Called on a Wednesday
On Wednesday, November 11, after eight long days of counting, the Associated Press called the United States Senate race in Mississippi for Democrat Scott Colom. He defeated Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who has held the seat since 2018 and who made her own history as the first woman Mississippi ever elected to Congress. No Mississippi voter had beaten a sitting U.S. senator since 1942. People are calling it a monumental upset 145 years in the making, and by the end of this piece you will know exactly why that number matters.
Meet the Man From Columbus
Scott Colom is 43 years old. He is a seventh generation Mississippian from Columbus and a graduate of Columbus High School and Millsaps College. He serves as district attorney for Mississippi’s 16th Judicial District. The man who holds that job took it in 2015 by beating an incumbent of nearly 30 years, which tells you how he handles long odds.
His mother, Dorothy, is a retired judge who became the first Black person elected to the chancery bench in her district, the 14th Chancery District. His father, Wilbur, is an attorney who campaigned for Ronald Reagan and ran for state treasurer as the Republican nominee in 1987. He later switched to the Democratic Party.
Think about the conversations at that dinner table. Colom grew up with a trailblazing Black judge and a Reagan Republican at the same table, and you hear that upbringing every time he talks about a Mississippi that belongs to all of its people. He and his wife, Nadia, have two young daughters. Those girls are eighth generation Mississippians. Someday they will tell their own kids about the night their dad made history.
He gave his victory speech Wednesday night at Tougaloo College, the historically Black college on the northern edge of Jackson, and he opened it with a tribute to Hiram Revels, the first Black United States senator from Mississippi and the first Black senator in the entire country, a choice that set the tone for everything that followed. The spot was deliberate. Tougaloo’s Woodworth Chapel served as a meeting ground for Martin Luther King Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer in the 1960s and 70s. Medgar Evers met there as well.
Then Colom gave Mississippi a line it will repeat for years. “God didn’t want us to get it the easy way,” he said. “He wanted us to get it the Mississippi way.” He told the crowd he has “the courage to believe in Mississippi,” along with the courage to show the country that Mississippi matters. History in Mississippi waited 145 years, and then it walked into a chapel outside Jackson and took the microphone.
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