Rukia Lumumba

A legal professional, human rights advocate and transformative justice strategist, Rukia Lumumba is the daughter of the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba and late human rights advocate Nubia Lumumba. She is the founding director of the People’s Advocacy Institute for transformative justice in the South, co-coordinator of the Electoral Justice Project of the Movement for Black Lives, and co-managed the successful Committee to Elect Chokwe Antar Lumumba for Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. She has spent most of her career creating programs that address racial disparities, end mass incarceration, redefine and transform our approach and response to violence and challenge the need for prisons. She is a community member and legal professional committed to bringing forth a new system of governance that builds equity, cooperation, worker democracy, and environmental sustainability to provide meaningful living wage jobs, reduce racial inequities, eliminate mass criminalization/incarceration and build community capacity. She currently co-leads the Jackson People’s Assembly as a model for community-led governance; the Mississippi Bail Fund Collective to end pre-trial detention, co-developing Mississippi’s first violence interruption-credible messenger initiative, and serves on the steering committee of the Mississippi Prison Reform Coalition for human rights for all human beings and the closure of Parchman prison. She is on the board of several organizations including Operation Shoestring. Black VotersMatter Fund and the Edward W. Hazen Foundation. She is a graduate of Howard University School of Law and Tougaloo College.