the

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cooperative way
THE NEWSLETTER OF COPPERATION JACKSON
THE NEWSLETTER OF COPPERATION JACKSON
 


OPPORTUNITY
 

C ooperation Jackson purchased the West

Park Mall, located at the corner of W. Capitol where
Rose and Monument change names, in May of 2019.
Immediately after the purchase we renamed the
plaza in honor of Mississippi native Ida B. Wells.
One of the critical reasons why we named it in her
honor was because of her work supporting the
People’s Grocery Cooperative, which was a Black
owned cooperative situated outside of Memphis that
was burned to the ground as a result of a lynching in
March 1892.
The purchase of the Ida B. Wells Plaza was the
largest land acquisition made to date by our organiza-


tion to expand our community land trust, which is
named after Mississippi legend, Fannie Lou
Hammer. We purchased the Plaza and started the
community land trust to fight gentrification, prevent
the displacement of the Black working class from
West Jackson, and create an enabling environment
for cooperative and community owned businesses.
against us by our conservative enemies. For our part,
we hold that producing food sovereignty for Jackson
starts with producing food security in West Jackson,
where we are directly situated and can and must
make our most meaningful contributions. Food
security in this instance means being able to produce
through our own efforts enough food to feed the
25,000 people in our portion of West Jackson in a
sustainable and affordable manner. We have aim to
do this by bringing a grocery store back to the Plaza
and establishing an aquaponic and hydroponic
operation at the Plaza that would be addition to
Freedom Farms, our urban farming cooperative, that
would produce fish, crawfish, prawns, as well as a
mixture of fresh fruits and vegetables using a circular
water based growing method.

One of our central objectives of Cooperation Jackson

is working to enable food sovereignty in Jackson.
Food sovereignty means being able to produce
enough food in Jackson to feed all Jacksonians in a
sustainable manner to produce better health
outcomes in our community and ensure that food
can’t be used as a weapon

• Page 2 the cooperative way

We envisioned this plan coming to fruition in either 2021 or 2022. However, a series of recent events are
unfortunately driving us to adjust our plans and our timelines. The main event is the departure of Dollar Gener-
al from the Ida B. Wells Plaza. Dollar General had been indicating that they might leave the Plaza even before
we purchased it. But, they made it official in December 2019 and moved out at the end of February. In addition
to helping to anchor the Plaza financially during the transition we were planning on, their departure means that
the food desert that already existed in the community since the departure of Jackson Cash and Carry in 2017, is
only going to get worse, as for many people in our immediate community it was the only place in reasonable
walking distance to purchase any groceries. Now that Dollar General is gone, we have to figure out how to fill
this void to serve the communities needs, and to keep the Plaza becoming yet another run down, vacated
commercial facility in our community.

  going to take a broad community effort to over-

It’s

 come these potentially negative outcomes. We are
therefore calling on the community to join us in a
visioning and redevelopment process for the Ida B.
Wells Plaza and the Fannie Lou Hamer Community
Land Trust overall. We started a broad community
planning process at an emergency meeting held on
Thursday, February 27th at our headquarters, the
Kuwasi Balagoon Center for Economic Democracy
and Sustainable Development. We are going to take

OPPORTUNITY
the next critical steps in this planning process on
Tuesday, March 24th at the Balagoon Center. Some
of our key objectives for this months planning meet-
ing are as follows:
•. Developing a committee to help determine what
types of businesses and institutions we need in the
Plaza and how to attract them or start them
ourselves
• Developing a committee to organize short-term
solutions to the food scarcity problem we have in
West Jackson that were further aggravated by the
departure of Dollar General from the Plaza.
• Developing a committee to organize regular
monthly or quarterly programming for the communi-
ty at the Ida B. Wells Plaza to meet various social
and consumer needs.

We will also seek to recruit more community mem-

bers to join the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land
Trust advisory board to help with the long-term
development of the land trust.

So, join us in the quest to secure and develop our
community from the inside out. Let’s turn a crisis
into an opportunity to recreate our community as we
see fit to serve our own interests and visions.


The next Community Land Trust meeting to redevel-
op the Ida B. Wells Plaza is again going to be held at
the Kuwasi Balagoon Center for Economic Democ-
racy and Sustainable Development located at 939 W.
Capitol
  Street, Jackson, MS on Tuesday, March 24th
at 6 pm. Don’t miss it.

 



• Page 3 the cooperative way

about richard d. wolff

Professor Richard D. Wolff is one of the most promi-
nent Marxist economists in the United States. He is
one of the most dynamic populizers of radical
economic ideas and analysis, with a viewer and
listenership of millions.
Professor Wolff is Economics Emeritus, University
of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught econom-
ics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting
Professor in the Graduate Program in International
Affairs of the New School University, New York
City.  

PUBLISHED work
Over the last twenty five years, in collaboration with
his colleague, Stephen Resnick, he has developed a
new approach to political economy. While it retains
and systematically elaborates the Marxist notion of
class as surplus labor, it rejects the economic deter-
minism typical of most schools of economics and
usually associated with Marxism as well. This new
approach appears in several books co-authored by
Resnick and Wolff and numerous articles by them
separately and together. Common to all of Professor
Wolff’s work are two central components. The first is
the introduction of class, in its elaborated surplus
labor definition, as a new "entry point" of social
analysis. The second is the concept of overdetermi-
nation as the logic of an analytic project that is
consistently non-determinist. Professor Wolff was
also among the founders in 1988 of the new academ-
ic association, Association of Economic and Social
Analysis (AESA), and its quarterly journal Rethink-
ing Marxism.
ECONOMIC UPDATE
Professor Wolff's weekly show, Economic Update
Since 2005, Professor Wolff has written many short- with Richard D. Wolff, is syndicated on over 70 radio
er analytical pieces focused chiefly although not only stations nationwide and available for broadcast on
on the emerging and then exploding global capitalist Free Speech TV. Please contact the show's Media
crisis. He regularly published such shorter analytical Director if you are interested in syndicating the
pieces on the website of the Monthly Review maga- program: maria@democracyatwork.info
zine and occasionally in many other publications,
both print and electronic. The wide circulation of the
shorter pieces coupled with the deepening crisis
brought many invitations to present work in public
forums.

• Page 4 the cooperative way

May 2020 Calendar of Events

SATURDAY
May MaRCH
2018 Calendar of 14th @ 9am 
Events
Kazi Mob: Ida B. Wells Community Clean
Up.
1204 w. Capitol st.
Jackson,NS


wednesday March 18th @6pm 
Center for community production
922 W. Capitol St.
Jackson, MS  


tuesday March 24th @6pm -8pm
Community Land Trust Meeting: Ida B. Wells
Plaza redevelopment meeting 6pm-8pm
Balagoon Center
939 W. Capitol St.
Jackson,MS

www.cooperationjackson.org
cooperationjackson@gmail.com
Facebook/CooperationJackson
  
@CooperationJXN
601.355.7224
939 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, MS 39203