November 12, 2026 (Thursday)
Mississippi has a new U.S. senator-elect.
Last night, the Associated Press called the race for Democrat Scott Colom, district attorney for the 16th Judicial District of Mississippi. Shortly afterward, Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith conceded the race, saying she respected the decision of the Mississippi voters. She congratulated Colom and wished him well.
Colom thus becomes the third Black senator from the state of Mississippi and the first ever elected by the people, as his two predecessors became senators in the years immediately after the Civil War, when state legislatures, rather than the people, still chose U.S. senators.
In 1870 the Mississippi legislature chose Hiram R. Revels, a minister who had been born free in North Carolina to free people of color, to finish the term of a Senate seat left empty in 1861 when the man who held it left with the state upon Mississippi’s secession from the United States. Over the opposition of Democrats, who were then the party of the Confederates, Revels became the nation’s first Black senator, serving for a little over a year, from February 25, 1870, to March 3, 1871.
The second Black senator from Mississippi was Blanche K. Bruce, who was born into slavery in Virginia and in 1868 moved to Mississippi, where he became a large landholder and was active in the Republican Party. The legislature elected him senator in 1874, and he served from March 1875 to March 1881, working closely with New York’s machine politician Roscoe Conkling, for whom he named his son. During his tenure, he presided over the Senate for a day, becoming the first Black person to preside over the Senate and the only formerly enslaved person to do so.
The backlash against Black political power was ferocious in Mississippi, where Black people outnumbered white people in 39 of the state’s 75 counties. In 1889, when Republicans began to talk about federal protection for Black voters in the South, lynching, which had been declining, rose again dramatically.
The next year, a convention rewrote the state constitution to enforce white supremacy by making it virtually impossible for Black people to vote. They required voters to pay a poll tax of $2 and to be able to show receipts for the two previous elections and to be able to interpret a section from the complicated state constitution chosen by a polling registrar. Because jurors were drawn from voting lists, being purged from them meant Black Americans couldn’t sit on juries, either.
Northerners, worried about the political power of new immigrants, cheered on Mississippi’s educational qualifications for voting, and by 1903 every southern state and many northern ones had rewritten their constitutions to adopt similar limits to suffrage.
Mississippi became the center of voter suppression in the United States, making it the state on which voting rights activists focused in the years after World War II, especially after the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett TIll in the state in 1955 in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision requiring the desegregation of public schools.
Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran and the Mississippi field officer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), urged the national organization to get involved in calling for justice for the child. As part of his civil rights work to combat segregation, Evers led voter registration drives in the face of growing white resistance. On June 12, 1963, Byron De La Beckwith, a member of a white supremacist Citizen Council, shot Evers in the back.
In one of the most powerful ads of the campaign, Colom told the story.
“There’s a house in Jackson every Mississippian ought to walk through once,” Colom says, as he stands in front of Medgar Evers’s home. “It looks like every other house on the street, except for it isn’t. It has no front door. You come in through the carport, where the walls give you some cover. The children slept on the floor, below the windows. Their father taught them that if they ever heard gunfire, they should crawl to the bathroom. He made it a game.”
“I’ve been a prosecutor for ten years,” Colom said. “Unfortunately, I’ve stood in a lot of houses where something terrible happened. This isn’t any house. This isn’t any tragedy. This is where Medgar Evers died. He fought for this country at Normandy. He came home to Mississippi, and they wouldn’t let him vote.
“So he organized, helping other people register. Just after midnight on June 12, 1963, he pulled into here with an arm full of T-shirts that said, “Jim Crow Must Go.” A man hiding across the street shot him in the back. Two juries let that man walk. His wife, Myrlie, never stopped. It took 31 years, then a Mississippi prosecutor reopened the case, and a Mississippi jury, both Black and white, convicted him.
“In Mississippi, no one is above the law, and no one should be outside its protection. He was killed for helping Mississippians vote. On Tuesday, use your vote, and honor everyone who died for that right.”
Mississippians heard Colom. They went to the polls and made him the first Black candidate elected to the United States Senate from Mississippi.
In his victory speech, Colom reached back to minister Hiram Revels to anchor his journey to the Senate in the faith that he called a Mississippi tradition. “For me, this journey started with a prayer,” he said, “and in Mississippi, our prayers have often changed the course of history.” He called out Medgar Evers and voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer for their faith in Mississippi, but added that “in Mississippi, it’s local people that make the difference. Not just the names that are recorded in history, but people that do the work without any expectation of recognition.”
He continued: “I’ll tell you, it’s local people that had faith that Mississippi can make progress, and it’s local people like the people out here who had faith that we can win this election. So God bless you. But as my mom would always tell me, faith without work is dead, and we worked this election, y’all. We worked. God didn’t want us to get it the easy way, he wanted us to get it the Mississippi way.”
“For months and months, I’ve been telling everybody, everywhere I go, that we’re going to win this election,” Colom said. “I was saying that eight or nine months ago, and recently, I’ve been saying it on the news. But every time I said it, I pointed out that people were going to give me too much credit for it, because it’s not something that I did; it’s something that we did.”
“All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this,” Colom said. “I had the courage to believe in Mississippi. I had the courage to understand that we could show the country that Mississippi matters.”