Scott Colom breaks Mississippi's barrier as first Black senator

Scott Colom defeated Cindy Hyde-Smith on November 10 to become the first African American elected to the United States Senate from Mississippi. The victory ends a long-standing political pattern in the state, which has never selected a Black candidate for a statewide office. Colom’s win marks a distinct shift in the state’s electoral history.

Mississippi holds the highest percentage of African American residents of any state. Despite this demographic reality, the state previously ranked first in the nation for lynchings between 1882 and 1968, according to data from the NAACP and Ida B. Wells Barnet’s Red Record. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described the state as sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression. He hoped Mississippi would eventually become an oasis of freedom and justice.

Colom is not the first Black politician to seek high office in Mississippi. Congressman Mike Espy ran for the Senate twice against Hyde-Smith. He lost the 2018 special election and the 2020 general election. In 2011, Johnny DuPree, the mayor of Hattiesburg, lost a bid for the governor’s office. Charles Evers, the brother of Medgar Evers, ran as an independent Senate candidate in 1971 and received 23 percent of the vote.

Hyde-Smith faced controversy during the 2018 campaign. She told a supporter she would sit in the front row if the supporter invited her to a public hanging. The Jackson Free Press, a predecessor to the Mississippi Free Press, reported the incident. Colom overcame this history and Hyde-Smith’s incumbency to secure the seat.

Political analysts have long believed white voters in the South would not elect Black candidates for governor or senator. Many Black politicians avoided these races for that reason. Colom’s victory challenges that assumption. Other African Americans now hold seats in the U.S. Senate and governors’ mansions across the country.

Judson L. Jeffries, a professor of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University, noted the election’s symbolic weight. He stated that the idea of Mississippi sending a Black man to the Senate was as unthinkable as the election of a Black president in 2008. Jeffries suggested the result may inspire other African Americans to run for high-profile statewide offices.