Black voters view Scott Colom’s historic Senate win through lens of Mississippi’s racial legacy

Detailed summary

Out of all the southern states, Mississippi has a special place in the struggle over Black Americans’ exclusion from the nation’s promises of freedom and justice.

It’s been nearly 150 years since a Black man has represented deep red Mississippi in the US Senate.

That changed Wednesday evening as Democrat Scott Colom was declared the winner over Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith, who had been endorsed by President Trump. For many in the state and for Black Americans across the nation, Colom’s victory reflects the ambitions that were thwarted by generations of systemic oppression and violence.

Janice Johnson, who lives in Greenville in the Mississippi Delta, says having a Black senator has been a long time coming. “In the last few years we have seen great strides,” she said.

Out of all the southern states, Mississippi has a special place in the struggle over Black Americans’ exclusion from the nation’s promises of freedom and justice. There’s Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the Mississippi-born journalist who investigated 19th-century lynching across the South, and Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose 1955 kidnapping and murder by white men in Mississippi reinvigorated the Civil Rights Movement.

There’s Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s first Mississippi field secretary who fought at Normandy in World War II and organized Black voter registration until his 1963 assassination. And Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights leader who challenged Mississippi’s all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Representative Bennie Thompson, who represents Mississippi’s Second District, was a student organizer for Hamer while studying at Tougaloo College, where Colom’s victory celebration was held Wednesday night. And now, Thompson is watching his mentee, Colom, fill a more than 145-year gap of Black leadership in statewide office.

“From my perspective, I now have a partner in Washington,” Thompson said before introducing Colom.

“I can’t help but think about Medgar Evers on Veterans Day,” Colom said during a victory speech. “A moment like this, where he served his country and came home to Mississippi, when they wouldn’t let him vote.

He added…

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Boston Globe. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.