OurTupelo

When Scott Colom takes the oath of office for the U.S. Senate in January, he will not be the first Black senator from Mississippi to make history. But he will be the first in nearly 150 years and the first chosen by voters rather than state lawmakers.

Colom, a Democrat, was declared the winner Wednesday over Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Here are some things to know about the two previous Black senators from Mississippi, Hiram Rhodes Revels and Blanche Kelso Bruce.

The first Black member of the U.S. Congress

Revels became the first African American to serve in either chamber of Congress when he took his Senate seat on Feb. 25, 1870.

Born to free parents in North Carolina in September 1827, he traveled throughout the country as an adult doing religious work and educating other Black people, according to biographies on National Park Service and U.S. Senate websites. After the Civil War, he settled in Natchez, Mississippi, where he served as presiding elder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Revels was elected as a Natchez alderman in 1868 and was one of 35 Black men elected to the state legislature the next year. Mississippi’s U.S. Senate seats had been vacant since the state seceded from the Union in January 1861. Revels was selected by his fellow state legislators to fill one of the seats, and a white man was chosen for the other.

“An opportunity of electing a Republican to the United States Senate, to fill an unexpired term occurred, and the colored members, after consulting together on the subject, agreed to give their influence and votes for one of their own race for that position, as it would in their judgement be a weakening blow against color line prejudice,” Revels later recalled, according to a U.S. Senate website.

Revels was seated two days after Mississippi was readmitted to the Union and served just over a year, until March 3, 1871, when his term ended.

The last Black senator from Mississippi

The Mississippi legislature chose Bruce to be the first African American to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate. He was seated in 1875 and became the first Black man to preside over the Senate in 1879. Born into slavery in 1841 — his father was a white man who owned his mother — Bruce was the only formerly enslaved person to serve in the U.S. Senate, according to the Senate and National Park Service websites.

Bruce was born in Virginia and his father moved his plantation operation to Mississippi, where Bruce began picking cotton at age 8. He escaped to Kansas early in the Civil War, established a school for Black children in Missouri in 1864 and attended Oberlin College in Ohio for two years before a lack of funds caused him to withdraw.

He returned to Mississippi, where he became a wealthy businessman and landowner and held several positions in local government before he was elected to the U.S. Senate by state lawmakers. He served in the Senate from 1875 to 1881.

Unlike Colom, Mississippi’s previous Black senators were Republicans

Reconstruction, the 12-year period after the Civil War from 1865 to 1877, was when the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were adopted, abolishing slavery, establishing birthright citizenship and prohibiting denial of the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

The Republican Party was the party of President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, declaring all enslaved people in rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

A total of 17 Black men served in the U.S. Congress during Reconstruction, 15 in the House of Representatives and Revels and Bruce in the Senate. The Senate wouldn’t have another Black member until 1967, when Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts took office as the first Black person to be popularly elected to that body.

Earlier this week, Mississippi entrepreneurs and investors gathered in Jackson for the annual startup conference put on by Innovate Mississippi. There are two pitch competitions as part of the event, one for early stage startups and another for later stage companies. 

The later stage competition featured 10 Mississippi companies pitching their goods and services to a panel of investors. The winner, receiving $15,000 plus attention from investors, was LOA Carbon, which recently relocated from New York to Mississippi. 

“We thought we were likely to land in either Texas or Alabama, and we didn’t really even pay attention to Mississippi,” said Ryan Shearman, the company’s CEO. But the research and development at the state’s universities, the manufacturing capacity, labor market and programs such as Innovate ultimately pushed them to choose Mississippi.

SpaceXSI Updates

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company with an ever-changing name, SpaceXSI, formerly SpaceXAI, formerly xAI, said that it expects to invest $45 billion in Mississippi, double its original announcement.

According to Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality records, SpaceXSI began construction in Southaven before it received proper permits. It now faces fines of up to $6 million.

But in a separate matter, a federal judge in an NAACP lawsuit against the company found that MDEQ misinterpreted federal clean air statutes around the company’s temporary natural gas turbines it is currently using to power its data centers.

This week, the MDEQ permit board rejected an appeal of its decision to approve an air permit for SpaceXSI’s permanent power plant. Among the permanent turbines are eight converted jet engines. It appears to be the first power plant using converted engines that has come before the permit board. 

