGM who cofounded Cooperation Jackson, along with a group of nonmembers, were all transplants to Jackson, Mississippi. Long before the organization was even thought of, a phase of our solidarity economy work had begun. For me, the new chapter of my life in Jackson was continuing the story of my life as an activist and organizer in New York and Atlanta, except I was not sure what I would do for an income after my contract as conference coordinator of the Jackson Rising New Economies Conference ended. For all of us, the work included getting ready for hosting a huge conference, studying, and participating in training on solidarity economics and cooperatives (regardless of whether we had studied or lived experience), building relationships in the community, outreach, door knocking, and meetings. This work began before the organization, whose name we borrowed (with permission) from Cooperation Texas. We knew there would need to be an institution to carry out the work and be the container for additional projects, co-ops, and coalition building. What we did not know was that launching the institution would end up getting fast-tracked after the untimely death of Mayor Chokwe Lumumba.
The leadership of Cooperation Jackson decided with limited funds and without nonprofit status to forgo any compensation for our work in order to acquire land in West Jackson. We did this with the explicit understanding that land is a basis for our freedom, independence, and self-determination. None of this work has been done to benefit any one family or small group of people. Our coordinating committee at the time knew we would need to have a core team to work full-time, and we decided to pay five of us $1,000 a month based on need, desire, and capacity. I point this out to say that real sacrifices must be made in our movement-building work. Moving to Jackson, further away from my family, network of supportive friends, and work opportunities, was no easy choice. But is what was needed to add capacity to my former political organization and to start this project. A stipend of $1,000 a month for a family of four (supplemented with food stamps, because Kali refused to get the stipend and worked on a full-volunteer basis!) was what we felt needed to happen at that historic juncture.
We created the nonprofit, in addition to a limited liability corporation, to raise charitable funds, establish a community land trust (CLT), and engage in cooperative and solidarity economy education and training. The majority of the funds raised by Cooperation Jackson have been used to acquire land explicitly to take it off of the speculative market. Short of directly liberating the land, the CLT is a direct way to operationalize the motto, “Free the Land.”
Cooperation Jackson’s work is anchored in West Jackson, particularly the Poindexter Park and Capital Neighbors sections of West Jackson. These are Black working-class/poor neighborhoods, with a high concentration of homeless individuals, arguably the highest concentration in Mississippi. The leadership of Cooperation Jackson, which includes me, chose this neighborhood for two reasons. First, because of its history. The Poindexter Park neighborhood is home to the original Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika; its house was located at 1148 Lewis Street. We wanted to be connected to this history and its living memory in the neighborhood. Also, in analyzing the city, we noted the high concentration of Black homeownership and available land in the neighborhood. This combination is important in our ongoing fight against land speculation and gentrification. We knew then and know even more now that such speculation is on the rise in West Jackson.
My life and work are not divorced from the people’s struggle. I live and work within the trenches of my neighborhood. Living here, doing this work, and struggling within and as part of a community has reminded me of my working-class background. It has deepened my anti-capitalist analysis, my commitment to centering our Black poor/ working-class community organizing, and the importance of centering Black women. Even though I live under similar conditions as my neighbors, I also fully recognize my privilege and the positionality.
I am willing to commit class suicide, and Jackson has reminded me in very uncomfortable ways that I can and will have to if I’m being true to revolutionary politics.
We made a choice to live and work in West Jackson instead of driving in from North Jackson or the surrounding suburbs. We made the choice to be here with our children, despite this being a neighborhood reminiscent of our own childhoods rampant with drugs, violence, and poverty in Los Angeles and New York. We want better for our children, and we want better for all of our people, but knowing the challenges of organizing Black working-class people from our own respective upbringings and experiences, we chose to live and work in this neighborhood, despite the challenges. We chose to develop relationships with other Black working-class people to build a more self-determined future. Many organizers become literally divorced from the people’s struggle in both their living conditions and their lack of organizing in poor communities. Outside of holding cultural events or identifying as a “Black organizer,” too many live their lives disengaged from the struggle of Black poor, working class, and even so-called middle-class everyday life.
