“The last Black man to represent Mississippi in the Senate was born into slavery and left office in 1881,” says The New York Times. He was replaced by a white former Confederate soldier who disavowed the ideals of racial equality and ushered in segregationist policies.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to Mississippi as “sweltering with the heat of injustice.”
“The state has long been associated with political dispositions that would have rendered Colom’s rise as an African American and a Democrat unthinkable — from its poll taxes and literacy test in the Jim Crow era, to the murders of activists trying to register Black people to vote, to aligning with deeply conservative politics that propelled Donald Trump to a 22-point win in Mississippi in 2024,” says The Washington Post.
“Mississippi voters made history because they refused to be intimidated, discouraged, or counted out,” said Derrick Johnson, the national president of the NAACP, in a statement. This year, the NAACP opened 11 field offices and registered more than 17,000 voters, he said. The Jackson office still has bullet holes from the time Medgar Evers worked in the state, when he faced several assassination attempts before being killed in his driveway.
Colom’s “breathtaking victory” solidifies Democrats’ ascendance in Washington and the potential for a political realignment in the South, the Post says.
Incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R, congratulated Colom on his victory in a video posted to X. “While this is not the outcome we worked for or hoped for, I respect the decision of Mississippi voters,” she said.
Colom was born to a prominent family — his father was a Reagan-appointed judge and his mother was an attorney. At 28, he became the youngest and first Black judge appointed in the history of Lowndes County and later the first Black city prosecutor for Columbus. He successfully ran for district attorney for Mississippi’s 16th Circuit Court District in 2015, running on a reformist agenda emphasizing diversion programs for nonviolent offenders, and unseated a nearly 30-year incumbent. As district attorney, he personally prosecuted more than two dozen jury trials, obtaining guilty verdicts in nearly all of them.
After the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year further weakening the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Colom tapped into the backlash among Black voters angered by attempts to dilute their voting power.
At Tougaloo College, where Colom gave his acceptance speech on Wednesday night, supporters danced and wept, says a separate Times article on the celebration.
Vonda Reeves, 68, a doctor in Jackson, said that when she learned of Colom’s victory, “It was like I was levitating because of the joy I felt.”
John’s daily commentary on briefing.center
Here is John’s commentary today, titled ‘‘60 Minutes’ and Trump: the extended version’
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