From Memphis to Jackson: The Truth About Policing of Black People in the American South
Whether in Memphis, Tennessee or Jackson, Mississippi, the worst thing the contemporary Black freedom movement can do is accept outdated political ideas and strategies as expressed by the Black political class that is actually responsible for policing and imprisoning ordinary Black people all over the American south.
Apartheid. Separate and unequal. Disenfranchisement. Jim Crow. Unconstitutional. Racist. These are many of the adjectives that have been thrown about to describe Mississippi’s House Bill 1020 (HB 1020) that is headed for a vote in the Senate after recently passing through the House of Representatives. The Mississippi Legislative Black Carcass, a degenerate body of lawmakers who have been on ventilators since before the pandemic, gathered in the rotunda of the legislature in a repugnant display of “opposition” reminiscent of 1955. Except they would have not been welcome nor could they have been voted to office in 1955. Some Black misleaders will “Emmett Till” we recognize who actually holds the power and authority in our Black communities. For some time now, it is not white lynch law but actually Black professionals and elites that have their Black hands around Black toilers’ necks.
I know some of you would say within American governments, and outside them at the grassroots, isn’t White fascism real and growing? Aren’t right-wing White politicians in State and local governments proposing some reactionary laws, whether they pass or not? Yes. They are! Even far more of consequence than this legislation around the capitol business district. But if you are preparing to fight fascism, you don’t vote against it, you prepare to fight it in the streets. And only a chump wouldn’t realize that the Black political class is preparing to fight the Black grassroots in the streets, using the police state to carry it out.
At the center of the controversy concerning the bill, is a proposal to establish a court system and expand the Capitol Police that is presided over by the white-led Mississippi Public Safety Commissioner, within the Capitol Corridor Improvement District (CCID) that was established in 2017 with the support and approval of many democrats in the legislature and the Black-led municipal government of Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba. The bill includes proposals for two judges, two prosecutors, and two public defenders to address the back log of cases that currently languish in the Hinds County Circuit Court. A major point of contention over the bill is that the judges who hear cases and the prosecutors who try the accused in the proposed court will be appointed by the Mississippi Supreme Court Chief Justice and State Attorney General, respectively. Those who support the county and city government officials who are overwhelmingly Black, claim that this is an affront to Black political power and is a subversion of the criminal justice system’s Black autonomy.
Two things can be true at the same time. Black people don’t need white racists policing us. We also don’t need self-professed Black leaders in hierarchical government who overwhelmingly police us to death now shouting how their individual power is being usurped because they are Black. There are other possibilities for empowerment but we don’t need miseducation that stokes awareness while referring us to white led power structures in Black communities that have already been dismantled.
Further, we don’t need “black power” that kills and mutilates and warehouses our bodies telling us the great insult is when white folks do it. These are the nonsensical formulations of Black people who have a lot of doubt about ordinary Black people’s loyalty to their heinous regimes. As we should.
Black sovereignty is not about who gets to police, jail, and kill ordinary Black folks — this is the self-confessed bankruptcy of Black politicians and police chiefs and judges today. People who don’t make a mockery out of holding an African worldview would know this already.
Black autonomy is the self-directed power of the Black common people even where Black people hold official government posts. That is the stage we have arrived. This is why Mayor Lumumba’s administration wet their pants in anticipation of the national rebellion against police murder in 2020 coming to Jackson, Mississippi. Perhaps it did not arrive as a result of his service to his white friends in the State Capitol and manufacturing an empty black consciousness he continues to live by.
The Black political class of Jackson Mississippi are talking all kind of bull jive exactly because ordinary Black folks in Mississippi actually think broad mindedly. The national trends are clear to the Black grassroots.
Less Than a Month Ago
Less than a month ago, the killing of Tyre Nichols by five Black police officers in Memphis, Tennessee was broadcast on national television. These brutes swung their batons, stomped his head, kicked him about the body, and used his head as if it was a punching bag resulting in his death. C.J. Davis, a Black woman police chief in Memphis responded that this was wrong — though she had been part of a corrupt cover up of sex crimes in the Atlanta police force, and had been police chief previously in Durham, North Carolina where crime and murder was (and still is) out of control. How can anyone be encouraged by Davis’s handling of police murder in Memphis when her entire career has been marred by institutionally carrying out brutality and mass incarceration? Do these basic facts sound like Black control of law enforcement or sovereign politics is a new thing?
