Scott Colom Is Mississippi’s First Black Senator in 150 Years
· The Atlantic
One fall afternoon in Liberty, Mississippi, in 1961, a white Democratic former congressman and state legislator named E. H. Hurst shot Herbert Lee in the head. Hurst was angry that Lee, who was Black, had been trying to register other Black Mississippians to vote. An all-white jury accepted Hurst’s claim that he had acted in self-defense because Lee came at him with a tire iron. Donald Trump, now the sitting president of the United States, was 15 years old.
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This was how “negro law” worked in Jim Crow Mississippi, which was essentially a police state. Although many laws were race-neutral in their language, “in a society in which race mattered above all else, ‘negro law’ determined who was punished for what,” the historian Neil McMillen wrote in Dark Journey, his 1989 history of Mississippi. In the 1940s, the NAACP was “virtually forced to operate underground,” because in 1920, the state legislature had made it illegal to “possess or distribute” material that would “disturb relations between the races.” As late as 1961, a white man could shoot a Black man in broad daylight and get away with it. When the Black reporter Simeon Booker arrived in 1955 to cover the lynching of Emmett Till for Jet magazine, he wrote that he witnessed “not only raw hatred, but state condoned terror.”
This apparatus of state-condoned terror was still active into the 1960s. As Thomas Ricks writes in Waging a Good War, his history of the civil-rights movement as a nonviolent military campaign, when the legendary civil-rights organizer Bob Moses went down to Mississippi he was “assaulted and jailed repeatedly, sometimes simply for speaking to white people as equals.” In 1963, Moses and other organizers survived a drive-by shooting. He later wrote to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that Mississippi was extremely dangerous—“we were just like sitting ducks” and “people were just going to be wiped out.”
[Adam Serwer: Even where MAGA won, MAGA lost]
The point of all this terror was to prevent what happened yesterday, when Democrat Scott Colom defeated Cindy Hyde-Smith to become the first Black U.S. senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction. Hyde-Smith attended a segregation academy as a child—private schools set up in the South to circumvent the Brown v. Board of Education ruling to integrate public schools. She had previously blocked Colom’s appointment to the federal bench. On Election Night, Hyde-Smith declared victory, saying, “I blocked Scott Colom from being a federal judge, and you blocked him from being a U.S. Senator.” That was a little premature.
“In Mississippi, our prayers often change the course of history,” Colom said in his victory speech last night. “It’s not something that I did, y’all. It’s something that we did. All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this.”
The last Black man to have served as a U.S. senator from Mississippi, Blanche Bruce—back then senators were appointed by the state legislature—was born enslaved in 1841. His mother was enslaved, and his father was her master in the eyes of the law. One of Bruce’s votes was against the Republican-supported Chinese Exclusion Act, which he explained as a vote of conscience and solidarity, “representing as I do a people who are considered essentially disqualified from the privileges and immunities of American citizenship.”
Before the turn of the 20th century, Mississippi was majority-Black. State-tolerated (or state-encouraged) terror led many Black Mississippians to flee north during the Great Migration. Today, Mississippi still has the highest proportion of Black residents of any state. Before the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, law and violence kept Black Mississippians disenfranchised; after, racially polarized voting would place a hard ceiling on the aspirations of every Black candidate in this red state. The last Democrat to represent Mississippi in the Senate was John Stennis, an avowed segregationist who, as a prosecutor in the 1930s, led the prosecution of three Black men who had been tortured into confessions, a case that led the Supreme Court to rule in 1936 that such confessions are inadmissible under the Fourteenth Amendment.
This is all to say, as one famous Mississippian put it, that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Mississippi today is not the Mississippi of Dark Journey, but we are living in a world inextricably shaped by it. Multiracial democracy in America is young; it emerged only in the lifetimes of the people who are still currently governing the country. It is younger than the president. It is younger than most of the justices on the Supreme Court. And it has been under assault. The past decade has seen a relentless attack on its foundations from people who remember the time before multiracial democracy as a golden age. It was not a golden age in Mississippi, not for people like Herbert Lee, or Bob Moses, or Fannie Lou Hamer.
Conservatives have undone or undermined many of the laws and constitutional amendments passed to ensure that Black Americans could exercise their rights as full citizens. The Supreme Court has slowly chipped away at the Voting Rights Act, most recently ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that racist voting restrictions are constitutional if they are passed with partisan, rather than racist, intent. This standard would permit many Jim Crow–era laws that were superficially race-neutral but racist in intent. As McMillen observed, in pre-1965 Mississippi, “much of the exclusionary process was necessarily left to the discriminatory application of otherwise racially neutral law.” (If lawmakers want to disenfranchise Democratic voters, and those voters just happen to be Black—by coincidence, of course!—that’s fine.)
Many Republican-controlled states in the South responded to the ruling by gerrymandering Black-majority districts out of existence. At the time, the former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale gleefully speculated that “if states are aggressive, we could see a healthy majority in the House perpetually.” Republicans might never have to worry about courting Black voters again.
Black Americans responded to this assault on the foundations of their freedom with terrific fervor in the midterms. Black-voter turnout in the South appears to have surged last week to a hair below levels usually seen when a president is on the ballot. That, along with increased white support for Democrats, helped put previously deep-red states like Mississippi into contention.
[Adam Serwer: Texas Republicans get washed]
The next Congress will have seven Black U.S. senators including Colom, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Juliana Stratton of Illinois, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, and Cory Booker of New Jersey—the most ever in history. There will be five contemporaneous Black governors in the United States in 2027, with Wes Moore in Maryland, Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia, Byron Donalds in Florida, David Crowley in Wisconsin, and Aaron Ford in Nevada. Before this election, there had been only three such elected governors: Moore, Douglas Wilder from Virginia, and Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. The first Black governor of any state, P. B. S. Pinchback of Louisiana, who inherited the office in 1872 after his running mate was impeached, required the intervention of the Grant administration to prevent a white-supremacist uprising in Louisiana. He was in office for 39 days. There would not be another Black governor in America for more than a century.
The fact that Black voters defeated efforts to limit their political power does not make such efforts morally acceptable or justifiable, of course. As Jamelle Bouie wrote in The New York Times this week, “That Americans of all stripes can overcome obstacles to voting does not mean that they should have to. And high Black turnout does not obviate the need for legislation to secure the right to vote.”
Bruce would be proud of Colom, I think, albeit initially confused as to why he was running as a Democrat. It took a century from Reconstruction to the civil-rights movement to restore the rights of Black voters, and far less time before politicians and justices began to curtail them again. Yet the project of snuffing out Black aspirations to equal citizenship will always fail. It failed in 1875. It failed in 1965. And it failed in 2026, with Callais. It will always fail, even if it takes a hundred years. Or a hundred and fifty.