Democrat Scott Colom hasn’t yet won Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race. The state is still tallying ballots that could make Colom the first Black senator from Mississippi since …1881.
We’ll probably know by Friday. It will depend on a process playing out in election offices across Mississippi’s 82 counties, where local officials are receiving and examining absentee and provisional ballots. As of Monday morning, Colom’s lead over Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith had grown to nearly 2,600 votes.
Hyde-Smith has not appeared publicly since election night, when she essentially declared victory despite a razor-thin margin with ballots still uncounted. “We are not backing down,” she posted on social media Friday. “This election is not over. Our team is working across Mississippi to monitor the remaining ballots and protect the integrity of the process. We will see this through to the very end!”
Mississippi’s counties can count absentee ballots if they are received by today — five business days after the election. Voters with identification issues also have until today to address them in person at their local elections office. Counties have until this Friday to certify complete results to the secretary of state.
During the campaign, Colom emphasized that he would represent all Mississippians, and he charged that Trump’s policies — the war with Iran and tariffs, especially — harmed everyone equally, cutting across all demographic lines.
But Colom and his Black supporters have not ignored the significance of his candidacy as a Black man. He ended his campaign with an ad set at the Jackson home of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was gunned down in 1963 in his own driveway, dying in front of his wife and children.
“It’s a powerful reminder of the sacrifice to gain the ballot,” Colom said Friday. “What was important to me about that ad is we didn’t ask people to vote for me. We just talked about the sacrifice, talked about the story. We just wanted that to be the closing ad because I wanted that to be the last message that the people of Mississippi heard.”
***
I have never been to Mississippi. I’ve been invited there but always found excuses. To me, Mississippi was the Ku Klux Klan. The heartland of American racism. The place where reprobate bullies could — and did — murder people who tried to stand up to them. I also had a more personal reason for avoiding the state.
In September 1964, the start of my freshman year at college, I got word that a boy who had protected me from childhood bullies — I knew him only as Mickey — had been murdered in Mississippi.
Early that summer, Mickey — whose full name was Michael Schwerner — had traveled to Mississippi to register Black voters. The Civil Rights Movement was gaining strength. Martin Luther King Jr. had given his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the August 1963 March on Washington, where 250,000 people had gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear him.
“Freedom Summer” of 1964 brought college students, both Black and white — Mickey among them — from northern schools together with Black people from Mississippi to educate and register Black voters under the aegis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Mississippi was chosen because only 7 percent of the state’s eligible Black voters were then registered, in a state that was about 40 percent Black. Most had been frozen out of the polls with poll taxes, subjective literacy tests, and brutality. It had been that way since 1877.
The system was enforced by white supremacists who could commit crimes with impunity because the entire region had become a one-party state run by white supremacists.
Mickey was among the first wave of volunteers to arrive in Mississippi for Freedom Summer. On the afternoon of June 21, 1964, he and two other student volunteers — Andrew Goodman, also white, and James Chaney, a young Black man — were driving near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, when Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price stopped them for allegedly speeding.
Price locked them up in the local jail. That night, after they paid their speeding ticket and left the jail, Price followed them in his police car, stopped them again, ordered them into his car, and took them down a deserted road where he turned them over to a group of his fellow Ku Klux Klan members. They beat Mickey, Andrew, and James with chains. Then they killed them and buried their bodies in an earthen dam under construction.
For weeks, no one knew what had happened to the three volunteers. Lyndon Johnson used concern over their disappearance to pressure the House to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2.
Just before he signed the bill, Johnson addressed the American people on television “to talk to you about what that law means to every American.” He said:
[T]hose who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning…. Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom. Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders.
Johnson was proud that his bill had the bipartisan support of more than two-thirds of the lawmakers in Congress, along with “the great majority of the American people.” He said:
The purpose of the law is simple…. to promote a more abiding commitment to freedom, a more constant pursuit of justice, and a deeper respect for human dignity…. We will achieve these goals because most Americans are law-abiding citizens who want to do what is right. My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail.
On July 16, two weeks after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and a little more than three weeks after James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner disappeared, Senator Barry Goldwater accepted the Republican nomination for president at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California. Goldwater told Republican delegates that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Meanwhile, Alabama’s segregationist Governor George Wallace, running in Democratic primaries against incumbent Lyndon Johnson, won 34 percent of the vote in Wisconsin and 30 percent in Indiana. A significant share of those votes came from working-class Democrats.
In the presidential election that fall, voters backed Johnson’s vision of America and rejected Goldwater by a landslide, the loser prevailing only in his own state of Arizona and five states of the Deep South: Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina.
Mickey’s body and those of Chaney and Goodman were found August 4. They were illustrations of extremism in the defense of what white supremacists defined as liberty.
The state of Mississippi refused to bring murder charges against any of the killers, but eventually Price and Neshoba County Sheriff Laurence Rainey, also a Klan member, and sixteen others — including Samuel Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of Mississippi’s White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan — were arraigned for the federal crime of conspiracy to violate the civil rights of the murdered young men.
An all-white jury found seven of them guilty, including Price and Bowers. After several unsuccessful appeals, each received a sentence of between three and 10 years. None would spend more than six years behind bars.
When the news reached me that Mickey had been beaten and murdered by white supremacists — by adult bullies who would stop at nothing to prevent Black people from exercising their right to vote — something snapped inside me.
It was as if I had gotten a new pair of eyes and began to see everything differently.
Before then, I understood bullying as a few kids picking on me for being short, making me feel bad about myself. After I learned what happened to Mickey, I began to see bullying on a larger scale, all around me: Black people bullied by white; workers bullied by employers; girls and women bullied by men; the disabled or gay or poor or sick or immigrant bullied by politicians, insurance companies, landlords, and bigots.
I saw the powerful and the powerless, the exploiters and the exploited.
It seemed as if the world had changed, when in fact it was me who had changed. I had a different understanding of the meaning of injustice. It became as personal to me as were the bullies who called me names and threatened me on the playground — but larger, more encompassing, more urgent.
***
Last Monday, the day before Election Day, Angela Lewis, the daughter of James Chaney, said a prayer of thanks to her father, who had been murdered just days after she was born. On Tuesday, she voted for Scott Colom. That she could vote at all was because of people like her father, Goodman, and Schwerner.
“I called all my kids,” Ms. Lewis said, “and I told them that if they love me and if they ever want to talk to me again, they better get out of that bed in the morning and they better go vote.”
Even if Scott Colom is not determined the winner of the race to become Mississippi’s next senator, in an important sense Colom has already won. He has achieved what seemed impossible in 1964 — a Black man gaining so many votes in Mississippi that the result turns on absentee and provisional ballots.
Not only has Colom won, but Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner have won. Mississippi has won. America has won.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