Other news:

• The Mississippi Council on Economic Education held its annual forum to celebrate personal finance and economic education in the state.
• A mechanical and electrical fabrication contractor is investing $4.25 million to expand its operations in Greene County.
• The city of Madison approved a tax increment financing plan for a $60-million mixed use development, called the Gallery. It approved up to $11.74 million in borrowing to help pay for public infrastructure for the development. Property taxes are higher in a TIF district with the excess money going to repay the bonds, as well as sales tax revenue from within the development. Madison County may also join.
• Trustmark announced Thursday that it will merge with Hancock Whitney in a deal estimated to be valued at $3.2 billion. Together the two Mississippi headquartered banks will create a $58-billion in assets bank across six Southeastern states and an $8.9-billion market cap that the companies said would be the “premier Gulf South bank.” The deal is estimated to close in the first quarter of 2027.

Mississippi is again working to build a statewide system that will help hospitals, health providers, pharmacies, laboratories and emergency medical services securely share patient health data.

“We’re creating the infrastructure to improve care coordination, to support emergency preparedness, to strengthen public health decision making and to give healthcare professionals the information that they need to deliver even better care,” Gov. Tate Reeves told reporters at an Oct. 21 press conference.

The exchange will initially be funded by the federal Rural Health Transformation Program, a $50 billion, five-year program to spur innovation in rural healthcare and offset cuts to Medicaid that was signed into law in 2025 by President Donald Trump. Reeves has called the health information exchange the “backbone” of the state’s plan for the funds. 

Health information networks help to create a “person-centric” health record system, where health records are linked to a patient rather than a hospital or clinic, according to Dr. David Kendrick, chair of the medical informatics department at the University of Oklahoma School of Community Medicine. 

“It should be expected that patients have their full medical story with them throughout life,” said Kendrick, who is also the the founder and former CEO of MyHealth Access Network, Oklahoma’s statewide health information exchange. 

This is not the first time Mississippi has worked to develop such a system. The Mississippi Health Information Network was funded with a federal grant and established by state lawmakers in 2010. It was growing until the state Legislature declined to renew it in 2019 — an abrupt decision stakeholders said came as a surprise.

Other health statewide exchanges emerged to fill the gap around the time the state network shut down, including the Mississippi Hospital Association’s IntelliTrue and the Mississippi Health Access eXchange, a physician-led network established in partnership with the Mississippi State Medical Association.

The federal government has pushed states to improve healthcare data sharing among providers for decades. The efforts can help bridge parts of a fragmented healthcare system and improve patients’ health, allowing clinicians across systems to spot dangerous prescription drug interactions and reducing duplicate services.

But despite the benefits for patients, health information exchanges, or HIEs, often face challenges with funding and incentivizing providers to participate, said Julia Adler-Milstein, a professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco.

“Building a successful HIE requires not just technical infrastructure, but governance, incentives, and a lot of pieces that have to come together and align for an exchange to be successful,” Adler-Milstein said.

In some states, expanded health data sharing has raised questions about patient privacy, in particular because of cases in which patient data has been used by immigration and law enforcement agencies. 

Mississippi’s application for a vendor to create and operate a new health information exchange, with services expected to begin in January, closed on Nov. 3. 

The contractor is expected to build and operate an exchange that “aggregates, enhances, and distributes health data as a public good,” according to a request for proposals. Core goals are to improve care coordination in trauma response, access to clinical information and centralized imaging services. Beyond serving individual patients and providers, it will also support the state’s study of public health. 

“It’s a game changer for those of us studying population health outcomes,” State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney said at an Oct. 14 Board of Health meeting. 

How Katrina spurred Mississippi’s first exchange

Plans for a statewide health information exchange in Mississippi were spurred in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, which damaged paper-based medical records and left thousands of patients unable to access them.

In 2007, then-Gov. Haley Barbour established a task force to plan for a statewide health data exchange. The group recommended a pilot network in the six-county area along the Gulf Coast most heavily affected by Katrina to lay the groundwork for a potential statewide network. 

State lawmakers authorized the Mississippi Health Information Network in 2010. That year, Mississippi received about $10.4 million in funding through a federal program to help states build health information exchanges.

Mississippi’s network generated a repository of patient data and sent real-time alerts to providers when patients were admitted, discharged or transferred to or from emergency departments or hospitals. It also supported public health reporting and disease surveillance efforts, said Mike Garcia, the network’s former interim executive director who was involved in the project from its early days and has since retired. 

By 2014, the system included 13 hospitals, 39 clinics and more than 600,000 patients, according to a report from the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review.

