Scott Colom, the first Black U.S. senator ever elected by Mississippians, traces his lineage in the state back seven generations, to when the nation was forging its foundation on the backs of stolen Black people. He waged a campaign set on showing that “Mississippi matters,” which many registered more as a question than a declaration, doubting whether a Black man and a Democrat could win the seat. During the most expensive election cycle in U.S. history, his campaign coffers were empty compared with Democrats in other battleground races. Finally victorious on Veterans Day, he credited the state’s civil-rights titans and local people who work without an expectation of recognition for carrying on the “Mississippi faith tradition” of having hope, even—or perhaps especially—in dark chapters.
Many Americans might be surprised that Colom flipped what’s long been a deeply red seat. But this win is the product of decades of uphill, incremental, thankless, and overlooked labor powered by an ancestral charge and a conviction to reclaim Mississippi. My late stepfather, Obbie Riley, a five-term Democratic county supervisor in Mississippi, was among those who undertook that fight, although he didn’t live long enough to see its results. The state’s “faith tradition” that Colom evoked is as much about prayer as it is about remembering generations of bloodshed in Mississippi, where Black voting rights were redeemed by those who could only dream of what Colom has now achieved: finally turning his home state blue.
“There were times when I was tired, and I felt like I couldn’t keep going, but I kept the faith,” Colom said during his victory speech Wednesday night. “And that is another tradition of our state. There’s so many people that had faith in Mississippi at times where it seemed impossible.”
That faith, and the hard work that must accompany it, was something Colom learned in his household, where he and his twin brother were reared by now-retired Judge Dorothy Colom, the first Black person to be elected to her region’s chancery court, and Wilbur Colom, an attorney who was once a Republican. Scott built on this pedigree, attending the University of Wisconsin to study law and returning home to the Columbus area, in the east-central pocket of the state, not far from the Alabama line. There he became the youngest and the first African American justice-court judge in Lowndes County, in 2011, and then Columbus’s first African American city prosecutor, in 2013. Later he took a bolder step, campaigning for district attorney in his early 30s.
[Adam Serwer: Even where MAGA won, MAGA lost]
If Columbus were anywhere else, it might be described as a natural incubator for a Democratic U.S. senator. It is a college town, home to the state’s women’s university; it’s also a vertex of a region known as “The Golden Triangle,” which is anchored by Mississippi State University and an Air Force base in Starkville. Colom ran for district attorney in 2015 as a reform candidate—and unseated a 27-year incumbent who’d defended debunked medical-examiner analyses that had led to multiple false convictions that were later overturned. Colom has been the region’s top cop for more than a decade; he instituted restorative justice and counseling for gun-violence survivors, among other reforms. In 2020, days after George Floyd was murdered, Mississippi’s attorney general suddenly dropped a police-shooting case that Colom had transferred to the state in 2016. Colom was outspoken about it, making parts of the case file public and expressing regret for handing the case over.
History is never fully in the rearview in Mississippi, and that was evident throughout the Colom campaign. On the day before he delivered his victory speech, at Tougaloo College, a historically Black school with a rich civil-rights history, Colom held a press conference wearing a mocha-brown hoodie that bore a quote from the civil-rights organizer Bob Moses: When you’re in Mississippi, the rest of America doesn’t seem real. And when you’re in the rest of America, Mississippi doesn’t seem real. Moses directed Freedom Summer, the 1964 effort to recruit hundreds of white college students to Mississippi to help open Freedom Schools, or voter-registration-and-education sites meant to overcome the ridicule, violence, and other tactics the state used to keep Black voters off the rolls. At the time, the state had the lowest Black voter-registration numbers, despite being the Blackest state in the U.S.
Training for the college students was under way when members of the Ku Klux Klan burned down Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Philadelphia, Mississippi, after beating parishioners suspected of holding civil-rights meetings. Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, organizers who had done grassroots work at Mt. Zion, knew they had to leave Freedom Summer training in Ohio to check on the community. Andrew Goodman, a college student who volunteered for Freedom Summer, joined them on his first trip to Mississippi. On the afternoon of June 21, as the trio made their way through the center of Philadelphia, the deputy sheriff, a Klansman, pulled them over and arrested them. When they were released after nightfall, a group of Klansmen and law enforcement kidnapped them, killed them, and buried them in an earthen dam in Neshoba County, where an FBI search located them 44 days later.
This past summer, Colom made a campaign stop at the Neshoba County Fair, where politicians frequently stump. Ronald Reagan spoke there during his 1980 presidential campaign, emphasizing his belief in states’ rights, which many interpreted as a dog whistle, given the proximity to where the three civil-rights workers had been slain. Colom’s father worked for Reagan’s transition team. In a 1981 interview with The Daily Mississippian, the University of Mississippi’s student newspaper, Wilbur Colom criticized some of Reagan’s policies and said that the GOP of the ’50s and ’60s had been deficient in its support for civil-rights legislation, but that Black voters’ commitment to the Democratic Party shouldn’t be automatic either.
