
If a city elected a member of the KKK as its mayor it would be front page news.
JACKSON, Miss. — On July 1, Chokwe Lumumba, an attorney with a long record of black radical activism, took office as mayor of Jackson. His inauguration took place in the gleaming convention center that sprang up four years ago in the state capital’s mostly deserted downtown.
A crowd of 2,500 packed the hall. The city councilors and other dignitaries, most of them African-American — Jackson, a city of 177,000, is 80 percent black — sat on the dais. The local congressman, Bennie Thompson, officiated. The outgoing mayor, Harvey Johnson, the city’s first black mayor, wished his successor well. The Mississippi Mass Choir gave a jubilant performance of “When I Rose This Morning.”
Finally, Lumumba, 66, approached the podium, pulling the microphone up to suit his tall, lean frame. “Well,” he said, “I want to say, God is good, all the time.”
The crowd replied. “God is good, all the time!”
“I want to say hey! And hello!”
The crowd called back, “Hey! Hello!”
Then Lumumba smiled and raised his right hand halfway, just a little above the podium, briefly showing the clenched fist of a Black Power salute.
“And I want to say, free the land!”
Applause rang out, bells chimed, wooden staffs rose up and people shouted back, “Free the land!” That’s the motto of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), the movement formed in 1968 that sought to turn the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina into an independent black nation.
Jackson’s new mayor is a former vice president of the RNA and a co-founder of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), a national group born in 1993 that seeks self-determination for African-Americans — whom it calls New Afrikans — “by any means necessary.” Like many shaped by the Black Power era, Lumumba long shunned formal politics, until a successful run for City Council in 2009. Now, as mayor, he is seeking to apply the tenets of the black radical tradition to the duties of running a city.
“Nowadays you’ve got to call yourself a ‘change agent’ or something, or else you’ll make people scared,” Lumumba told me when I visited Jackson in August. “But I am a revolutionary.”
We met in City Hall, a handsome 1846 structure that was built by slave labor and spared destruction in the Civil War because it served as a hospital for both sides. The mayor had just come from a budget hearing before the City Council.
Lumumba was dressed in a dark suit, and his short white hair was discreetly combed over. He is a compelling speaker, prone to long answers, but with the orator’s gift for making complex ideas sound colloquial. He sprinkles his sentences with “all right, OK” and has a sharp sense of humor, which he used to biting effect on his opponents in the mayoral debates.
Raised in Detroit, he was radicalized by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In 1969 he began law school at Wayne State University, gave up his given name, Edwin Taliaferro, for the “free name” Chokwe Lumumba — honoring the Chokwe ethnic group of Central Africa and the Congolese revolutionary Patrice Lumumba — and joined the RNA in Jackson, leaving law school for two years to dedicate himself to the cause. After graduating, he set up a practice in Detroit and represented the former Black Panther leaders Geronimo Pratt and Assata Shakur.


