156 Years Later: Will Mississippi Finish the Sentence?

The Outsider's take

The Outsider/ 7 November 26

Mississippi, the state with the nation’s highest number of lynchings, is counting ballots that could send its first popularly elected Black senator to Washington.

Days after polls closed, Mississippi is still counting. Democrat Scott Colom leads Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith by about 1,000 votes, with nearly a million ballots cast. The race remains uncalled. Affidavit ballots (a temporary paper ballot used to record a vote when a person’s eligibility cannot be immediately confirmed at the polling place) can be cured through November 10; counties must certify by November 13, and lawyers are already on the scene.

There is no runoff: the candidate who finishes ahead wins.

If Colom holds on, this won’t be just an upset. It will be a reckoning.

No state fought harder to keep Black Americans from power. Between 1877 and 1950, Mississippi recorded 654 racial terror lynchings more than any other state. Its 1890 constitution used poll taxes and literacy tests to strip Black citizens of the vote.

Emmett Till was murdered there in 1955, Medgar Evers in 1963, and three Freedom Summer volunteers in 1964, killed for registering voters. The Confederate emblem remained on Mississippi’s state flag until 2020.

Yet Mississippi also sent the first Black American to the Senate: Hiram Revels, in 1870. The legislature chose him, not the voters. Then, for 156 years, the door stayed shut. Colom would be the first Black senator Mississippians have elected themselves.

How did a race rated "Safe Republican" come this close? Hyde-Smith's vote total fell from 710,000 in 2020 to fewer than 463,000. Seven counties she won last time now lean toward Colom in unofficial results. And in 2023, Hyde-Smith blocked his federal judgeship, freeing him to run.

Two futures remain possible. If Colom's lead holds, Mississippi will make history. If late ballots from the Gulf Coast and Rankin County lift Hyde-Smith, she’ll keep her seat by the narrowest margin of her career.

But some things are already true. A Black Democrat has pushed a Trump-endorsed incumbent to a dead heat in the Deep South. The idea of a permanent red wall and the claim that Black candidates can't win white votes in Mississippi are now in question.

History is not destiny. Ballot by ballot, Mississippi is deciding whether it’s ready to finish what Revels started.

The Outsider will update this story when the race is called.