There have been Black mayors and police chiefs in Jackson, Mississippi for over two decades. With these keywords, meant to electrify racial consciousness, does the Black political class prioritize mobilizing only the elderly and history professors? Do they believe that everyday Black people think they are held back by white folks? Where are white folks central to the power structure where African Americans live? Genuine radical democratic political thought must clarify all of this.
The Vote and Black Elected Officials Will Not Save Us
Many continue to subscribe to the idea that the way to secure Black power is by electing local officials, including Black police chiefs and sheriffs, as theorized by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton in Black Power (1967). In 2012, certain Black nationalist activists, placing Carmichael’s and Hamilton’s theory into practice, were responsible for managing the campaign of the first Black sheriff elected in Hinds County. These activists, paid by the left block of capital to contaminate and misdirect Black liberation politics, celebrated this as a major victory for Black people. Since that time, it has been Black sheriffs who have presided over the jail where a number of Black people have been beaten, maimed, or killed. In 2023, the idea that Black autonomy and power is secured through the vote and elected officials is asinine and has been disproven time and time again throughout the last three to five decades of history.
It was Wilson Goode, the Black mayor of Philadelphia, who dropped a bomb on the MOVE organization dedicated to Black freedom and ecology in 1985, not his white predecessor Frank Rizzo who was odious and fascistic in his own right. A Black united front got Mayor Goode elected (preposterously including Black capitalists and Black radicals).
Despite what those who yap about “a New Jim Crow” like to project, it was the Black political class in cities like Washington, D.C., Detroit, Cleveland, and Atlanta who presided over the mass incarceration of Black people as the heroin and crack epidemics took hold in Black locales in the 1970s and 1980s.
Regardless of what Black politicians and those activists who coalesce around them say about Black self-determination and power, they never have been and never will be for direct self-government of ordinary people. They will never endorse Black commoners arriving on their own authority in a confrontation with totalitarian Black rulers who claim to be the embodiment of ordinary Black people’s freedom. We should not seek nor expect such an endorsement.
When we consider the meaning of totalitarian, we don’t just use it to mean a dictatorship. We need to consider it as a manipulative psychology. Which social class leads the Black freedom movement? Why does the aspiring Black elite think they own the identity of the Black community? How did selfish power-grabbers above society come to define what it means to be “Black” and what is a threat to Black people?
The Black Political Class Versus Ordinary Black People
Any casual observer of what has been happening in Hinds County, Mississippi generally and the city of Jackson specifically for the past several years knows that ordinary Black people have no dog in this HB 1020 fight. In recent years, at least nine Black people have been killed by the Jackson Police Department (JPD), led by a Black mayor, Black police chief, with a majority Black police force. Additionally, a Black officer was caught on video with his hands around a Black youth’s neck in a routine stop in Jackson.
The Hinds County Sheriff’s Department and JPD have collaborated to establish a regional Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team to subordinate the Black multitudes and to be on standby in the event of a rebellion against the Black-led police state. The JPD and city council collaborated with Donald Trump’s Department of Justice initiative Project Empowering Jackson Eliminating Crime Together (EJECT) that sought to lock up and banish those charged and convicted of non-violent gun possession. After years of barbarity at the Hinds County Justice Center in Raymond, Mississippi, the federal government recently took over the management of the pre-trial detention facility.
There is no question of collaboration that kills and subordinates by Mayor Lumumba’s Jackson city government and the majority Black Hinds County Board of Supervisors with white authorities at the state and/or federal level. So why the spasmodic production about how the white authorities can’t be trusted? There is a famous song: “red, black, and green… think about it and you will know what I mean.” If we think about it, we would see that a cheap Black Nationalism has been used to manipulate Black people while white and Black law enforcement officials are in constant contact and collaboration. Why do Black collaborators and killers get to chatter about what is empowering for Black people?
