Building Black Political Power in Jackson, Mississippi
Shawty, pop that pussy if you wanna
Candied yams and collard greens
Pocket full of stones, riding clean
Let me tell you bout this country shit”
-Big K.R.I.T. (2010) from Country Shit
(this is adapted from a longer essay)
Jackson is the capital city of the state of Mississippi and was named after the seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson (who was responsible for the Trail of Tears—one of many forced relocation marches for people who were Indigenous to the land—and a slave owner). Mississippi is also the state that many of my family members migrated from during the six decades of Black movement known as the Great Migration in the twentieth century to get away from the apartheid of the Jim Crow South. I have been to Mississippi several times. While Jim Crow laws have been abolished, the oppression and acrimony towards Black people still hangs as heavy in the air as humidity in the Mississippi summer.
Mississippi is a place that I associate with the past—a place my family and many others like us escaped from, never to look back. Although the state has produced many whom I have drawn inspiration from, such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Medgar Evers, and Big K.R.I.T., I would never have thought it could show me a way to a better future. However, as it turns out, I was very wrong. One of the reasons for my change in mindset: an organization in the state capital known as Cooperation Jackson.
Cooperation Jackson is an organization stationed in Jackson, Mississippi, focused on building Black self-determination through the Jackson-Kush Plan. This plan was developed, in part, by two community coalitions: the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) and the Jackson People’s Assembly. The latter group was formed after Hurricane Katrina, and MXGM was heavily involved in its founding.
Founded in 2014, Cooperation Jackson joined the Jackson-Kush network as an organization dedicated to building Black political power—a dangerous thing to attempt in the United States, as cofounder Kali Akuno has noted—even in a place like Jackson, which is 82 percent Black. It’s worth underscoring that Cooperation Jackson’s methods are rooted in Black consciousness, which aims for the liberation of all people, especially the marginalized, no matter their race.
Cooperation Jackson proposes to place the ownership and control of the means of production in the hands of Black working-class Jacksonites; advance an ecologically regenerative economy; democratically transform the political economy of the city, state, and region; and advance the goals of the Jackson-Kush Plan, which they see as a prelude to the radical decolonization and transformation of the United States through “an initiative to build a base of autonomous power in Mississippi concentrated in Jackson…that can serve as a catalyst for the attainment of Black self-determination and the democratic transformation of the economy.”
This is a lot to take in, and it would be tough to summarize all of Cooperation Jackson’s planned activities, which are supported by four independent branches within the organization: a network of local mutual aid cooperatives, a start-up development center, a cooperative school and training center, and a cooperative credit union and bank. While many of the projects are still in various stages of development, one on-the-ground program that particularly interests me is Cooperation Jackson’s very first offering, now a decade old: the Sustainable Communities Initiative. The program supports green worker cooperatives, construction of an eco-village, development of food sovereignty, and “just transition” policy reform.
The term just transition came out of North American trade union and community struggles in the 1970s and 1980s, centered around protecting workers in polluting industries who were losing their livelihoods due to environmental regulations. It transformed into an organizing framework through mid-1990s alliance-building between the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers union and environmental justice organizations, especially Indigenous-, Black-, and Latinx-led groups. Since then, environmental and climate justice movements, along with trade unions, anti-globalization movements, and others, have used the just transition model to identify links between the systemic issues they are fighting against.
The Sustainable Communities Initiative focuses on the community of West Jackson, which is facing rising pressures of gentrification. The nearby Medical Corridor, a beneficiary of federal investment after Hurricane Katrina, increasingly encroaches on the longstanding neighborhoods of West Jackson. The Medical Corridor is an anchor project driven by the University of Mississippi. Once funding for the corridor was solidified, it enabled three more real estate developments in the city: the Downtown-One Lake Redevelopment initiative, the development of a sports complex in Downtown Jackson, and the Capital Complex Bill. West Jackson, which is a working-class Black community (92 percent Black), is adjacent to Downtown Jackson, the political and economic heart of the state of Mississippi. This follows the ominous pattern of urban renewal in the United States, whereby communities with relatively low levels of political and economic power are displaced from their communities and displaced of their land, in the interests of drawing more capital to the urban elite. Dr. Mindy Fullilove details this process and the effect it has on communities, especially Black communities, in her 2004 book, Root Shock. In response, Cooperation Jackson Network (CJN) decided to create more spaces and institutions that are democratically and cooperatively controlled by the people who currently live in West Jackson. They have also been influential and effective in shaping local electoral politics and helped elect the late mayor Chokwe Lumumba, who was closely associated with the network and whose municipal policy-making echoed the tenets of just transition.
