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Democrat Scott Colom has made history as the first Black US Senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction.
The longtime district attorney is also the first Black candidate to win any statewide office in Mississippi since Reconstruction.
His shocking upset victory in a state where Donald Trump won by 23 points in 2024 is even more remarkable considering Mississippi’s history.
This was the state where Jim Crow was the most violent and repressive. It was where Emmett Till was lynched and young civil rights workers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. There were 581 documented lynchings during the Jim Crow era, more than any other state.
Before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, only 6.7 percent of eligible Black voters were registered to vote in Mississippi.
Now, more than 60 years later, it was Black voters who turned out in record numbers to rewrite the history books, motivated in part by a new struggle to protect voting rights.
As was the case across the South, the Supreme Court’s demolition of the Voting Rights Act in the Louisiana v. Callais decision spurred Black voters to cast their ballots at a historic rate.
For the closing ad of his US Senate campaign, Democrat Scott Colom stood in the driveway of the house that once belonged to Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was assassinated by a white supremacist in 1963 while holding t-shirts that said “Jim Crow Must Go.”
“He was killed for helping Mississippians vote,” said Colom. “On Tuesday, use your vote and honor everyone who died for that right.”