Jackson’s Black political classes opposition to HB 1020 is a fight to have a monopoly over jailing and abusing working-class Black people. They are not fighting for Black people to be free. They are defining Black freedom as their right to degrade, criminalize, and repress the Black multitudes in Jackson and Hinds County. All of the talk about opposition to racism and conjuring up ghosts from Mississippi’s past is nothing more than a misdirection to obscure the fact that the predominantly Black political system in Hinds County administers racism more efficiently than any white regime could and they intend to keep it that way.
Ghosts of Mississippi
Everyone knows about the infamous racial history of Mississippi, but what many have yet to realize is the way that this history is continually used as a weapon to lend legitimacy to Black authoritarian rulers acting in the name, and claiming to represent the interests, of Black people. Their go-to political maneuver is to conjure up the ghosts of Mississippi’s racist past in the interest of preserving power for themselves while working to suppress any independent Black voices that deviate from the adopted narrative that whatever is happening is because of racism. Especially, in an outmoded and dismantled form of rule.
I don’t know if the sponsor of HB 1020 has racist motivations for putting forth the bill. What I do know is that contrary to what some might want people to believe, it is not 1955 in Hinds County, Mississippi. If it were, the sponsors of the legislation would not have been so conciliatory in the face of repudiations by Black colleagues in the legislature. If it was 1955, they probably just would’ve called their Black “opponents” racial epithets right on the legislative floor.
2023 is not 1955
We know what just happened in Memphis and we know when Black police kill Black people there is no national uprising. This is a result that the next development in political thought among our people and those who wish to express solidarity hasn’t emerged or been clarified yet. Many fighting white racism today don’t know exactly what they want. Most coalitions fighting racism still have Black mayors and Black police chiefs or their close associates in their coalitions. Whoever accepts this and decries government surveillance and subversion need to get their own minds right before claiming to raise anybody else’s consciousness.
When we place this in conversation with the facts that the Black mayor and Black police have killed at least 9 Black people in Jackson, a pattern starts to emerge. We live in 2023 and the reality is that in Jackson, Birmingham, Little Rock, New Orleans, Montgomery, and Charlotte, the police state is led by Black people. Southern cities that 50–60 years ago were mentioned with infamy are now celebrated with great fanfare and pride because they boast Black mayors and police chiefs. This serves as proof that the vast majority of Black and anti-racist people fought for power (it was called “civil rights”) on normative terms. It was a fight waged so that a certain class of Black people could enter the rules of established hierarchy. The function of this political class is to manage the lives of Black people and subdue any impulses toward liberation that might emanate from the Black multitudes.
Is Oppression Carried Out by Black People More Desirable?
Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba of Jackson has said that HB 1020 is “oppressive because it strips the right of Black folks to vote and its oppressive because it puts a military force over people that has no accountability to them.” First of all, the notion that the Black vote is being suppressed is nonsense. Nobody is stopping those Black people who still believe in the electoral system from voting. If this was the case, organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Certain People (NAACP) would not have to browbeat and cajole people about voting. There would not be any talk about embarrassingly low voter turnout.
By a military force, I can only assume that the mayor means the Capitol Police. Is his Black-led police department any less of an occupying force for Black people in Jackson? Is policing and criminalization of Black residents more legitimate when done by Black police? Which police force has killed more Black people over the last several years the Capitol Police or the JPD?
With respect to the proposed appointment of two judges as a part of the bill under consideration Lumumba stated, “It’s oppressive because there will be judges who will determine sentences over people’s lives.” When the Black Hinds County judges determine sentences that send Black people to jail for life, should the people feel more liberated because they were condemned to prison for life by a Black judge?
Despite the belief that Black judges and prosecutors can relate better to the problems of Black defendants and tend to be fairer because of this, I did not find this to be true in my experience of practicing criminal law as a public defender before Black judges in Hinds County. Many of them took great umbrage to my zealous advocacy on behalf of my indigent clients. Black judges and prosecutors believe in the system every bit as much as the white judges and prosecutors. The Black judges or Black prosecutors, as a social class, have the same kind of disdain and contempt for the defendants who are before them as white judges. This results in them perpetrating the same types of injustice to Black defendants as a white judge or any other judge for that matter.
