The Deep South Couple Working 24/7 for Social Justice
This is an excerpt from the book The Moment: Changemakers on Why and How They Joined the Fight for Social Justice, edited by Steve Fiffer and to be published by NewSouth Books in September 2022. The author of more than a dozen books, Fiffer most recently collaborated with the late civil rights icon Dr. C.T. Vivian on his memoir, It’s in the Action. For The Moment, Fiffer interviewed more than 35 activists of all ages, backgrounds, and professions. Among those featured “in their own words” are Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative; Don Katz, founder of Audible.com; award-winning author Edwidge Danticat; and Cornell University junior Pranjal Jain, founder of Global Girlhood.
Chokwe Antar Lumumba and Ebony Lumumba
Chokwe Antar Lumumba, 38, is the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Ebony Lumumba, 38, is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English, Foreign Languages, and Speech Communication at Jackson State University. The Lumumbas met in kindergarten in Jackson and married in 2012. Chokwe Lumumba, a graduate of Tuskegee Institute and Texas Southern University Law School, was elected mayor in 2017. His late father, Chokwe Lumumba (formerly Edwin Finley Taliaferro), served as Jackson’s mayor for a year until his death in 2014. Ebony Lumumba, a graduate of Spelman College, earned her Ph.D in English from the University of Mississippi.
Ebony: I can go back to being four- or five-years-old and seeing my mother refuse to buy dolls that didn't look like us and instead buying the materials to make ones that did. That moment sticks out so keenly because it's where I came to an understanding that there is an entire movement against who we are fundamentally. It was my introduction into thinking critically about the many ways that we are oppressed as people of color—something as simple as the absence of a baby doll that looks like me to reinforce my identity and rightful space that I hold within society.
Chokwe: I distinctly remember being five-years-old at home alone with my older sister when the phone rang. My mother was a flight attendant, so she was often gone during the week. And my father would be off working. So my sister, who's nearly five years older, would look after me. The voice on the phone talked about our father, who was leading anti-Klan rallies and marches, and then told my sister, “I'm gonna kill you and your little brother.” It was evident they had eyes on us in the house. I remember going to hide in my parents' closet with a knife until Daddy got home.
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I didn't have dreams of boogie men. I had dreams of the KKK. I had the privilege of growing up with my hero—my father. Out of admiration for what he did, I absolutely knew from my early childhood that I wanted to be engaged in something that was a part of the bigger work of trying to build self-determined communities and trying to improve my community.
Ebony: Activism is a deliberate response to circumstances and challenges. I leave it that broad because in the work that I do as a literature professor, a writer, and an artist, I've seen activism take on so many forms. Just as oppression has so many tentacles and manifestations, activism has to be that diverse and multifaceted as well. It can’t only be reactionary. It has to be forward thinking, has to establish a standard before these oppressions and repressive practices take place.
Being an activist necessitates thoughtfulness. It has to be genuine. It has to be organic. It has to be calculated. I use this variety of terminology because I think, of late, we have seen activism be mis-defined. We've seen it go through a sort of pejorative moment where activists are shamed or confused with folks who create chaos. And that's not what activism is.
Chokwe: In the simplest of terms, I think activism is love. It is an unyielding love that says, “I can't stand for the oppression that I see. I can't stand to see people subjugated. I can't stand to see inequity. I can't stand to see the harm anymore.”
Most people think activists are angry or mad. And yes, there is a discontent; it’s a refusal to accept the status quo. But I think of something my father said: “If you don't love the people, sooner or later you will betray the people.” When you think about fighting for people or putting yourself in harm's way, I don't think that there's a greater expression of love for people than that.
Ebony: I think back to stories that have trickled down through my family. When the neighborhood didn't have full access to a store because of segregation and discrimination, my great-grandmother led the charge to start growing their own food and trading and bartering among themselves. She would buy the entire truck of produce from a white farmer and sell it to her community members and her neighbors at a more fair price. And she was able to build this trove to lend to her neighbors so that they could own their own spaces. That was activism at the grassroots level.
It's something that I've always seen, so it feels natural to respond to a circumstance that is repressive or unjust with action. In raising our girls, we hope that what they're gleaning from being raised around us and our family is that you respond boldly to acts of oppression against yourselves, of course, but also your communities and other communities as well, who could benefit from your support.
