Tag: Chokwe Antar Lumumba

In African lore, rain means good fortune. So when Chokwe Antar Lumumba announced that he was running to fill his father’s mayoral seat on a rainy day in March, it was reassurance that The People’s Movement would forge ahead. Still grieving for his father, Chokwe Antar strapped a city, a people, The People, on his back and vowed to fight for the progress set into motion by Chokwe Lumumba and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. And though Chokwe Antar lost the mayoral election in a close run-off on April 22, he understands, just as his father before him, that one battle does not decide the war.

On March 8, hundreds of people, especially from the South and particularly Jackson, Miss., came to mourn and reflect on the life of Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, who died suddenly on Feb. 25 at the age of 66. Starting with a March 5 tribute at the historically Black college, Jackson State University, Mayor Lumumba’s life was memorialized for several days, ending with the masses lining the streets for his burial motorcade. A collection of tributes to the late great mayor of Jackson, Miss.

The election is on April 8, and without the funds needed to support Antar’s campaign today, we risk the gains made in the city – not just the infrastructure building and the spirit of cooperation but the work done in City Council, including getting the first ever anti-racial profiling ordinance passed, and all the work that is poised to happen: the economic undergirding of the most vulnerable and the fair application of the law that will ensure a truly safer city.

When a Black radical dies in Mississippi, one should never accept at face value the state’s word on the cause of death. When that revolutionary Black man dies soon after becoming mayor of the state’s capital and largest city, history and reason compel us to put assassination first on our list of possibilities.

In a stunning turn of events, Chokwe defeated Jackson’s three-term incumbent and first African American mayor, Harvey Johnson, the white Republican-financed young Black businessman Jonathan Lee, and others to win leadership of the city with the second highest percentage of Black people in the United States.