Courtesy Mac Epps
Volunteers with Volunteers with Mississippi M.O.V.E. (Motivating & Organizing Voters for Empowerment) distribute 5-gallon buckets of non-potable water so Jackson residents can flush their toilets.
On Thursday, September 1, days after more than 150,000 residents of Jackson, Mississippi were informed that they would be without clean water indefinitely, Mac Epps was standing just half a mile down the road from the state capitol at a twelve-floor senior citizen center called 809 State Street.
Epps and his colleagues with the organization Mississippi M.O.V.E. (Motivating & Organizing Voters for Empowerment) arrived at the center that day with fifty five-gallon buckets of non-potable water, trying to help some of their most vulnerable neighbors meet at least one very basic need.
“In 2022, two minutes from the state capitol, you have your senior citizens—[who] have served and worked for this country, this state, and this city—sitting around and waiting for somebody to give them a five gallon bucket of dirty water so they can flush their toilets,” Epps tells The Progressive. “In the middle of a crisis, that’s what they want.”
Even for Jackson, which is 82 percent Black and has endured its share of turmoil in recent years, the crisis that erupted when heavy rains caused the city’s main water treatment facility to fail at the end of August has been a paradigm-shifting trauma.
More than 150,000 residents—most of the capital city’s population—are without safe drinking water and have no clear timetable for getting it back. And the crisis has been compounded by a cascade of other structural problems. In the aftermath of the plant failure, Jackson public schools shifted to remote learning. Some buildings were left without the water needed to run air conditioning units in sweltering late summer heat and humidity, while issues with the city’s water drainage system have left some concerned about the spread of mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue fever and malaria.
For many people, however, the most frustrating aspect of the crisis is just how predictable it was. Water quality has been an issue in Jackson for decades, one that has grown particularly acute as severe weather events linked to climate change have stretched the capacity of the city’s aging infrastructure.
Last year, a winter storm burst pipes and water mains, leaving thousands of residents without water for weeks. The city was under a boil water notice for the majority of 2021, and for the better part of a month before the treatment plant failed this year.
“Anyone who was half awake in Jackson knew this was coming,” Kali Akuno, executive director of the organization Cooperation Jackson, says.
That included the mayoral administration of Chokwe Antar Lumumba and his predecessor, and father, Chokwe Lumumba, both of whom made appeals to current and past Republican governors for assistance and were, they’ve claimed, turned away.
Now, one of the major concerns is that Mississippi’s white, conservative leadership will use the crisis as an opportunity to wrest control of the water system away from the people of Jackson—either by privatizing it or by creating a regional council dominated by representatives from conservative suburban counties to oversee the system.
On Monday, Republican Governor Tate Reeves confirmed that his administration is actively considering taking the water system out of Jackson’s hands—potentially depriving the city of a critical source of revenue.
“It fits a historical narrative, and the narrative is that Black people cannot govern themselves and are not worthy of any support toward that end.”
“Privatization is on the table,” the governor said on September 5. “Having a commission that oversees failed water systems as they have in many states is on the table. I’m open to ideas.”
For Akuno, the governor’s refusal to commit significant state resources to aiding Jackson and his constant criticism of the city’s management in the aftermath of the crisis is all too familiar.
“It fits a historical narrative, and the narrative is that Black people cannot govern themselves and are not worthy of any support toward that end,” Akuno tells The Progressive. “Why waste resources on something that you know is going to fail because these folks are technically and genetically presupposed to fail?”
It’s a vicious, cynical cycle that leaves Jackson mired in a state of, as Epps termed it, “normalized chaos.”
Jane Alexander, president and CEO of the Community Foundation of Mississippi, grew up in Jackson and watched many of her high school classmates decamp for the surrounding suburbs. She called the state’s attitude toward the city a “shift backwards” to Jim Crow-era antagonism.
“There’s this reemergence of a paternalistic view that’s very disturbing and unpleasant to watch,” Alexander says. “It’s this whole thing of the state’s going to make you form this commission, and it’s got to have state appointees onto it because you’re a Black-led city and you can’t run your own affairs. That is pretty much overtly what they say about how they’re going to do this.”
It’s not just Jackson, either. As jarring as the water crisis in Jackson is, there are a number of households in other parts of Mississippi—especially the rural, majority-Black Delta region—that have no running water at all.
The lack of investment in the state’s working people extends far beyond water infrastructure. During his tenure as governor, Reeves has refused to expand Medicaid, cut income taxes, and allowed public schools to go underfunded. In April, he vetoed state funding for upgrades to a Jackson park and planetarium because, “Jackson is not one suburban golf course and one planetarium away from thriving.”
Over the past two weeks, while firmly in the national spotlight, Reeves has worked to get short-term fixes in place for the water system. President Joe Biden approved the governor’s request for a federal emergency declaration for Jackson at the end of August, allowing the federal government to coordinate and fund much of the short-term response to the crisis, and the city’s water pressure was restored on Monday.
But the long-term outlook remains bleak. Lumumba said at the end of August that it will likely take billions of dollars to fix Jackson’s water infrastructure, or, Akuno estimated, fifteen years of an annual Jackson city budget hollowed out by decades of white flight and hampered by its status as a capital city where government-owned land is not subject to property tax.
Beyond that, many in Jackson are simply resigned to the notion that their city and state governments are either too inept or too callous to reliably provide basic services.
Akuno, who also worked in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, says he believes his organization will need to take a more active role to help maintain a supply of drinkable water, including collecting and distributing water catchment systems, and teaching people how to use iodine.
“One of the more radical things we could do in service of the community [would be] to help facilitate more autonomy, more self control, more flexibility and freedom so we’re not dependent on the whims of what the state will and will not do,” Akuno says. “That’s the direction that we’re realistically going to have to move in.”
While Mississippi is by many metrics the poorest state in the country, it also has one of the highest rates of income inequality and a firmly entrenched power structure. The failing water infrastructure in Jackson has done nothing to upend that paradigm.
“The bottom line is that it’s always been [about] race—and what underscores that is capitalism,” Akuno adds. “If you can get away with those conditions, and extract the profit from it, that’s what you're going to do. Mississippi is the poster child for that history.”