Chokwe: My grandmother worked for the local chapter of SNCC in Detroit. Just recently, going through some documents, I learned how my grandparents were the lead plaintiffs in a lawsuit as their community was succumbing to eminent domain, which took over their homes and their community for a highway system.
I think that was contagious for my father, who out of that intense love to want to see change felt the need to be a revolutionary nationalist freedom fighter. He knew his career as a lawyer—and later as mayor of Jackson several years before I was elected—had to be a manifestation of that greater work that he was trying to do. Ultimately, I think that it all hinges on the fact that oppression is the greatest organizer of all time.
My father moved from Detroit to Mississippi in the early ’70s and had been working with a group called the Republic of New Africa, focused on building self-determined communities. That had culminated in an armed engagement and gunfire with the police. He ultimately returned to Detroit to get his law degree and become a civil rights lawyer.
My parents didn't tell us what to think, they wanted to teach us how to think. They thought that giving us a sense of community, a sense of activism, was as important as giving us food, water, and shelter. They had given their lives to the movement so much so that they believed that they had to give their most precious resource. We moved from New York to Jackson when I was five-years- old.
My father had no job waiting. We had no relatives there. We moved to Jackson so that my parents could teach us to be part of the movement. They started the Malcolm X Grassroots Center for self-determination and self-defense where we did political education, summer camps for children, martial arts training and so forth, trying to be a resource to the community. I had to learn how to do security outside of the building at eight-years-old!
Before setting up his law practice, my dad had to take the Mississippi bar exam. Even that was a struggle. After passing the test, they asked him because of his activist past whether he was going to try to overthrow the state of Mississippi. He paused and said, “Absolutely, but I'm gonna do it in a legal way.”
I was ingrained in activism, but at the same time my lived experiences made it personal. I experienced racism in my junior high classroom regularly. Derogatory phrases and comments were commonplace and accepted. Rebel flags were displayed, and my classmates cheered when they heard Nat Turner was killed in his rebellion. I spoke out against those things, and I had to wage war with adults for decisions like not standing for the pledge of allegiance, which I considered a contradiction to our history. I think the school was surprised when they called my mother in and she supported me.
Another time when a teacher referred to me in a way that he didn't refer to other students, I lashed out and was given an in-school suspension. My father said, “Listen, if you suspend my son for that, then I'm gonna take off my work day and come teach him in school. And then I'm gonna sue you for the time I lost at work.” They called his bluff, and he did it—came to school and then filed suit. They took it off my record.
Ebony: As I came of age, I started to understand the necessity to perform these very basic, practical forms of activism in your household and in your own community. We had the headshot of the first Black Miss Mississippi on our refrigerator for years to reinforce the value of diverse beauty and our own identities. On the same theme, I remember my father driving two or three hours to find a Black doll to give to my sister and me for Christmas one year. He drove that far because at the time it wasn't available anywhere near our city, the state capital of Mississippi.
I also think about the concerted efforts my parents made to ensure that we were reading certain books, that we had seen certain films. It’s become canonical now, but we were watching Roots when I was seven or eight and not really able to process all the complex themes. But that time was sacred. We were going to watch it as a family, and then we were going to discuss what we saw and what we didn’t understand.
It made it clear to me that my parents wanted to be our resource for information about what was right, what was wrong, and what we would encounter as we grew and developed. I remember my mother pushing back against certain standards in the classrooms in my elementary school and these assumptions that were made about Black students versus white students. Seeing the consistency in my parents' immediate and bold response whenever oppression reared its head taught us to never shrink back from responding to injustice.
My father was the only Black man on bank and real estate boards. My mother made tremendous sacrifices to become the first Black female stockbroker for Dean Witter in Mississippi. She had small children and had to study and be away from us throughout that process, but she made it clear to us why she was doing it. It wasn't for career advancement; she wanted us to understand that if she could do it, then we certainly could and that she should not have had to be the first to do it. This was the early Nineties!
We had a family photo album. But it wasn’t conventional. There weren't just images and captions of moments. There were newspaper clippings about family members who had marched for certain things, clippings about family members who had been disenfranchised.
At certain moments—it may have been when we had an issue at school or when we were not responding to something in the way that we should have—my parents would pull out the album and say, “We’re going to read this article and discuss this moment. This is your family. And this is what happened to us.” We were being taught the many faces of oppression so we could recognize them and so that it would be second nature to respond to it. And so now, in our professions—with Chokwe as mayor and me in academia-- we're keenly aware of the way that these things manifest regardless of environment. The more recent discourse about diversity and equity and inclusion has become dominant, but we're still very clear about how much ground those effort do not cover.
