Scott Colom Is Mississippi’s First Black Senator in 150 Years
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.
Key points
- The Democratic candidate won in a southern state that had not seated a black senator since 1874.
- 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.
- senator from Mississippi, Blanche Bruce—back then senators were appointed by the state legislature—was born enslaved in 1841.
“In Mississippi, our prayers often change the course of history,” Colom said in his victory speech last night.
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.
Additional details
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Today, Mississippi still has the highest proportion of Black residents of any state.
- It’s not even past.” Mississippi today is not the Mississippi of Dark Journey, but we are living in a world inextricably….
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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