When we moved to Jackson, our organization was in a period of great transition. The successful election of Chokwe Lumumba as the mayor of Jackson was extraordinary. Chokwe was a known entity to the people of Jackson and solidified some possibilities for organizing. However, although the people of Jackson knew Baba Chokwe Lumumba, they did not know MXGM or NAPO, let alone the Jackson-Kush Plan. This meant that it became too easy for a 180-degree shift to take place with an overreliance on electoral politics.
Telling no lies and claiming no easy victories must mean honestly assessing the lack of political education, leadership development, and Organizing for Self-Determination and Liberation 87 engagement in the hood, when there is no real campaign or project to engage “the people.” Getting out the vote is one thing, but building or rebuilding a base within the community is another. Based on our own work over the years, Cooperation Jackson’s leadership knows that we have a long road ahead to become deeply rooted in the community and gain the people’s trust. We recognized in 2015 that developing the solidarity economy component locally was more than simply introducing it to the base; we had to start from scratch. We had a relatively strong membership, but, by 2018, after the unfortunate splits, we had to rebuild that base.
While plenty of people want to say and think that this separation was based on personal differences, there were very fundamental differences politically and ideologically. We internally discussed the Kush plan, which was at a crossroads, and understood that as an effort at a coordinated strategy it was, in essence, dead. What then does an organization, an experimental project birthed from a long process that led to the strategy, do in such a situation? We agreed to keep doing what we started out doing and to continue even if whisper campaigns and threats to our work continued. We believe in the idea of letting our work speak for itself; it has to if we truly want to unplug from the nonprofit industrial complex! If we truly believe (as scary as it may feel) that the revolution will not be funded, we have to move forward with deeply grassroots base building in our communities. And despite our plethora of media, social media, and self-made media, the revolution will still not be televised. This is not to say that special funding or media will play no role in our work, but the hard work of building and sustaining radical movements cannot be reliant and dependent on either of these elements if we are to truly organize for people’s liberation.
While Cooperation Jackson’s mission and aim are to build a solidarity economy and realize economic democracy, we advocated and uplifted the three pillars of economic democracy, participatory democracy via people’s assemblies, and electoral politics (including the development of an independent political party). We did not, and do not, uplift simple electoral victories outside of these wider strategic concepts simply because it might be advantageous to “cloak” ourselves in Baba Chokwe’s political and organizational legacy. We did create an autonomous Cooperation Jackson People’s Assembly, which led to housing justice work, rent relief, an eviction hotline, and rental assistance fairs.
The people have to be prepared to make choices in their own ultimate interests. We hope the redirection of the assemblies will be a vehicle for these choices, and we hope they become truly autonomous from the city’s administration in order to exercise their independent agency. A truly independent people’s relationship with progressive government will mean criticisms, making demands, and organizing for change. Isn’t that the way an inside-outside strategy, one that ultimately works both within and outside of the system, works? Being in government and working with progressive local government is always an inside-outside strategy!
An inside-outside strategy can’t keep compromise on the outside for the protection of those on the inside! This was already my frustration with work in international and domestic human rights projects I’ve engaged in since 2009. From climate justice work to the Decade for People of African Descent (which ends in 2024), my position is that there is not a balance to be forged nor do we try to balance things for comfort’s sake. Inside-outside work is needed but it is also a contradiction. It is only okay when we recognize it as such and constantly work to check ourselves on which is the priority tactic or strategy to advance the needs of the people. Which aspect of the inside-outside dynamic, at any given moment, will best shift the balance of power? Most of the time, the outside protest and self-organization is, of course, most able to mobilize for lasting change.
We need to be discussing and heavily debating how grassroots organizations and movements engage in electoral politics. I question if the model I helped implement in Jackson had it right from its inception. I was challenged to think about this even more deeply while in Germany for a housing gathering, after a discussion turned into a fishbowl debate between me and a comrade from PAH (a national housing justice grassroots organization in Spain). The requirement for members of PAH is that they step down from the organizations they’ve been part of while they hold any elected office. For them, there is no blurred line between the movement and organizations, making demands in the interest of its membership, on the one hand, and, on the other, any elected officials coming out of that same movement while they are in office. I’m not completely sold on this being the only way to approach the potential conflicts that can arise or to protect each side. The premise of their model was taken for granted here though, and it led to major conflict.
