Congratulations to Chokwe Lumumba! As a Southerner from the Deep South myself, let me say this is truly a groundbreaking event, and I welcome him winning the election. I hope he guards himself and remembers what happened to Medgar Evers, Marco McMillian, Emmett Till, Louis Allen, James Craig Anderson, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, George W. Lee, Lamar Smith, Mack Charles Parker, Paul Guihard and Vernon Dahmer.
All those listed were people, public figures or civil rights activists murdered in Mississippi. Medgar Evers and Marco McMillian were both elected to public office before being murdered. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and dumped in the Mississippi River.
— E.S.
BY KIRSTEN WEST
Former Ward 2 Councilman and Chokwe Lumumba, 65, is the new mayor of Jackson, Miss., winning the general election with 87 percent of the vote, reports Fight Back! News.
“I’m just delighted. I feel wonderfully well about the people and their vote. Our slogan has been the people must decide and the people gave us an outstanding mandate today for positive change in the city of Jackson,” Lumumba said. “We intend to work diligently and put all our hearts and efforts into that and we’re going to be calling upon the people to work with us. We’re not working by ourselves.”
As previously reported by NewsOne, Lumumba served four years on the Jackson City Council before running for mayor. He spent part of the ’70s and ’80s as vice-president of the Republic of New Afrika, an organization which advocated for “an independent predominantly black government” in the southeastern United States and reparations for slavery.
“The provisional government of Republic of New Afrika was always a group that believed in human rights for human beings,” Lumumba told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “I think it has been miscast in many ways. It has never been any kind of racist group or ‘hate white’ group in any way…. It was a group which was fighting for human rights for black people in this country and at the same time supporting the human rights around the globe.”
As an attorney, Lumumba has represented legendary activist, poet, actor and Hip-Hop artist Tupac Shakur in several cases, and his godmother, Assata Shakur, whom Lumumba calls a “Black Panther heroine.”
Assata, formerly Joanne Chesimard, was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army.
She sought political asylum in Cuba after being accused of killing New Jersey state trooper, Werner Foerster, in 1977, and recently became the first woman placed on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list. Medical evidence proved that it was “anatomically impossible” for Assata to kill Foerster after being shot by state trooper, James Harper, and forensic evidence proved that she had not fired a weapon. Even with that knowledge, the FBI recently raised the bounty on her head from $1 million to $2 million dollars.
The Espresso Stalinist 