‘Berniecrats’ Support Jackson Movement but Continue to Ignore War and U.S. Empire

By Bruce Dixon / Black Agenda Report

When Chokwe Antar Lumumba stepped to the podium at the People’s Summit in early June this year it was no small matter. The young mayor-elect of Jackson, Mississippi, carried with him the moral and political heft of almost half a century’s organizing work in that state and around the country.

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. Eleven 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 Jackson with 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 U.S. 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 “People’s Summit” in Chicago this June. The People’s 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.

Berniecrat honchos like former Ohio state senator Nina Turner, and allied media spokespeople in The Nation, Mother Jones and elsewhere were only too glad to mine the movement credibility of Jackson, Mississippi, without mentioning the RNA, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, or Cooperation Jackson. They pretended, and allowed the ignorant among their followers to believe the movement in Jackson, Mississippi, was somehow part of a wave of organizing efforts inspired by Bernie Sanders, rather than the present phase of organizing efforts stretching back half a century.

The Berniecrats appear to have pocketed the movement cred of Jackson without giving Jackson or its principals a thing. They got to speak at the yearly event, but Jackson doesn’t have shot callers or even a spectator’s seat on the board of Our Revolution, the Berniecrat political operation, or any other line of visible input on its policies or positions. And those positions are highly questionable.

Paul Jay of The Real News Network was the first to observe that the Berniecrat “People’s Summit” featured speeches by Van Jones and other luminaries but offered no mention from the podium, no workshops and no presentations on foreign policy, on the military budget or the profound impact of global empire on everyday life in the U.S., which spends more on arms than the next eight or nine countries combined. Our Revolution president Nina Turner can talk endlessly about the human needs not being met in this country. But when Paul Jay interviewed her on her appointment to the presidency of Our Revolution he made the mistake of asking her a generic foreign policy question.

It was a real softball question, inviting Turner to link the insane amounts spent by the U.S. government on arms and the military –$13 billion aircraft carriers and trillion dollar F-35 aircraft — to the absence of funding for schools, infrastructure, social security, student loans and more. Turner utterly fumbled the question, as though she’d never thought out loud about it, and never wrote or spoke a stump speech line on the subject. We cannot know her thoughts, but she really has NOT spoken on the subject, perhaps because her mentor Bernie Sanders is pretty much mum on it as well, and Turner is committed to aping Bernie’s act as the formula for political success.

The sketchy foreign policy section of Our Revolution’s web site reflects the same ignorant or deliberate myopia as well, eschewing the mention of drone wars, the thousand plus military U.S. military bases, U.S. campaigns for regime change in Iran, Venezuela, Syria and elsewhere or Israeli apartheid. Let’s give Turner and the Berniecrats some credit. These are not stupid people. They know exactly what they’re saying and what they’re leaving out and they know exactly why they want to do this. They know their constituency is antiwar and they’re not. They aspire, like good leading Democrats everywhere to get the antiwar vote by default. Bernie Sanders, Nina Turner and Our Revolution want to play it like Barack Obama, who as a candidate got credit for being antiwar when he actually said he only opposed “dumb wars,” whatever that meant.

For whatever reason, this is the crew to which Chokwe Antar Lumumba has attached himself. This is the cause to which he has delivered the credibility of half a century’s struggle in Jackson, Mississippi. What does this mean?

Will the forces that elected Chokwe Antar Lumumba, including MXGM and participants in the Jackson movement be required to mute themselves on regime change in Venezuela, Iran, Syria and elsewhere? Will they have to toe the Berniecrat line and silence themselves on drone wars in Africa or the fact that the U.S. arms and trains every military except two or three on the African continent? Is silence on these issues part of the political DNA of the junior Lumumba’s circle, as it is of Nina Turner and the Berniecrats? What IS the real price of Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s affiliation with the Berniecrats, and what if anything can the Jackson movement expect to receive in return?

Should the Jackson movement even want to be claimed by these people?

Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a state committee member of the GA Green Party. He lives and works in Marietta, Ga., and can be reached via email at [email protected].