Clearly and in general, the level of consciousness and organization of our people needs to be raised. Our strategic and tactical debates and our handling of internal and external contradictions needs to be sharpened. Joining MXGM taught me that it is our role to build what consciousness and organization exist within our communities. As organizers, it is our responsibility to not only meet the people where they are but also to engage in dialogues that will increase their capacity to connect their lived experiences with an analysis of the roots of our oppression. Creating a base of people committed to revolutionary transformation means including language that may not be familiar at first. It also means not assuming that our people aren’t ready.
We see in our everyday work that everyday working-class Black people in Jackson are ready to engage with and be introduced to radical ideas. We still maintain that this is why thousands of Black working-class people voted en masse for Chokwe Lumumba and Chokwe Antar Lumumba. Over the decades of Chokwe’s public works, particularly as a movement lawyer, the people of Jackson were introduced to his radical ideas and those of the New African Independence Movement (NAIM).
As for Cooperation Jackson’s leadership, we have been clear from day one that our views are minority views among the people. We are going to have to win people over to our politics and positions through demonstrated action, not just through the conviction of our arguments. Cooperation Jackson is and always was premised on making revolutionary nationalist rhetoric both material and concrete. From the perspective of the NAIM, clearly the level of consciousness and organization of our people needs to be raised. However, this doesn’t mean our communities aren’t clear about the conditions they face.
People know all too well their conditions, and our job is to pose solutions based on our collective experience, study, and ideology. Organizing people means supporting their voices to exert power, a force to push for the change they/we want to see in the city. This is a power that needs to exercise its muscles for when we don’t have a favorable mayor, a progressive mayor, or even a mayor who comes from local grassroots organizing. The muscle of the community has to be ready when the state government pushes back against our efforts to govern in a transformative way. Together, we must build the new model of sustainable urban living that we envision. Revolutionary organizing is about telling no lies and preparing our people for the struggles ahead. It entails providing leadership that offers a direction. Revolutionary leadership points out our failures, and collectively summarizes our history so we can learn from all of our efforts—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
I wholeheartedly believe in flexibility, but we can’t take mass appeal to mean becoming so broad and general that we contradict the fundamental principles that are at the very core of what grounds us. At this moment, with humanity and Mother Earth on the brink of destruction, our call for radical, revolutionary, transformative action must be loud and clear. Beyond revisionism, we must assert unapologetically anticapitalist, anti-extractivist, and anti-imperialist politics, policies, and processes.
This requires educating the people about the reality of what taking clear stances might mean, choosing to make sacrifices in the short term for the benefits in the long term. We must be clear about the limitations and traps of the system. We’ve talked at length about how radical movements have been undermined and destroyed in this pursuit, and how the Democratic Party has been the graveyard of social movements in the US. We’ve been clear and honest about what mayors can do and what the limitations of these positions are, particularly in Mississippi, where municipalities have few rights that cannot be overwritten by the state. This is the reality all over the South.
In my view, we were and are clear—crystal clear. We have a difficult road ahead to make Jackson a successful model that could illustrate how revolutionary nationalist politics can concretely serve our people. If our plan is going to serve the people, the base of Black working-class people, it will have to be led by strong organizations, not a fickle group of petty bourgeois drifters who will turn on us at the drop of a dime. With our understanding of contemporary capitalism and the United States, you can’t have it both ways. Making Jackson, Mississippi, a model of revolutionary governance and transformation requires Cooperation Jackson and hopefully other organizations and individuals to step up, be clear about their mission and their means, and prepare our people to fight.
With this clarity and the help of an organization committed to building the future in the present, we can make Ella Baker’s words a reality and transform the world through our own liberation.
PM Press owns the copyright of this book, and Bioneers excerpted it with permission.
