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EVERYONE THOUGHTFBIFBIUS Your browser does not support the element. a new hotel would revitalise the downtown area. Nearly two decades ago city leaders in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, negotiated a $10m loan to fund developers to build on empty land next to a glossy convention centre. But the area was derelict and no one put in a bid for it.That was until last year, when two Nashville developers met Jody Owens, the district attorney, in a cigar lounge near the Capitol and asked him how to strike a deal. He told them that they needed the mayor’s blessing to build and that $100,000 ought to convince him. The money, he allegedly said, “can come from blood diamonds in Africa, I don’t give a fucking shit”. Soon he and Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the mayor, were flying to Florida on the developers’ private jet. Aboard a yacht in Miami they handed Mr Lumumba a personal cheque and Mr Owens a wad of cash. The mayor called a clerk to get the application deadline moved up and deposited the money into his campaign coffers. That night they partied at Tootsie’s Cabaret, a strip club, on the developers’ dime.But the Nashville men had no plans to build: they were undercover agents. On October 23rd Mr Owens and Mr Lumumba were indicted for bribery and money-laundering. Both pleaded not guilty. The mayor called the charges a “political prosecution” and said that he still plans to run for re-election in the spring, despite potentially facing a prison sentence of up to 75 years.A band of self-described “radicals” close to the mayor say the sting operation was a set-up concocted by white extremists to dethrone their black leader. They suggest that the state’s Republican politicians are behind it, even though the case’s federal prosecutor was appointed by Joe Biden. “You’re witnessing a legal lynching,” says Tariq Abdul-Tawwab, a social-justice campaigner. The only crimes the mayor was charged with, they correctly note, are ones he was lured into by the . In order for the ruse to not be considered entrapment, the government must prove at trial that it had dirt on the mayor beforehand.The indictment is a blow to a city that is already spiralling downwards. After a treatment plant failed in 2021, Jackson went without clean drinking water for a month. When the system crashed again, a court put the utility under third-party control. The city’s sewage system is so leaky that locals complain of faeces bubbling up into the streets when it rains. Four of the seven public libraries have at some point closed due to mould. During the pandemic Jackson became America’s murder capital. In 2022 it had 94 homicides for every 100,000 residents, a rate comparable to notoriously dodgy cities in Mexico and Ecuador. New Orleans, America’s runner-up, had 76.Even so, the city “is divided over whether the mayor is a colossal failure or a hero”, says Othor Cain, a citizen-journalist. Critics say Mr Lumumba accelerated the city’s decline by staffing his administration with ideologues who didn’t know how to govern. Others reckon the problem is corruption as well as incompetence. In 2021 Kenny Stokes, a city councillor, claimed that the mayor’s “relationship with dope boys” was making him “soft on crime”. Last year Mr Lumumba raised eyebrows by battling with the city council to direct a garbage-collection contract to a specific vendor.The mayor’s allies say the decline is a result of chronic underinvestment by politicians who want to choke America’s “blackest city”, and that Mr Lumumba is in the cross-hairs because he refuses to bow to them. Mr Lumumba will have his day in court, but there can be no doubt about his commitment to racialised and radical politics. His father, a leader of the Republic of New Afrika, a militant black-nationalist group, moved his family from Detroit to start a black colony. A shoot-out with the police left one officer dead and most of the group’s leaders arrested. Lumumba senior, who was away that day, became a criminal-defence lawyer and represented Tupac Shakur, a rapper, and Geronimo Pratt, a high-ranking Black Panther. In 2013 he was elected mayor of Jackson, before dying suddenly of natural causes.His son, who wears skinny suits and Rolex watches and lacks his father’s unfussy charisma, made black autonomy his mission. In office he has resisted the state’s attempts to seize control of Jackson’s airport, take over the schools and police the heart of the city. To ease gun violence Mr Lumumba tried, unsuccessfully, to suspend the state’s open-carry law. “He is seen as an incarnation of black Jackson standing up against white supremacy,” says D’Andra Orey, a political scientist at Jackson State University. To the more powerful state politicians who control the flow of federal funds, the mayor is a failed and now allegedly corrupt politician presiding over an urban disaster. “He continues to try to blame the white folks instead of taking responsibility for his administration’s fiscal failures,” says Pete Perry, a former head of the county Republicans.For now, the mayor’s soldiers are bracing for war. “The gloves have to come off, I tell the movement, this is not training day,” says Danyelle Holmes of the Poor People’s Campaign, an activist group. Clicking her hot-pink nails together she explains that her radicalness is inspired by her great-great-grandfather, who killed his slave master. When asked what happens if Mr Lumumba is convicted of the crimes he is accused of, Ms Holmes’s eyes scan your correspondent fiercely. “The movement continues,” she says, “but it continues in an even more aggressive way.”
