He never could quite understand the United States of America had already become his beloved vision of a Republic of New Afrika. [Republic Of New Afrika” Arrives In Jackson, Mississippi, VDare.com, 9-24-2013]
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| R.I.P Chokwe Lumumba |
Not just tiny region in the Southeast portion of the nation, but the entire country.
There's no need to utilize militant language anymore, ending speeches with calls of "Free the land."
This land is your land, no longer my land.
Elected mayor of an 86 percent black city (the capital of red, white, and Dixie, Mississippi), Lumumba was an unrepentant black nationalist, in a nation where such a term is a distinct oxymoron.
To be an American patriot in 2014 is to believe completely in the moral superiority of blacks (conversely, to believe vociferously that any notion of "white interests" is demeaning to humanity and the concept of social justice); to be an American dissident in 2014 is to believe universal suffrage is merely a gateway to universal suffering, with the failure of democracy a reminder nature can never be brushed aside in the pursuit of abstractions like equality and civil rights.
Poor Chokwe Lumumba.
A nation built upon a piece a paper - that can be interpreted to mean virtually anything, bless those white men in powdered wigs who wrote it! - can also fall for anything when such lofty concepts of freedom, liberty, and equality are pitched, with people like the late Chokwe Lumumba never fully understanding the American people had willingly struck out.
Willingly.
Struck out.
The belief in black moral superiority is as American as apple pie at this point, so why the need for a separate black nation in Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama?
Though Chokwe Lumumba didn't realize it in life, it's in death the obvious is clear: he represented the last American.
Yes, Chokwe Lumumba was the last American.
Elected to be the top executive official in a dying, decaying, dilapidated capital city (built and sustained by a people no longer
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| An image from Chokwe's funeral... yes, that is America (86 percent black Jackson, Mississippi to be exact) |
The New York Times wrote an unintentionally hilarious eulogy of Lumumba, whose humor will fly over the heads of most of the individuals living in the landmass known as the United States of America. [Jackson Mourns Mayor With Militant Past Who Won Over Skeptics, 3-9-14]:
Many people here still do not entirely know what to make of the mayor with the unusual name and even more unexpected résumé, who proudly embraced the term “militant” and to many was still the same dashiki-wearing firebrand who first came to prominence advocating an independent black nation in the South in the early 1970s.
But when Jackson said goodbye to Mayor Chokwe Lumumba this weekend, blacks and whites, for a change, largely united in mourning an unlikely experiment that ended when he died last month, apparently of a heart attack, at age 66, after only eight months in office.
To many in the capital’s black majority, the mayor was still the passionate advocate for black causes who over a 40-year career represented the rapper Tupac Shakur and pressed the state to retry the killer of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
To the white business establishment, he had evolved into a surprisingly pragmatic politician who promised to fix the potholes and the sewers and passed a sales tax increase to help do it. “It was very much like Nixon to China,” said Leland Speed, 81, the chairman of the EastGroup Properties real estate investment firm, who admits he did not vote for Mr. Lumumba.
“The expectations when he was elected were not very high, and he surprised everybody pretty dramatically.”
What is no longer much debated here, from the tumbledown shacks in Jackson’s hollowed core to the colonnaded mansions and gated communities in the largely white northeast, is the sense that Mr. Lumumba was moving a city ravaged by decades of poverty, crime and white flight in the right direction. What is less clear in this city of half a million, the state’s largest, is what comes next.
Mr. Lumumba first arrived in Jackson in 1971 as a leader of the Republic of New Afrika, the 1960s-vintage liberation movement that called for billions in reparations payments to blacks and an independent black-majority nation in what are now the states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina.
Two years earlier, the Detroit native had changed his name from Edwin Taliaferro to Chokwe (pronounced SHOW-kway), for an African tribe that resisted slavery, and Lumumba, for Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader who was ousted and executed in 1961 by C.I.A.-backed forces.
While the candidates in last spring’s mayoral primary initially focused on Jackson’s daunting problems, chiefly soaring violent crime and crumbling infrastructure, Mr. Lumumba’s radical past quickly became an issue.
A video surfaced of a speech he made in 2009 describing his election to City Council that year as part of the process of “seizing power from the ground up.” The video proved, as one north-side resident put it in a local weekly, that Mr. Lumumba was “still a paranoid radical who hates America.” Mr. Lumumba dismissed the jibe.
“I feel kind of comfortable being militant,” he told reporters. “Fannie Lou Hamer was a militant. Medgar Evers was a militant. Martin Luther King was a militant. In pursuit of good interests, there is nothing wrong with it.” He finished second in the primary and handily won a runoff, despite losing badly in predominantly white precincts. Within city limits, Jackson is 80 percent black.
At his inauguration last June, Mr. Lumumba called for unity, then raised his fist and shouted the New Afrika slogan, “Free the land!” “Suburbs freak out,” was the headline in one newspaper.
But if Mr. Lumumba still harbored radical ambitions, Jackson had more pressing problems: dilapidated buildings, abandoned lots, a rising murder rate, a quarter of the city living in poverty and an estimated $2 billion in urgent infrastructure repairs.
He increased water and sewer rates and began a push for a 1 percent sales tax increase for infrastructure, selling the plan in town halls across the city. Many white Jacksonians cite the meeting at Christ United Methodist Church, in the heart of the white community, as pivotal.
“They expected this radical and they went to the town meeting and what they found was a grandfather,” said Todd Allen, 50, a college recruiter who was mourning the mayor’s loss over a Southern Pecan ale at a downtown bistro. “I’m upset that he’s gone because I really believed in him,” he added.