Wilbur’s son ran a campaign with a complementary refrain: Why should Mississippi automatically be considered a Republican stronghold, especially when Democrats have chipped away at GOP control in statewide elections over the past decade? When my stepfather died in September, he was the lone Black person and Democrat serving as a Neshoba County supervisor. And although that set him apart, he’s remembered for how he sifted through disagreements to move forward, even if the ideological overlap with his colleagues was the size of a grain of sand. Throughout his campaign, Colom likewise touted that he would work with anyone, Republican or otherwise; he even visited a Trump rally and spoke with people waiting in line. There’s a Mississippi brand of bipartisanship, one my stepdad practiced, that’s a mainstay especially in rural areas, where people of difference have found commonality even amid bitter political and racial tensions.
Colom’s win was propelled by grassroots organizing to register voters, get them to the polls, and, in some cases, help them return to certify or cure provisional ballots. The senator-elect outraised his opponent, the incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith, in the last quarter of the campaign (approximately $1.45 million to $864,000), but that was nothing compared with the money pouring in for other Democratic Senate candidates. Colom’s campaign had a “rich message but a poor treasury,” Representative Bennie Thompson said at the Tougaloo victory party, where he introduced the senator-elect.
With seemingly nothing to lose, Colom infused a little bit of fun into his campaign, producing a series of ads that showcased his sense of humor. One, called “Sinators,” parodied the Mississippi-based movie Sinners using Colom’s identical twin brother. In it, a Hyde-Smith look-alike asks for just one more chance to keep everything in Mississippi the way it is. Hyde-Smith, whose parents sent her to a segregation academy as a child, was caught on camera in 2018 saying of a supporter standing beside her that if he “invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row”—in the state where more known lynchings occurred than in any other. (She later said that the remark was an “exaggerated expression of regard.”) She conceded the race after it was called on Wednesday, and congratulated Colom on his victory. The moment had a karmic quality: After President Biden nominated Colom to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi in 2022, Hyde-Smith single-handedly blocked him from the lifetime appointment, even though other statewide Republicans supported him for the role.
For a time, it looked as if the election results might face legal challenges. During the week-long vote counting, Hyde-Smith was asked about the possibility of fraud in the election and said, “There’s always irregularities.” In the summer of 2025, Mississippi shifted tens of thousands of voters to “inactive” status based on data from the credit-reporting agency Experian. DeSoto County, home to the white-flight suburbs of Memphis, inactivated more than 15,000 voters, more than anywhere else in the state. On Election Day, lines there lagged, and polling stations ran low on affidavit ballots. Colom won the county with about 53 percent of the vote; Hyde-Smith had won the county in her previous two elections.
The first time the Department of Justice used the now-gutted 1965 Voting Rights Act to protect white voters happened in Colom’s district, in Noxubee County, in 2005; Wilbur Colom represented the defendant in the case. A decade later, around the time that Scott Colom was running for district attorney, a DOJ lawyer from the 2005 case filed a lawsuit alleging issues with the Noxubee voter rolls. Instead of undertaking a costly fight, the county entered a consent decree that required a period of scrutinized voter-roll management. Noxubee and Lowndes, another county in Colom’s district, also saw voter inactivations surge in the months before the 2026 midterms. This living history is another reason many doubted whether Colom, or any Black senatorial candidate, could make it to Washington.
Political pundits have already compared this moment to the Barack Obama elections, which saw high Black voter turnout in Mississippi and elsewhere. Nadia Colom—the wife of the senator-elect, a real-estate agent, and former executive director of the Golden Triangle Boys and Girls Club—said in her speech on Wednesday that people have been calling her “Mississippi’s Michelle,” referring to the former first lady. “While it’s an honor, really and truly, to be seen in that light, what really means the most to me is that I get to be called Mississippi’s,” she said.
[Read: Why Black voters abandoned Trump]
Colom’s campaign rightly touts him as the first Black U.S. senator to be elected by Mississippians. Mississippi sent two Black senators—Hiram Revels, the nation’s first Black senator, and later Blanche Bruce—to Washington at a time when they were selected by state legislators. Black men also served as secretary of state in Mississippi for nearly a decade after the Civil War. In 1870, 14 percent of the state Senate and 47 percent of the state House of Representatives were made up of Black men. By 1874, nearly 80 percent of the state House was Black. Because Reconstruction showed such promise in Mississippi, the backlash that followed was orchestrated, acute, and violent.
A defining feature of Mississippi history is that white violence directly triggered an exodus. One historian estimates that from 1914 to 1920, during the Great Migration, one in five of the Black migrants leaving the South for economic opportunity, safety, dignity, and more came from Mississippi. White Mississippians waged yet more violence against Black folks who stayed, assassinating Medgar Evers, sickening and fatiguing Fannie Lou Hamer, and brutalizing everyday citizens into strange fruit. The remnants of that targeted violence are still visible today in the state’s stark inequality and lack of opportunity for Black Mississippians.
But Colom’s campaign challenges the narrative that Mississippi should be defined through the lens of white harm, and that those with aspirations are better off leaving. On Wednesday night, Nadia Colom said to her and Scott’s twin girls, eighth-generation Mississippians, that she hoped the race reinforced the family motto to never quit, a value instilled in their father, who passed it to them. Persistence is a precious inheritance in a state that often ranks dead-last in indicators of prosperity, livelihood, health, well-being, and education. Scott Colom didn’t quit when donors wouldn’t answer the phone, when fewer than 10 people showed up at his first town hall, when it took eight days to rightfully claim his victory. For 200 years and counting, his ancestors didn’t quit on Mississippi, toiling and resisting on the lands that he traversed during his campaign. Now he is reaping the reward of remaining.
Leave a Reply