I've been a voracious reader since I was seven or eight. And I think it’s impossible to truly read texts from just about any canon and not want to be involved in community, not want to respond to inequities, not want to make an impact. And that's what I found myself wanting to do. I'm not saying that every text illuminates realities and historical truths; they don't. But what I found myself doing at 10 or 11 was reading texts and wondering, where are my people?
I loved reading, but never saw myself. That didn't make me want to stop reading. It made me want to find the books where we were. Then, ultimately, in this career that I have now, it made me want to write the books where we will be.
I knew the stories existed in my family because we went over them at the dinner table. When we got home past curfew, we had to sit there and go through the album and read about what had happened to our family members in unjust societies.
I knew the stories existed, but they hadn't been documented. So that is where my activism comes in today—in the way that I accomplish telling those stories in my writing, my teaching, my art. It grew out of noticing the same thing my mother noticed in the dolls, in her stock brokerage, the same thing that my father noticed in his community—that there is an absence, a gap, an inequity. How do I change that? And so my career has grown out of that.
My parents did fill one gap. They would assign us books that we weren't reading in school—and then have us write book reports about them. In our household, we had Dr. King’s Letters from Birmingham Jail, Sojourner Truth’s speeches. Alice Walker. Richard Wright.
All this made me even more curious about the texts that weren't focused on our communities. I'm a lover of Shakespeare’s tragedies. But I read them now through the lens of looking for the disenfranchised characters, looking for the characters who have blackness projected onto them through their actions. I read Faulkner very differently from some of my colleagues. I'm reading for the identities of the characters of color and the Black characters who are oftentimes more thin than their counterparts in the text.
The last thing I'll say about this is I remember being in graduate school as the only Black person in just about all of my classes. And there’s a moment in your trajectory as an academic where you're deciding on your specialization. What are you going to write about, research about?
At that point, perhaps surprisingly to everything I’ve mentioned, I was resisting writing about and focusing on Black life and literature because I thought that was going to be expected and that I was going to have to prove myself with these other, more well-accepted genres and canons of literature. But I remember sitting in that class and looking around the table and being the only Black person in that class—professor included—and thinking, if not me, then who? If I don't demonstrate my sincere love for my foundation and my heritage and my community, and do it with this authentic appreciation, who do I expect to do it?
Chokwe: One of the themes of both of our stories is that once you're exposed to activism, once you're exposed to knowledge and understanding of what people experience, then it's no longer a choice, right? It becomes a part of your identity from the careers you choose to what makes someone attractive to you.
My wife is not only beautiful, but part of that is being equally yoked and purposeful in the decision of how we would name our children. From a biblical sense, we believe that the power of life and death is in the tongue. We had a part of our history as a people robbed from us—the legacy of meaning in our names and the cultural connection to what African names mean to us and how we choose to name our children. When our ancestors were stolen, their names were also taken. We believe deliberate naming is reclamation in the face of that inhumane injustice. It is reparative and part of our act of self-determination.
My father was born Edwin Finley Taliaferro in Detroit in 1947. He changed his name to Chokwe Lumumba after Dr. King was assassinated. Ebony—whose own name means Black—and I have named our daughters Nubia and Alaké. Nubia means beautiful blessing. Alaké means one to be made much of.
For me, growing up in the ’80s in Jackson with the name Chokwe Antar Lumumba was, well, let’s just say there were never key chains with my name on them! But now, having grown in that space and being educated, there's nothing more beautiful than an African name when I run into it. There's nothing more satisfying than knowing we can name our children African names. Knowing my wife’s story, there's nothing more satisfying than when I see our seven-year-old have that same insatiable desire to read and learn and have her picture, her view, of what brilliance and what ability looks like actually look like her.
It’s so important that parents and young people be intentional in seeking out information and educating themselves. There are books that I lean on for the truth. Whenever my father would do a Black history speech, he’d start off by saying, “You know it's a shame that we're still teaching our children that Christopher Columbus discovered America. America wasn't lost, Columbus was! And long before he and his comrades in Spain figured out that the world wasn't flat, you had Africans traveling to and from the continent of Africa to this continent, this country. They’ve found totem poles to prove that.” He often wasn’t invited back!
