Posted on July 6, 2021

The Great Replacement: Jackson, Mississippi

Robert Hampton, American Renaissance, July 6, 2021

This is the tenth in a series about the continuing disappearance of whites from American cities (see our earlier articles on Birmingham, Washington, D.C., New York City, Chicago, Richmond, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles). Many people still pretend that The Great Replacement is a myth or a conspiracy theory, but the graphs that accompany each article prove them wrong. Every city has a different story, but each has seen a dramatic replacement of whites by minorities.

Jackson, Mississippi, is no place for the white man — or for its namesake. Last year, its city council voted to remove the Andrew Jackson statue outside City Hall. There was only one vote against, from the council’s lone (white) Republican. Five blacks and a white Democrat woman voted to dump Old Hickory. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba celebrated the decision as a victory for blacks.

While removing a statue does little to change our condition as oppressed people, we should not have to constantly encounter the likenesses of those who profited off of the blood, sweat, and despair of our ancestors or see them immortalized as honorable. When I took office, I found out the name Jackson means ‘God has shown favor.’ So, we want to reclaim the name of our city for that meaning and divorce it from the legacy of a brutal owner of enslaved people who was instrumental in initiating the Trail of Tears against indigenous people. Black people have reclaimed and repurposed names given to our families by slave owners for centuries. This is no different.

The city that is tearing down its namesake can barely keep going. For a month this year, the state capital couldn’t provide clean water to its citizens. The direct cause was two winter storms, but Jackson’s water system had been in trouble for years. In 2020, over six billion gallons of raw and minimally treated sewage gushed from Jackson’s water system into the nearby Pearl River.

The city frequently suffers water breaks — and cuts in service — in the winter, despite its mild climate. The water is polluted with lead, and the city has no money to solve the problem. In 2019, the city turned off water to 20,000 residents who refused to pay. All the city’s infrastructure is falling apart; liberals blame “systemic racism.”

Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba

Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba (Credit Image: © Jim West/ZUMA Wire)

Businesses have been leaving for years. A local news article from 2003 lamented: “Downtown Jackson was once booming with business, but over the years businesses have slowly left. Today, there is only a skeleton of what once was.” That problem only gotten worse. Unlike most Southern cities, Jackson’s population has declined by more than 40,000 since 1980 and is now 155,000.

Jackson’s last movie theater closed in the late 1990s, so you can’t watch a first-run movie anywhere. Sixty years earlier, when the city covered only one-third the land area it does today, it had a dozen movie theaters. This cinema desert has been the subject of academic research.

The Istrione Theater in Jackson, Mississippi

The Istrione Theater in Jackson, Mississippi in 1921. (Credit Image: Exhibitors Herald via Wikimedia)

Crime and terrible schools explain some of the decline. Last month, a city councilman called for the National Guard to patrol the city. In 2020, the city had a record 128 murders. That gave it the second highest rate in the nation at 80 per 100,000 residents (St. Louis is number one at 88 per 100,000). Jackson is set to break its 2020 record this year, with murders up 38 percent over the same period last year. Only two percent of murder cases since May 2018 have gone to trial, and fewer than half of the murders this year have resulted in an arrest.

The schools are a mess. Jackson Public Schools typically get an “F” or “D” from the state and they barely avoided a state takeover in 2018. A report from that time found that only 20 percent of students were proficient in reading and writing and only 18 percent were proficient in math. Funding is not the problem; enrollment is falling and yet the budget remains the same.

Jackson wasn’t always like this. This 1961 documentary on the city’s battle with segregation shows what it once was. White couples walked the streets and business thrived. Jackson was a nice place to live — and watch a movie.

In 1960, it was 64 percent white. Today, it’s only 16 percent white. Here is the white population over the last 100 years:

Every mayor since 1997 has been black. Two in the past 10 years were black radicals: Chokwe Lumumba and his son and current mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba. Lumumba Sr. was an open black nationalist who once called for a black ethnostate. He won the mayoral race in 2013 promising “black power” and racial wealth redistribution. At his inauguration, he raised his fist and shouted the New Afrika slogan, “Free the land!” He died in office in 2014.In 1960, when the white percentage was highest, all of the city’s schools were segregated. Integration drove out whites. The 1974 Supreme Court decision in Milliken v. Bradley was the death knell. Until then, whites could shelter in majority-white school districts within the city, but Milliken found that busing was legal across district lines. Whites left for the suburbs.

His son was elected in 2017 on the promise that he was a “revolutionary” just like his father. He, too, campaigned to chants “Free the land!” and “By any means necessary,” and added a promise to make Jackson “the most radical city on the planet.” He pledged to bring “self-determination,” but today, he begs for state and federal assistance. In February, he said the city can fix rotting infrastructure only with state and federal help.

Jackson is 82 percent black, so it is almost Lumumba Sr.’s ethnostate. This is not a city that was lost to immigrants. It lost Americans. It’s fitting that it no longer wants any association with Andrew Jackson. It’s alien to Old Hickory and his people.