His father arrived in Mississippi with the Republic of New Afrika in 1971. The RNA was a target of COINTELPRO, so federal and local authorities promptly provoked an August 1971 shootout at RNA’s headquarters which took the life of a police lieutenant and wounded an FBI agent. 11 RNA members were charged and some served long terms in prison. Chokwe Lumumba assisted in their legal defense and after graduating law school in 1975 he settled permanently in Jackson Mississippi.
In 1990, Lumumba was a founding member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. In the 27 years since its founding MXGM members have been at the forefront of practically every movement upsurge and mass mobilization against police terror. In 2012 MXGM pulled together the initial report documenting the daily toll of police, private security and vigilante killings of black people, providing the research methodology, the initial facts and the inspiration for deeper inquiry and for the ongoing mobilizations against police terror and impunity which have taken place in the last few years and given birth to the Black Lives Matter movement, among much else.
Some time in the mid 1990s, MXGM invited those among its membership who were willing and able to relocate to Mississippi and take part in the collective work of social, economic and political transformation. By then the elder Lumumba had already sunk his roots deep into Mississippi. He was a peoples lawyer, frequently defending not just poor and indigent local clients, but political prisoners including Mutulu Shakur, Fulani Sunni Ali, Geronimo Pratt and Assata Shakur, and other members of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. A tireless advocate of human rights around the world, he also found time to coach basketball and baseball teams, and to organize community cleanups and issues forums. Lumumba helped pull together disaster relief in the wake of Katrina, and took part in the process that eventually drafted the Jackson Kush Plan, a document outlining a process of economic, social and political transformation of Mississippi and surrounding areas by founding and fostering collectively owned enterprises – cooperatives, and relying on quarterly peoples assemblies to solicit popular participation in the movement and in governance.
The collective around the elder Lumumba chose to run its political candidates as Democrats, likely because in Mississippi where Republicans are openly and unmistakably the White Man’s Party black voters don’t need much convincing to vote for Democrats.
Lumumba was elected to Jackson’s city council and became the city’s mayor in 2013. Ambitious plans were laid for a national conference linking a new entity, Cooperation Jacksonwith global and local movements for economic and social transformation like the Mondragon Cooperative movement in Europe and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a longstanding movement of black farmers in the US South. Mayor Chokwe Lumumba died a few months into his first term as mayor. A hastily organized campaign to elect his son Chokwe Antar Lumumba to fill his unexpired term failed in 2014, but the junior Lumumba was elected in primary and general elections this summer.
That’s the weight of historic movement clout and credibility Jackson mayor-elect Chokwe Antar Lumumba brought with him to the misleadingly named “Peoples Summit” in Chicago this June. The Peoples Summit is actually the annual invitation-only gathering of Berniecrats, where the faithful gather to be inspired, to hear success stories of local movements inspired by Bernie’s run for president, and to take part in workshops on how to organize and manage local campaigns.