I wanted to be around him. On the occasions I would go to court with him, I’d see this sea of people who looked like me just pleading guilty to charge after charge and being sentenced to time. And it dawned on me as a little boy, it just seemed like everyone couldn't be guilty. Right? And that evolved into an understanding that not everyone could afford to profess their innocence.
Seeing all the inequity within our justice system, I did not see myself going into elected office. What I was raised on was more antagonistic towards electoral politics and more directed at action. My journey became kind of the evolution of asking, what are the best ways to organize and basically coming to the conclusion that if you can only organize people who think like you, you're not much of an organizer.
So as mayor now, while looking at issues like potholes that in the grand scheme of things may seem minor compared to other threats, it is understanding what Amilcar Cabral spoke of when he said that people aren't fighting for the ideas in our heads, they're fighting to win material benefits. Essentially—and I'm paraphrasing—it’s the desire to live good, safe lives and to assure a future for their children. So that's the way I see electoral office. I don't see it as the end. I see it as a means to an end, and our end has to be to build self-determined, equitable communities of dignity.
Some degree of compromise is necessary. But what I am unyielding on is that I don't compromise my principles, for which I not only lead but guide my life. These are the principles of self-determination, whether or not people are gaining greater access over their lives, whether people are being enriched in a way that democratizes power.
When I’m asked for advice about how to become more active, I think it returns to love. Your activism doesn't necessarily have to be that you stand up on the table and shout about discrimination or exploitation. It can be the execution of compassion that you show to an individual. It can be the recognition, even in a private setting, to say, “Listen, I want to support you and want you to know that this isn't right. And so we need to find collectively what the solution is.”
Any young person that is trying to find their purpose, whether they are a part of an activist community or not, I always give them the words of Frantz Fanon, who wrote The Wretched Earth, that, “Each generation must discover its mission and fulfill it or betray it.” That's such a profound notion to me: that we're all searching for what our purpose is. We're all searching for what our contribution will be to this world. But once we discover it, we have the responsibility to be bold enough to walk in it.
Ebony: I think if I add anything, it would be to encourage young people to leave whatever space they inhabit better than they found it. I remember being in those classrooms in high school and in middle school and knowing that something wasn't right or hearing something that wasn't right. Even with the support of family, speaking up is scary. Popularity is valuable, and it's difficult to stand out. But one of the motivating things is I knew that I wouldn't be the last Black student or Black female student or female student in that space. And I had accountability to whomever was coming behind me. And that was a motivating factor: that I could not leave this space without leaving it a little bit better or without making an impact if I have the capability for doing that. The truth is, you always have the power to do it.
We can't think about “microwave” activism: that you're going to make a stand and then that change is going to happen quickly. That you are going to get to benefit from it. It’s not that fast. So, we've got to be content with planting seeds and understand that—and I’m stealing this from an African proverb that Chokwe uses quite a bit—we're sitting under the shade because someone else planted a seed long before us. So we talked about our grandparents and I talked about my great grandparents and the reason that I can sit in this office, the reason that I was able to even attend the schools where I got my graduate degree as a Black person was because someone else planted a seed that they did not get to see the fruit of.
I tell my students that it’s important to understand that even the small chipping away at the surface of oppression matters and share that my goal for them from interactions that we have is that they foster and maintain intellectual curiosity and question everything. When you're questioning everything, that's going lead you to these sources that my husband has mentioned. That's going to lead you to want to know more about this event or this date or this person, or this text or this quotation. It leads to historical honesty and accuracy when we are intellectually curious. And it doesn't always mean you have to read 500-page history books. That's not everybody's jam.
We’ve got a three-year-old and a seven-year-old, and the seven-year-old is in that stage of asking profound questions. So, she wants to understand what she's seeing, what she's absorbing, what's being told to her. She’ll say, My teacher said this. Why is this true? And that sort of thing. When you have small children, the questions can be overwhelming. But we are determined to answer those questions and to encourage more questions. Sometimes it drives us crazy, but I don't want her to ever feel like there are ever too many questions to ask.
There’s always another question to ask about everything. And I think if we adopt this sort of mantra of just being curious, being intellectually curious about everything, about what the media tells us, about what our history books tell us, about what has been accepted as historical fact, then we will get to a much more equitable space.
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