“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.”

It’s just s-o-o-o-o-o-o nice to hear an American politician talk like a responsible adult.