But as it grew, the system struggled to achieve buy-in from some key stakeholders. Like many health information exchanges, providers paid a user fee to participate, with the expectation that the network would one day become self-sustaining. Hospitals were charged $100 per bed to participate, according to budget documents for the 2017 fiscal year. That year, the agency collected roughly $660,000 in user fees. Federal funding ran dry and legislative appropriations declined over time. 

Sen. David Blount, a Democrat from Jackson, authored the bill necessary to reauthorize the network in 2019 — what he believed would be a “routine matter on something important and needed.” 

The Senate passed the bill, but it died without a vote by the full House.

“To me, it was a needless failure, and I was puzzled by it at the time,” Blount said. 

When the Mississippi Health Information Network lapsed, it had roughly 30 million patient records, Garcia said. He said the records were stored in a vault and immediately began to lose their value.

“It was all very anticlimactic,” Garcia said. 

Building demand before infrastructure

The challenges Mississippi faced in keeping a health information exchange alive — including funding and participation — mirror those faced by similar networks across the nation. 

Although data networks can help improve the quality of patient care, hospitals aren’t always incentivized to share information, because patient data is a key asset that ties patients to hospitals, said Adler-Milstein.

For an exchange to succeed, it must also create value for providers, such as helping them meet quality metrics tied to payments and motivate them to participate. 

“There aren’t really strong incentives to share patient data across competing health systems,” Adler-Milstein said. “So you really have to build the demand, and then build infrastructure that supports it.”

Exchanges also need sustainable funding models, Garcia said. He said he believes government support should incentivize providers to participate without making them pay to participate, particularly because they are already contributing value by supplying data. 

“The burden can’t be put on the users,” Garcia said. 

Under some Mississippi Rural Health Transformation Program grants, providers receiving funding are required to participate in the exchange. State officials have not explained how the system will be funded after the federal funds, which must be spent by 2032, are expended.

Shelby Wilcher, a spokesperson for Reeves, whose office is overseeing the plan, did not respond to a request for comment about the state’s long-term plans to fund the exchange.

During the application period for vendors, one potential contractor asked whether the Mississippi State Department of Health or the Division of Medicaid would require or incentivize providers to participate, and whether funds would cover the providers’ onboarding costs. 

In response, the state Health Department, which oversaw the procurement process, said it “can not speak for RHTP requirements.” 

Beyond funding and incentives, experts said, a successful exchange requires buy-in from stakeholders across the health system — including those who receive, deliver and pay for care. Those stakeholders must first come together to establish a shared vision for the exchange and ensure it provides value to everyone involved to ensure sustainability. 

“Governance is what comes first, and that means convening actual people that live in the community to do the work,” Kendrick said. 

For centuries, the customs and traditions of the Choctaw nation have been passed from one generation to the next. About two decades ago, William Dan Isaac, a member of the tribe’s Mississippi band, helped form the Mystic Winds Social Dance Group to hand down traditions of dance, music and storytelling to Choctaw youth. 

The endeavor not only exposed Choctaw youth to the wider world but also shared their culture and traditions across other communities.

Another opportunity comes this weekend when Mystic Winds joins dozens of other groups for the 83rd National Folk Festival, which returns Friday and runs through the weekend in downtown Jackson.

This year’s festival commemorates the country’s founding 250 years ago, but Mystic Winds provides a reminder of the Indigenous cultures that existed across the Mississippi River valley before Europeans settled the area.

“A lot of our people were removed from here,” Isaac said. “But the state itself, its rivers and creeks and the names of the counties, hold our roots here.”

Taking part in this year’s folk festival, he said, will “honor and share this connection to our homeland.”

The festival showcases early Indigenous and African American traditions alongside folk traditions from Hawaii and the U.S. Virgin Islands, offering “a snapshot of the nation’s cultural fabric” woven over two and half centuries, said Blaine Wade, the executive director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, which puts on the national festival. 

“I cannot think of a better place to celebrate America at 250 than Mississippi,” he said.

“You cannot tell the story of American popular music, and really cultural achievement, from food to music, literature – all forms of artistic expression – without Mississippi,” Wade said. 

Last year’s inaugural Jackson gathering, organizers said, was the first time the festival has taken place in the Deep South.

The festival features genres that span the blues and hip-hop to country, as well as other traditions such as Brazilian capoeira, Cajun, Filipino rondalla, Mardi Gras Indian and Texan conjunto.

“A few years back we were invited to the B.B. King Museum,” Isaac recalled, noting a connection between the “call and response” pattern of blues and the rhythm of native stomp dancing the Choctaw call “chahta hihla.” 

