After the 1955 trial in which an all-white jury acquitted Emmett Till’s murderers, the hard-hitting independent journalist I.F. Stone wrote these prescient lines: “The South must become either truly democratic or the base of a new racist and Fascist movement which could threaten the whole country and its institutions.”
For most of its life, my home state of Mississippi has largely fulfilled the second part of Stone’s prophecy. But this week, Scott Colom’s long-shot victory over Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith revealed an arc of 145 years of history finally bending toward justice.
The last Black senator from Mississippi — and the only one to have served a full term — was Blanche Kelso Bruce, a former slave who served from 1875 to 1881. Bruce was part of a remarkable but short-lived political wave of his time, when at least 226 Black citizens were elected to state or federal office in Mississippi during the brief Civil War Reconstruction period. When Bruce ran for re-election, he was defeated by James Zachariah George, a former enslaver, signer of Mississippi’s Secession Ordinance, and Confederate colonel who served under Jefferson Davis. George also became a principal architect of Mississippi’s racist 1890 state constitution, which disenfranchised Black voters and became a model not only for nearby Southern states but also for Hitler’s fascist rule in Nazi Germany.
Because it’s Mississippi, the 2026 contest between Hyde-Smith and Colom echoes the past. Hyde-Smith herself is a product and cultivator of Mississippi’s white supremacist, segregationist culture. She attended Lawrence County Academy and sent her children to Brookhaven Academy, each founded in 1970 as segregation academies, as white families cited Bible chapter and verse to justify abandoning public schools that were finally being racially integrated nearly two decades after Brown v. Board of Education. One of her early actions as a Mississippi state senator in 2001 was to introduce a Senate bill to restore the name “Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway” to a section of roadway. In 2014, Hyde-Smith visited the Jefferson Davis home in Biloxi and posted photographs of herself on Facebook wearing a Confederate military cap and holding a Civil War-era rifle. She captioned the photos “Mississippi history at its best!” In 2020, she opposed the removal of Confederate statues, and in 2021, as a U.S. senator, she voted against advancing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which sought to restore federal protections for Black voters in southern states like Mississippi.
And because it’s Mississippi, there is a certain poetic justice in Colom’s victory. In 2023, Hyde-Smith blocked President Joe Biden’s nomination of Colom, who in 2015 had become the first Black district attorney elected in a majority-white judicial district in Mississippi, to serve as a federal judge.
I’ve always thought of my home state as both a throwback and a harbinger of America’s future. As a white kid born in the fateful year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and who came of age in Mississippi in the 1970s and 1980s, I find Colom’s victory deeply moving.
As I note in my recent book, Backslide, I grew up watching the last lurching death throes of the world that folks like James George had birthed and that Hyde-Smith desperately fought to keep on life support. I experienced the much-delayed integration of the Jackson Public School System when our elementary school welcomed our first Black teachers and classmates in our nation’s bicentennial year. My public high school boasted respectable levels of integration, with a student body that was approximately 40 percent African American and 60 percent white, even if we persisted in calling ourselves “the Rebels.” I experienced the first observances of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, even if we continued to celebrate — as Mississippi still does — the birthday of Robert E. Lee on the same day.
Even before Colom’s victory, there were signs of momentous change in Mississippi, revealed in determined efforts to tell the truth about the state’s racist past and to repair the damage done. We have vanquished the legacy of the Confederacy from the state flag, reckoned with the legacy of injustice and racial violence in Neshoba and Tallahatchie Counties, restored sacred lands in Winston County to the Choctaw tribe, and established in Jackson the nation’s only state-funded museum dedicated to civil rights.
And there are signs in the exit poll data that this election was not a blip but rather a sign of a dawning possible future:
Compared with the 2024 election, all 82 Mississippi counties shifted toward Democrats (statewide, a whopping 23.5 percentage points), including 18 counties that flipped from Republican to Democrat.
Though a shrinking white evangelical cohort voted 90 percent for Hyde-Smith, the non-evangelical majority of the electorate voted 75 percent for Colom.
Hyde-Smith won 61 percent of the over-65 vote, and Colom won 62 percent of the under-45 vote.
If you visit Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol today, you will see two bronze statues, each donated in 1931 by the state of Mississippi to represent its values. One is Jefferson Davis, the U.S. senator who betrayed his country to become the president of the Confederacy. The other is James Z. George, who defeated the state’s only previous full-term Black senator and spent the rest of his life working to prevent his fellow Black citizens and their descendants from exercising their democratic right to vote. The state still hasn’t officially recalled these symbols. But Colom’s victory signals that a majority of contemporary Mississippians have, finally, chosen to support a truly democratic society rather than a racist, fascist movement.
Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the author of Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn Against Democracy. He writes the Redeeming Democracy newsletter on Substack.
"If you visit Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol today, you will see two bronze statues, each donated in 1931 by the state of Mississippi to represent its values. One is Jefferson Davis, the U.S. senator who betrayed his country to become the president of the Confederacy. The other is James Z. George, who defeated the state’s only previous full-term Black senator and spent the rest of his life working to prevent his fellow Black citizens and their descendants from exercising their democratic right to vote."
This is astounding to me! It is a disgrace that needs to be rectified as soon as possible.
Thanks for the article. I knew Colom's victory was historic, but I didn't know many of the things you pointed out.
Good for Mississippi, and especially the younger voters for making history in this magnificent way. Good riddance to Hyde-Smith. It makes Colom's victory that much better!