Race and Class Struggles
Many might inquire are there enough Black judges and prosecutors to be approached as a social class? Are they not isolated token individuals? This line of questioning proves that Black may be beautiful but it is not very historical. “Blackness” feigning pride and the search for power can also be dishonest. All over the former Jim Crow south electoral and patronage politics has existed for decades. Overwhelmingly Black people do not live in rural isolation but in urban blocs. Black people not only vote overwhelmingly for Democrats but almost nobody expects liberation from their votes. What do people expect then?
The most dedicated professional vote mobilizers are part of teams that expect administrative positions, jobs, minority business loans, and scholarships for their children. This is a valid, if self-centered, expectation for that is what electoral politics brings, a machine for patronage for the formally educated and middle classes. Now this exhibits the same values as most white people where we are told falsely that Black elites are more moral and ethical.
What these Black political machines, found all across the American South, have never brought is an end to police brutality and murder or disproportionate incarceration. How can there be Black mayors, police chiefs, judges, prosecutors, and professors all over the American south but there is still disproportionate police murder and mass incarceration of Black people? Institutional oppression is sustained because Black people subscribe to political strategies of empowerment that are outdated and unethical. We shouldn’t be quick to say they are “white” strategies. But we must learn a future that discards reliance on the social class of people who place their personal advancement above the Black multitudes.
Passive Participation is not Democracy
Many critiques of the Mississippi bill have pointed to the fact that Jackson residents have not been consulted about the bill. This speaks to the passive participation that some Black politicians like to pretend is direct self-government. Democracy means majority rule. The fact that sometimes Black politicians ask for input or allow the public to participate in discussions in public forums is not democracy. This is passive participation that is ultimately controlled by those politicians that facilitate such townhall meetings that allow powerless constituents to come blow off steam. For popular forums or assemblies to be of use, ordinary Black people need to invade, occupy, and control them. They need to make counter-proposals of their own, they first discuss in their kitchens, in the barbershop and beauty shops, on their porches or stoops. They should not expect that the degenerate politicians who claim to represent Black sovereignty will listen and implement what they desire. They should counter-plan, knowing that there is no such thing as a progressive hierarchical government. This is a step to forming their own government (not a new election for someone else above the Black community).
Ordinary People Must Hold the Reins of Society
Black toilers in Mississippi and beyond are more than capable of speaking for themselves and arranging their own judicial affairs and new society. In fact, if any substantial change is to be brought about this must happen. Politicians, wielding cheap rhetoric, claim that the people who are closest to the problem are closest to the solution. If this is the case, shouldn’t ordinary people who live with, confront, and solve many of the problems in their communities hold the reins of government? How will the Black political class feel when ordinary Black people take the power from them and act on their own authority? They will, with their overstated “black” consciousness, threaten them with prison and beat them with Black police.
We should have courage to directly govern our communities. We do not because shrewd politicians, both Black and white, pay lip service to such things. They just pander to us, so that we will continue to vote for them, and keep them in power, while we remain powerless and degraded. No matter what judges are appointed in Mississippi or what bills pass through the legislature, the reality of Black working people and the unemployed will not change. Ordinary Black people have no dog in this hunt and should not succumb to the idea that these politicians are fighting for or representing us. In fact, this cloud of dust they are kicking up over this legislation is meant to protect the Black political class in Jackson from the realization of what is wrong as embodied by the brutality and murder in Memphis and all across the American South.
Everyday Black folks can fight our own battles. We can direct and control our communities. History has proven this perpetually. Not the history of civil rights officialdom, their photo-op arrests, and their collaboration with the police and party politics purchased by the wealthy. But the history of Black freedom that pushes Black leaders (invented for us, apparently youthful, speaking outdated notions) from behind. When we act on our own authority there is no false “Black rhetoric” by aspiring rulers who look like us that can contain our self-directed power.
This post was reposted from Stories by Adofo Minka on Medium
