Scott Colom Is Mississippi’s First Black Senator in 150 Years
Adam Serwer's Atlantic article places Democrat Scott Colom's defeat of Cindy Hyde-Smith—the first Black U.S. senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction—against a history of racial terror and disenfranchisement, from E. H. Hurst's 1961 killing of voter-registration organizer Herbert Lee to the Supreme Court's Louisiana v. Callais ruling, which Serwer argues lets racist voting restrictions pass as merely partisan. He claims Black-voter turnout surged in the midterms, quotes Hyde-Smith boasting she "blocked Scott Colom from being a federal judge," and judges the effort to snuff out Black political aspirations destined to fail.