In their 2014 book on community governance, E. Fafotto and A. Fung describe embedded public deliberation as the means by which “[groups] of citizens collectively reflect on and confront the views of other participants.” This definition encapsulates the kind of discourse that is the bedrock of Cooperation Jackson’s four institutions, both in mission and in methodologies, such as people’s assemblies. These assemblies are extensions of the secret prayer circles that enslaved Africans in the United States, including in Mississippi, organized to create spaces of humanity and community; these circles were also used to plan and organize resistance against the brutal slave-based economy. Later, activists used assemblies to organize against white supremacists and support the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. The fact that the grounding concepts of these assemblies have endured for centuries in Black communities in Mississippi speaks to the discursive power of these methods of assembly and organizing. Cooperation Jackson has been able to draw on these historical concepts and use them to galvanize and empower people to drive both coordinative and communicative discourses—and demand policies capable of altering and creating institutions. Its influence can be seen in the establishment of participatory municipal budgeting in Jackson, which allows residents to directly control parts of the city budget and people’s assemblies—a policy that helped elect both Lumumba and later his son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the city’s current mayor.
However, Cooperation Jackson takes things further: they want to cultivate a public replete with political actors. One of the institutions they are establishing is a school for all ages, aimed at nurturing political consciousness along with the skills necessary to create a regenerative and more democratic economy. The organization is building what V. Schmidt describes as “discursive institutions,” created, modified, and used by the same “agents.”
Even though I am very much a city person, there is a saying that Black Chicagoans are just people from Mississippi in puffy coats. Because I was around my parents and family members (who picked up Southern accents from their parents) a lot as a child, I naturally spoke with a thick drawl despite being born and raised a thousand miles away from Montgomery County, Mississippi. People often made fun of the way I spoke and even called me “country,” which made me feel ashamed. For some reason, I saw the ways of Mississippi and the South as backward, antiquated, and ineffectual. As I learned more about the struggles that have continued there, as well as organizations like Cooperation Jackson, I realized the error and arrogance of thinking that the North was any better. I have tremendous respect for those who stayed and even more for those who returned to make Mississippi, America, and the world a better place. I am glad I could overcome that shame and ignorance to finally realize that, as Andre 3000 said upon being booed at the 1995 Source Awards for winning New Group of the Year, “The South got something to say.”
Cooperation Jackson has only existed as its own organization for ten years, and yet it is on track to make meaningful changes in Jackson, illustrating how local and historical context matters when shaping movements that spring from new(ish) ideas. Cooperation Jackson has built collective and collaborative power that is deeply rooted in deliberation; the organization effectively acts as what Fagotto and Fung call a “deliberative entrepreneur,” an individual (or group) who promotes the use of practices and processes such as facilitator training, networking with organizations, and identifying issues that can be solved through deliberative treatments. While these groups and people are key to introducing those tools to communities, government and organizational support (generally in the form of NGOs) are necessary to “anchor” deliberation within a given community, including shaping government support to the community’s needs.
Still, as a Black American aware of the violent backlash that prospering Black communities can face, I worry for the people of Jackson because I know what happened in places like Tulsa in 1921, Rosewood in 1923, and Philadelphia in 1985. It is dangerous for Black people in America to advocate for ideas that go against the mainstream narratives of Black inferiority and cultural identity. The fact that Black people are advocating for and creating different methods of governance that are rooted in principles of balance with the planet and the removal of power and energy “from the dominant male economic and power development model, which has … accelerated destruction … of life on the planet,” as Zo Randriamaro says is, sadly and unfortunately, asking for trouble.
I am curious to see how a Black-led initiative from a Black-led place can build popular recognition and support in general discourse, and survive the attacks certain to come if the organization can gain wider political and economic power. One path forward to ameliorate these fears is to lean into the intersectionality of the just transition framework, which has fostered international solidarity by embracing concepts such as ecosocialism and environmental justice, expanding from a labor-focused enterprise to a global movement that can adapt to different contexts. Even if we are not using the same nomenclature, people worldwide are building networks of solidarity through mutual aid, awareness, and successful campaigns against the status quo of an extractive economy. In the past few years, we have seen broad coalitions of people paying attention to and protesting against injustices that have direct ties to colonialism, be it the Black Lives Matter protests or the protests against the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian populations in Gaza and the West Bank, even over government backlash. These actions are of the utmost importance because, as Akuno shared at a September 2024 talk at The New School, “If we want to live in a world that is not defined by capitalist social relationships and commodity production and commodity relations, we have to take an active role in undoing those relationships and creating a new set of relationships, you know, that actually serve people’s needs.”
In centering discourse, coalition, and education in its approach to political change, Cooperation Jackson is sowing the seeds for a resilient, regenerative organization—a discursive institution that might have something to say, and the power to say it loud, for decades to come.
also posted on: https://publicseminar.org/2024/11/cooperation-jackson-black-consciousness/
