As Martin Luther King Jr. listed the places he dreamed of freedom taking root, he put the word “even” before the state where I was born. There was wall-to-wall racism in the United States, and the whole bloc of Jim Crow states was notoriously deadly. But from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, King spoke of a day when “even the state of Mississippi…will be transformed.”
Even. With that one word, King voiced what so many people believed, what so many people still believe, about Mississippi: that it is singularly oppressive, the last place a Black person in the U.S. would want to be.
With that one word, King voiced what so many people believed, what so many people still believe, about Mississippi: that it is singularly oppressive, the last place a Black person in the U.S. would want to be.
“Isn’t that where prejudice kinda started at?” a Black man, in Louisiana of all places, once asked when I said where I was from. A Black woman in Boston said she’d been proud she’d never stepped foot in my home state. But while in Memphis, she said, she impulsively crossed the bridge just to say she had. Joke’s on her, because the bridges out of Memphis lead to Arkansas, but the point is she considered Mississippi so frightening, she’d only stick a toe in.
Despite the state’s reputation as a thing unto itself — “They got white folks down there that scare white folks,” is how Richard Pryor put it — even Mississippi joined last week’s blue wave and voted to send Democrat Scott Colom to the U.S. Senate. Colom was finally able to claim victory Wednesday, more than a week after Election Day.
His win is historic in part because every Democrat the state previously sent to the Senate was some combination of slave owner, Confederate soldier or segregationist. But it’s even more historic because Colom is Black, and for the first time, voters in the Blackest state in the country have elected a Black person to a statewide office. (Republicans Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, Black U.S. senators from Mississippi’s Reconstruction era, were chosen by the state legislature, as senators were before the ratification of the 17th Amendment.)
Colom, a 43-year-old district attorney for four Northeast Mississippi counties, prevailed against the 67-year-old Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who eight years ago, infamously winked at the South’s history of lynching when she joked that if a certain supporter “invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” That seeming fondness for the state’s racist past didn’t cost her then, and it may not have directly factored into her loss to Colom, but her initial refusal to apologize exposed her as an arrogant white Southern politician who couldn’t conceive of such offensiveness costing her. How could it — in Mississippi?
According to an MS NOW analysis, in addition to holding all the counties that Vice President Kamala Harris won in the 2024 presidential election, Colom won 18 counties President Donald Trump carried that year, including 10 counties Trump won in 2020. Hyde-Smith, who was typical of this year’s incumbent Republicans who seemed clueless about how to campaign in a competitive race, got about 300,000 fewer votes than Trump did two years ago. Colom got thousands more votes than Harris.
Voter turnout typically falls off a cliff between a presidential election and a midterm, but in this race, turnout in Mississippi’s majority-Black counties was 88% of turnout in 2024, while the turnout everywhere else was 75% of 2024’s turnout. According to The New York Times Voter Trends, Colom won more than 90% of the Black vote and, significantly, 25% of the white vote.
During his victory speech, Colom spoke about the faith of voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer — who was beaten nearly to death by police in 1963 — and Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary who was assassinated outside his Jackson home three days later.
During his victory speech Wednesday night, Colom spoke broadly about faith, but also about the faith of two Mississippians in particular: voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer — who was beaten nearly to death by police in Winona on June 9, 1963 — and Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary who was assassinated outside his Jackson home three days later. Colom understood the moment. It would have been impossible for him to have faith that he could win his election without their prerequisite faith that Black Mississippians would someday participate in elections.
In 1964, the year before the Voting Rights Act was signed, the Southern Regional Council’s Voter Education Project reported that Mississippi “presents more resistance to would-be Negro voters than any other state and offers more intimidation and violence to Negroes than all the others combined.” In two years of working to register Black voters, the report said, activists had signed up more people in small cities like Brunswick, Georgia, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, than in all of Mississippi.
Only an estimated 6.7% of voting-age Black Mississippians were registered in 1964. I asked around this year and wasn’t given the name of anybody in my big Mississippi family who was in that number, not even the ones with college degrees.
Now, 62 years later, Black Mississippians made a Black Mississippian a senator.
This has otherwise been a hard year for my home state. Nolan Wells, a Black teenager, mysteriously died while on a boating trip with white friends, and nobody is facing charges. A white Senatobia police officer fired his gun into a moving car outside Walmart and killed Kohen Wiley, a 1-year-old Black baby. And not only are there no charges, but the state’s attorney general determined the police officer’s use of force was justified. The U.S. Supreme Court hollowed out the Voting Rights Act, and some white elected officials in Mississippi, taking cues from their segregationist forefathers, openly discussed wiping out Black voters’ political strength.
On Sept. 22, the day the grand jury declined to bring charges in Wells’ death, I asked on Facebook, “Black people, what’s it like being in Mississippi right now?” The responses included “scary and sad,” “terrible and I want to leave” and “frustrated and disappointed.” A high school classmate used the word “exhausting.”
Some white elected officials in Mississippi, taking cues from their segregationist forefathers, openly discussed wiping out Black voters’ political strength.
We can’t say, then, that Mississippi is transformed. King’s utopian dream notwithstanding, the state transforming may be as good as it gets.
But we can still rejoice in the incompleteness. Between Election Day and Colom being declared the winner, my exhausted classmate acknowledged “the first glimmer of hope and optimism I’ve felt in a long time.”
This is not the first time Black Mississippians have cheered an election, not when 98% chose Barack Obama in 2008 and 96% did in 2012. And not when 94% supported the 2020 ticket that made Kamala Harris the first Black woman vice president. But those historic victories can be credited to the rest of country. Mississippi didn’t go to either of those candidates.
Wednesday night was different. Black Mississippians were joyous because they saw their prayers and their labor pay off — even in Mississippi.
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