In 2013, Jackson, Mississippi elected a very progressive mayor, Chokwe Lumumba, who actually had planned to create a whole cooperative economy in the city. It was very exciting. His plan was to create co-ops out of many of the businesses that the city had already privatized and to help develop other co-ops. There were going to be urban-rural co-op linkages. There was a plan to have a year-long education program to train many people in Jackson, especially unemployed ones, in co-op development so they could start a variety of them. Sadly, Lumumba died [in February 2014, after only eight months in office], but despite this, the people in his administration whom he had hired to start doing this are now moving forward with a few of the co-ops, such as a waste-management cooperative. They hosted one of the largest co-op meetings in the US [Jackson Rising, in May 2014] which attracted about 500 people, predominately Black.
Beverly Bell and Natalie Miller at Truth Out, Other Worlds. The Legacy and Current Growth of Black Cooperatives
(via protoslacker)
