Little CisGen(d)eral

Many news articles are rightfully noting that Scott Colom becomes the first Black senator elected in Mississippi “since Reconstruction.” I think it’s worth more fully articulating why that is and the history tucked into that two-word phrase. Mississippi has always been one of the Blackest (by population %) states in the Union, and after the Civil War, in 1870, it elected as senator America’s first Black member of Congress — AME minister Hiram R. Revels. Four years later, he was replaced by Blanche Bruce, a former slave, who became the country’s second Black senator. Then, in 1890, state lawmakers in Mississippi called a state Constitutional convention in order to functionally strip Black residents access to the ballot box — introducing a $2 annual poll tax as well as literacy tests. As a result, Black voter participation plummeted. These were innovations, and became the inspiration for similar “Jim Crow” laws across the South during the period that followed Reconstruction. For the next 136 years, Black voter registration and turnout would be a major focus of civil rights efforts in Mississippi — including the work of Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer — often in response to acts of racial violence including the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till. Even so, no Black official had managed to be elected to a statewide office in Mississippi since the 1890 convention until yesterday, when Scott Colom was declared the winner of the 2026 Senate race.