black voter

It’s been nearly 150 years since a Black man has represented Deep South and deep red Mississippi in the U.S. Senate.

That changed Wednesday evening as Democrat Scott Colom was declared the winner over Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith, who had been endorsed by President Donald Trump. For many in the state and for Black Americans across the nation, Colom’s victory reflects the ambitions that were thwarted by generations of systemic oppression and violence.

Janice Johnson, who lives in Greenville in the Mississippi Delta, says having a Black senator has been a long time coming. “In the last few years we have seen great strides,” she said.

Out of all the southern states, Mississippi has a special place in the struggle over Black Americans’ exclusion from the nation’s promises of freedom and justice. There’s Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the Mississippi-born journalist who investigated 19th century lynching across the South, and Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose 1955 kidnapping and murder by white men in Mississippi reinvigorated the Civil Rights Movement.

There’s Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s first Mississippi field secretary who fought at Normandy in World War II and organized Black voter registration until his 1963 assassination. And Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights leader who challenged Mississippi’s all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, who represents Mississippi’s 2nd District, was a student organizer for Hamer while studying at Tougaloo College, where Colom’s victory celebration was held Wednesday night. And now, Thompson is watching his mentee, Sen.-elect Colom, fill a more than 145-year gap of Black leadership in statewide office.

“From my perspective, I now have a partner in Washington,” Thompson said before introducing Colom.

“I can’t help but think about Medgar Evers on Veterans Day,” Colom said during a victory speech. “A moment like this, where he served his country and came home to Mississippi, when they wouldn’t let him vote. But he had the faith that Mississippi could make progress. … He had faith that a day like this was possible.”

He added, “All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this.”

Johnson, who watched part of Colom’s victory speech from home, says she understands that Black voters, alone, aren’t responsible for Colom’s win. White voters, too, had to be fed up with the state’s economy, school systems and crumbling health care infrastructure for the poor — Black and white — under Republican rule.

“The most important part is we’ve got to have faith that Mississippi is ready to do the right thing,” an elated Johnson told The Associated Press on Thursday. “We as a people — and Mississippi as whole — are ready to show the nation. We have to work together, and that was his message. He wants to help pull us together.”

Jerome Dunn, a barber in Jackson, echoed Johnson’s sentiment.

“It takes everybody to vote, not one single race,” said Dunn, 59, who is Black and also voted for Colom. “I think people are looking for him to work for everybody. People are tired of Republicans and what they believe.”

Two came before Colom

Blanche K. Bruce, a Republican, was the second Black man in the Senate from Mississippi after that state’s legislature elected him to a six-year term. He served from 1875 to 1881. Hiram Revels, another Republican, was the first after the Senate voted to seat him in 1870 to fill a vacancy left empty since the start of the Civil War. Revels’ term expired about a year later.

Bruce and Revels were among 16 Black men from southern states who served in Congress during the period of Reconstruction, which aimed to address the inequities experienced by Black people during enslavement, while preparing reentry for the 11 Southern states that seceded from the union at the start of the U.S. Civil War.

Once Reconstruction ended and federal troops were withdrawn, freed slaves in the South lost many of the freedoms gained following the war as Southern states enforced racial segregation through Jim Crow-era laws.

White conservatives have dominated Mississippi’s Statehouse and congressional delegation ever since. Nearly all were white Democrats as laws restricted where Black people could live, work and go to school. That weight carried on through the Civil Rights era, but during the late 1960s white elected leaders in Mississippi switched political parties and became Republicans.

Colom’s win represents “a pretty significant change in Mississippi politics,” said Brian Shoup, head of political science and public administration at Mississippi State University.

“We haven’t seen a Democrat win the Senate since the 1980s and even then that was a traditional kind of more southern conservative Democrat,” the professor said. “We haven’t had an African American senator since the era of Reconstruction, so this is obviously a very significant and important election in Mississippi history.”

Mississippi has been burdened by its racial legacy

Black voters in Mississippi and across the South were faced with the reality of redistricting efforts designed to reduce Black representation in elected positions, set off in late April by a Supreme Court decision that gutted the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. The ruling helped fuel increased voter turnout.

But it’s difficult for many to ignore Mississippi’s troubling past involving race relations, from the lynching of Black people by the Ku Klux Klan and other mobs to the killings of Evers and Till.

In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, civil rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to Mississippi as a state “sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression.”

Colom’s election is historic and means things are changing in parts of the South, said Elnora Fisher, 68, of Greenville, who was born and raised in Mississippi where she remembers that simply living often didn’t seem fair to Black people.

“As I understood, my grandparents always tried to save up to vote,” Fisher said. “They had to pay a tax to vote.”

As a child during the 1960s, Fisher said her mother took her to an NAACP meeting. “While we were there the white police stopped the meeting and made us leave,” she said.

Black people in Mississippi should be ecstatic with Colom as a U.S. senator, Fisher added.

“Here in Mississippi, so much has been taken from the poor people and given to the rich people,” she said. “I hope Colom will give back to the people who helped get him where he is.”

Good may come of it all with so many eyes on the results of the contest between Colom and Hyde-Smith, said Shoup, the professor. Mississippians, along with the rest of the nation, may be ready to begin healing from the past.

“This race, the fact that it has been so close, and it has activated so much turnout, might portend the prospects of maybe being able to talk about these things in a more civil and open fashion,” he said.

Williams writes for the Associated Press. Sophie Bates in Jackson, Miss., and Aaron Morrison in New York contributed to this report.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — When the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act this year, U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures knew he was going to be targeted.

