Don’t Be So Surprised That Mississippi Turned Blue
The state’s “faith tradition” that Colom evoked is as much about prayer as it is about remembering generations of bloodshed in Mississippi, where Black voting rights were redeemed by those who could only dream of what Colom has now achieved: finally turning his home state blue.
Key points
- Moses directed Freedom Summer, the 1964 effort to recruit hundreds of white college students to Mississippi to help open Freedom Schools, or voter-registration-and-education sites meant to overcome the ridicule, violence, and other tactics the state used to keep Black voters off the rolls.
- On the day before he delivered his victory speech, at Tougaloo College, a historically Black school with a rich civil-rights history, Colom held a press conference wearing a mocha-brown hoodie that bore a quote from the civil-rights organizer Bob Moses: When you’re in Mississippi, the rest of America doesn’t seem real.
- He waged a campaign set on showing that “Mississippi matters,” which many registered more as a question than a declaration, doubting whether a Black man and a Democrat could win the seat.
Finally victorious on Veterans Day, he credited the state’s civil-rights titans and local people who work without an expectation of recognition for carrying on the “Mississippi faith tradition” of having hope, even—or perhaps especially—in dark chapters.
Additional details
- My late stepfather, Obbie Riley, a five-term Democratic county supervisor in Mississippi, was among those who undertook that fight, although he didn’t live long enough to see its results.
- But this win is the product of decades of uphill, incremental, thankless, and overlooked labor powered by an ancestral charge and a conviction to reclaim Mississippi.
- In 2020, days after George Floyd was murdered, Mississippi’s attorney general suddenly dropped a police-shooting case that Colom had transferred to the state in 2016.
- History is never fully in the rearview in Mississippi, and that was evident throughout the Colom campaign.
- Many Americans might be surprised that Colom flipped what’s long been a deeply red seat.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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