Mississippi’s First Black Senator in 150 Years
Blanche Bruce would have been proud of Scott Colom.
In Liberty, Mississippi in 1961, a white ex-Democrat congressman named E.H. Hurst shot and killed Herbert Lee, a Black man who sought to register other Black voters to cast ballots. Hurst claimed self-defense, stating that Lee attacked him with a tire iron. This incident exemplified the oppressive "negro law" prevalent in Jim Crow Mississippi, where race trumped all else. The historian Neil McMillen noted that laws on the books were race-neutral, yet "negro law" dictated who would face punishment.
The NAACP faced severe restrictions in the 1940s, forced to operate underground because the state legislature prohibited possessing or distributing materials that could "disturb relations between the races." In 1961, a white man could shoot a Black man in the street and escape punishment. When journalist Simeon Booker arrived in 1955 to cover the Emmett Till lynching for Jet magazine, he witnessed "not only raw hatred, but state-condoned terror."
Bob Moses, a civil rights campaigner, faced repeated assaults and jail time for speaking with white people as equals. In 1963, Moses and other activists narrowly escaped a drive-by shooting. Moses later remarked that Mississippi was a "dangerous place, we were just like sitting ducks."
The terror aimed to deter progress, such as the 1963 victory of Democrat Scott Colom, who became the first Black U.S. senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction. Colom noted, "It’s not something that I did, y’all. It’s something that we did." Blanche Bruce, the last Black senator from Mississippi, served from 1875-1881 and voted against the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1879, advocating for justice and solidarity.
Mississippi's racial dynamics have persisted, with the state having the highest proportion of Black residents. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended law and violence that disenfranchised Black Mississippians, but recent rulings have weakened its protections. Conservatives have dismantled laws aimed at ensuring Black citizens' rights as full-fledged members of society. Today, the assault on multiracial democracy continues under the guise of renewed reverence for the past.
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