Many posts have discussed civil rights.
From MLK's I Have a Dream speech, which mentioned Mississippi eight times: "I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice."
For the closing ad of his US Senate campaign, Democrat Scott Colom stood in the driveway of the house that once belonged to Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was assassinated by a white supremacist in 1963 while holding T-shirts that said “Jim Crow Must Go.”
“He was killed for helping Mississippians vote,” said Colom. “On Tuesday, use your vote and honor everyone who died for that right.”
Now Colom, in a fitting tribute to Evers, has made history as the first Black US senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction. The longtime district attorney is also the first Black candidate to win any statewide office in Mississippi since Reconstruction.
His shocking upset victory in a state where Donald Trump won by 23 points in 2024 is even more remarkable considering Mississippi’s history.
This was the state where Jim Crow was the most violent and repressive. It was where Emmett Till was lynched, Evers was assassinated, and the young civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. There were 581 documented lynchings during the Jim Crow era, more than any other state.
“Just to mention Mississippi, to cross the state line from Alabama and go there, it just created all types of problems in my own mind,” the late congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis once said. “It seemed like when you just drove over the state line, something happened to the air, to the environment. It was a psychological thing… Alabama is bad; Alabama is hell. But to go to Mississippi at the time was worse than hell.”