“That man had some chutzpah.” The sales tax passed with a staggering 90 percent of the vote. Reporters often noted that the mayor was disarmingly soft-spoken.
Former Governor Haley Barbour, a Republican, described him as “gracious.” Former Gov. William Winter, a Democrat, admitted he misjudged him. “I was afraid that he would divide our city,” Mr. Winter said at the funeral on Saturday. “I could not have been more wrong.”
Yet the mayor never renounced his black nationalist ideals, an incongruity on display at the memorial services over the weekend.
At City Hall on Friday, Coltrane Chimurenga of the militant Dec. 12 movement, in long dreadlocks, black leather coat and dark glasses, ended his speech shouting “Freedom or death!”
On Saturday, Mr. Lumumba’s son and political heir apparent, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, 31, delivered a barn-burning eulogy, closing with a raised fist and shouts of “Free the land! Free the land! By any means necessary!”
At the cemetery later, the entrance was flanked by two hook and ladder trucks, ladders extended in an arc. A giant American flag was draped from one, the red, black and green of the New Afrika movement from the other.
It may be the ultimate irony of Mr. Lumumba’s life that his most significant concrete achievement as mayor was the passage of a regressive tax to fix potholes.
“He has a place he wanted to go and he wanted to fly there on a plane,” his policy director, Walter Zinn, said in an interview.
“But there was no plane, just a bus, and the bus don’t work. The tragedy is, he died fixing the bus.”
As for the father, while his dreams for Jackson and Mississippi remain a mystery, being the progressive black mayor of a black-majority Southern capital ultimately may not have been a far cry from the black self-determination he once sought.
On Friday night, long after the crowds had gone, an honor guard of the Jackson police, a department once in league with the Ku Klux Klan, carried the mayor’s body out of a City Hall that was built by slaves in 1846.
His family and close aides watched silently under the towering Doric columns as Jackson’s radical mayor, wearing a gold and white dashiki, left City Hall for the last time.If slaves could be instructed how to build the City Hall in Jackson, why can't descendants of those slaves maintain or sustain a civilization white flight bequeathed them... oh never mind.
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| Hinds County Supervisor Kenny Stokes believes a nefarious conspiracy killed the great Lumumba |
The pot holes in the streets of Jackson, Mississippi are filled with more hope than can be spoken of for what the post-racial nightmare America has become, with few daring to notice those "ghosts of civil war martyrs" are scaring away civilization wherever blacks take over.
No matter.
The America Dream came true in Jackson, Mississippi.
That Chokwe Lumumba's earthly body left City Hall in Jackson wearing a gold and white dashiki (the flag of New Afrika present at his burial) should bring a smile to the face of any dissident held hostage in the open FEMA camp that is contemporary America -- where your free to go as you please, but not to think as you please.
Though the New York Times would have you believe Lumumba was uniting the city, it is in his death you see what life is like for that 14 percent white population of Jackson; conspirarcy theories surrounding the death of New Afrika's most famous son are spreading with each racially-charged rumor based on nothing more than resentment of whites. [Supervisor Kenny Stokes says Chokwe Lumumba was killed, wants autopsy performed, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, 3-2-14]:
Hinds County Supervisor Kenny Stokes says he believes Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba was killed, and now he wants answers.
During an event at Battlefield Park, Stokes told a crowd that the events, "We gonna ask a question: Who killed the mayor?"
After his speech, he told WAPT that he believes Lumumba was murdered, but he admitted that he had no proof. Hinds County Coroner Sharon Grisham-Stewart told The Clarion-Ledger on Wednesday that Lumumba died of natural causes at 4:55 p.m. Tuesday at St. Dominic Hospital.
She said she was not able to elaborate because of privacy laws. Neither family members or city officials have claimed any kind of foul play surrounding the mayor's death. Nevertheless, Stokes is not satisfied.
"We gonna ask a question: Who killed the mayor? We'd feel a lot better if there was an autopsy," Stokes said at the beginning of his speech. "First they say it's not a heart attack and not a stroke, then what was it? You don't just die like that and you're healthy."
"So many of us feel, throughout the city of Jackson, that the mayor was murderd," Stokes told a WAPT reporter after his speech. "I'm not going to sugar coat it. I'm not going to try to say it in a way where the people feel, you know, that we should have said it in another way."
Stokes, who served on the city council before becoming a supervisor, said he was suspicious because people who visited Lumumba at the hospital left that day saying the mayor was doing better and in good spirits.
"If he was in any way kind of in trouble, people would have stayed there," Stokes said. Stokes points to the multiple reasons given by individuals about how the mayor died, including reports of heart attack and stroke. "So how did he die? You don't die just by saying 'I'm sick,'" Stokes reasoned with the WAPT reporter.
"If they are saying it was cancer, cancer is a slow killer. It wouldn't have killed him like that." Stokes, who is well known for his unorthodox and often outrageous antics, was unequivocal in his beliefs about how the mayor died.
"I believe that someone killed him. Now I can't prove it, but I'm going to say it," Stokes said. "That's how I feel in my heart, and a lot of other people feel he was killed."Though inequality is fact of life, America was founded on the notion that all men are created equal.
Despite mountains of empirical evidence to the contrary, Hinds County Supervisor Kenny Stokes is your equal.
Well, morally, he is your better.
Poor Chokwe Lumumba.
He died believing shouts of "free the land" were still needed; he never realized the Republic of New Afrika hadn't just arrived in Jackson, but throughout all of America.
From Detroit to Macon, Georgia, the land is free.
And though blacks are politically in charge of thousands of cities (large and small) across America, one familiar refrain is always: whitey, we need your help.... well, mainly your money.
R.I.P Chokwe Lumumba: You were the last American.