Alabama’s Republican-controlled Legislature soon after redrew the 2nd Congressional District, one of only two in the state represented by a Democrat, to make it easier for the GOP to win.

Figures, one of several Black members of Congress who saw their districts redrawn, has complicated that plan. He is fighting to hold on to his seat by not only rallying Black voters in cities such as Montgomery and Tuskegee, both steeped in the nation’s struggle for civil rights, but also talking to voters deep in conservative territory, tugging at their concerns over rising prices of food, fuel and fertilizer.

“We know that the deck has been stacked. We know that the rules have been changed in the middle of the game, but we know what we’ve got to do,” Figures told a cheering crowd recently in Montgomery. “All we’ve got to do is show up. All we’ve got to do is show out. All we’ve got to do is fight.”

National groups have taken notice.

Spending on television advertising in the district has gone from almost nothing to nearly $10 million in the last seven weeks, according to AdImpact, with Democratic groups outspending Republicans.

Figures’ race against Rhett Marques, a state lawmaker endorsed by President Trump, is drawing attention as another sign of potential trouble for Republicans as they try to hold their majorities in Congress. The contest also has become a rallying point for Black voters angry over how Southern states swiftly gerrymandered congressional districts after the Supreme Court decision.

U.S. Sen. Cory Booker said the Alabama election is an opportunity to send a message on voting rights.

“The people of Alabama have a chance again to say this is a moral moment — ‘Not on my watch,’” Booker (D-N.J.) said during a campaign stop with Figures. “I will not stay seated while you try to take away our power.”

Racial gerrymandering

Figures was elected in 2024 after a federal court ordered new districts, ruling that the Legislature had unlawfully diluted the voting power of Black residents. Alabama is 27% Black and has seven U.S. House seats. With Figures’ victory, the state added a second Black member of Congress for the first time in its history, aligning its representation with its demographics.

But the Supreme Court decision last term paved the way for drawing new lines. The map Alabama is using on election day reduces the Black voting-age population in Figures’ district from 48% to 40%, making the district more likely to go Republican. Trump carried the area within the new district by 14 percentage points two years ago.

Despite the district’s conservative lean, Democrats are hoping a redistricting backlash and frustration over the economy will galvanize voters on Tuesday and send Figures back to Congress.

Some Black voters say they see echoes of the state’s Jim Crow past in the redrawing of the district.

“I’m 75, and history is repeating itself,” said Francis Fanning, a retired substitute teacher in Montgomery.

Sheyann Webb-Christburg was 8 in 1965 when she and other voting rights marchers were attacked by law enforcement in Selma.

“Much blood, sweat and tears was shed in an effort for African Americans to gain their right to vote,” said Webb-Christburg, who lives in Montgomery, and remembers a feeling of excitement when Figures was elected two years ago.

“It’s very sad that we are in this place,” she said. “But we still got to continue just as we did back in the ’60s. Lift our voices, because we always keep hope alive.”

Republican says he’s aligned with ‘Alabama values’

For the GOP, the new lines are about reclaiming a district that was reliably Republican before it was altered by the federal court.

“We have an opportunity to not only flip a seat from Democrat back to Republican here in Alabama, but to also hold the majority in the House with a win,” Marques said.

He emphasizes his legislative record, which includes support for school choice, law enforcement and restrictions on transgender athletes’ participation in girls’ sports and gender-affirming care for minors. Marques said he is more aligned with “the Alabama values in this district.”

He acknowledged voter concerns about affordability, but put the blame on President Biden’s administration.

Marques has deep ties to the heavily Republican areas of the district, where he served on the Enterprise City Council and ran an automotive store for decades.

“I know his values and I trust him,” said Coffee County Sheriff Scott Byrd, who appeared with Marques at an event with local law enforcement officials.

Republicans are optimistic about reclaiming the seat, but have expressed concerns about the potential for lackluster turnout as Figures mounts an aggressive campaign. Marques said he expects to prevail “if the Republicans and the people who believe in freedom” go vote.

U.S. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said the district is one of three dozen swing seats that will determine control of Congress.

“This seat absolutely will have a larger say on the direction of the country. Do we want conservative policies that are rooted in common sense, or do you want far-left socialists?” Scalise (R-La.) said at a campaign event for Marques in the city of Dothan.

From Black churches to Boll Weevil festival

Figures has been campaigning in both heavily Republican and Democratic areas as he seeks to maximize Democratic turnout while trying to persuade more conservative and independent voters.

He said affordability is the overriding issue facing all voters, from grocery and gas prices to farmers’ high fertilizer costs.

“The cost of living in this country is getting out of control. And we don’t come from a district or a state where people have the means to just continue to pump out money for $4 a gallon for gas or $8 for ground beef,” Figures said.

Figures often notes that the median individual income in Alabama is $34,000 and people struggle with access to hospitals and healthcare. He framed the race as a choice between “someone with a record of serving the people” or someone there to serve a president.

On an October weekend, his heavy schedule of stops included greeting people at the annual Boll Weevil Fall Festival in Enterprise, a predominantly white city of about 31,000. The festival is named for the cotton-destroying insect that forced the community’s pivot to more prosperous peanut farming a century ago.

The next day, he made a string of appearances through largely Black churches in nearby Dothan, urging people to vote.

Figures often notes that the district was never drawn as majority Black, but initially was split evenly between Black and white voters.

Speaking at Greater Beulah Baptist Church, a predominantly Black church in strongly Republican Houston County, Figures said the district was reconfigured in a way that makes it more difficult for “somebody who looks like me” to be able to win. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible, he said.

“Even though they are changing district lines, we still have the right to show up and make our voices heard,” he said.

Chandler writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines contributed to this report.