Geno Lee, the fourth-generation owner of the Big Apple Inn on Farish Street, usually arrives at events as a vendor selling food, but this time he’ll be more directly part of the festivities when he offers a food demonstration on the Mississippi Folklife Narrative Stage on Saturday. 

“Folk history is passed down through stories,” Lee said, and this festival is important because “it centers on stories passed down through music and culinary traditions.” 

There are ancillary events outside of the festival, such as the art museum’s exhibition featuring Tom Pich’s portraits of folk masters, which runs until January, and a community block party Thursday that runs until 3 p.m. at the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument. 

“We also see how business owners within the festival’s footprint” benefit from the increased foot traffic, said Thabi Moyo, a Jackson native serving as a local festival manager. 

The Rookery, an event space a couple blocks from the new Shivers Creek Catfish House on East Capitol Street, will host an open house during festival hours. Tony Davenport, a visual artist and educator from Vicksburg, will be a part of the festival’s marketplace. He has one of his largest murals in the Rookery.

Eddie Cotton Jr., who lives in Clinton, is a nationally recognized blues musician who has performed at several national folk festivals.

“I’ve played in Richmond, Virginia, and Maryland, even drove to Montana,” said Cotton. “I’ve seen a lot in my career traveling for 30 years, but there’s nothing like playing at home.”

Cotton said the festival is good at bringing in talented artists who represent different cultures. “I’ve seen amazing Japanese musicians, and I didn’t know what they were saying, but you see the authenticity and can tell they are the best at what they do.” 

Raiatea Helm is one such master of her craft, having gained international fame performing traditional Hawaiian falsetto. “From the early 1900s Hawaiian bands were traveling with string, brass, and woodwind instruments,” Helm said. 

Noting the influence of the lap steel guitar, a traditional Hawaiian instrument, on early blues music, Helm said that Hawaii has long had a presence in Mississippi. 

“It’s my first time visiting Mississippi,” Helm said, but the musical traditions she participates in and “the stories of our ancestors passed down in them” spread across the country long ago. 

Three Black University of Mississippi students who shared a now-viral Ring camera video of two white students making monkeylike sounds and gestures outside their front door say they received an apology from one woman.

But the other only amplified her behavior, they said, divulging details of the rest of the encounter that weren’t captured on camera.

“She continued to make the gestures after the girl was apologizing. It was like a slap in the face,” Victoria Johnson told “CBS Mornings” in an interview that aired Wednesday.

Johnson was joined by her roommates, Jakiyra Metcalf and Kaiyden Caldwell, to talk about the incident that has ignited a firestorm on the Ole Miss campus and across social media. The animalistic gestures and sounds are seen as racist because they were reminiscent of ugly, old stereotypes comparing Black people to simians.

For it to happen at a college community in the Deep South with a long history of racism has added to the raw emotions.

Metcalf saw the video Friday and she and Johnson went outside to talk to the two women, who had another friend with them. She was only seen glancing at the door in the video.

They said one woman, Alaina Kunes, apologized but said they had been making animal-like noises and gestures in front of other doors in the apartment complex. But the second woman, who lives in the complex, purportedly kept the antics going off camera.

Metcalf’s TikTok post has been viewed over 13 million times in four days. On Monday, the university posted a statement condemning the actions in the video as “offensive, hurtful, and unacceptable behaviors that conflict with our university values.” School officials also said the incident is being investigated and they are dedicated to “maintaining a safe and welcoming environment.”

Kunes, 18, issued a public apology Tuesday through a law firm.

“Before the incident on Nov. 6, I never met the women involved and was unaware of their race, however I recognize my actions were insensitive, inappropriate and deeply harmful,” Kunes said. “I would have never intentionally made those noises or gestures toward a person of color. I have apologized to the women and I pray they will forgive me.”

She has since withdrawn from school. She also said she would fully cooperate with any investigation.

The statement was originally posted on the firm’s website, but it had to be taken down because of ongoing harassment, said Kate Gardiner, a spokesperson for the firm.

Kunes will not be speaking beyond the statement, Gardiner added.

Outrage at taunting prompts opposition to social media shaming

The outrage against Kunes and the second woman, who has not publicly identified herself, has also stirred up opposition against using social media to malign them.

Tom Hennessey, an influencer tied to online fundraisers for people criticized for making xenophobic remarks, is credited with starting a fundraiser for the other woman on Christian fundraising platform GiveSendGo. It has raised over $30,000 as of Wednesday afternoon. The fundraising page states the “online mob (is) treating a juvenile stunt as a hate crime because the residents were Black.”

The fundraiser also says it could possibly be canceled if the woman “disavows our support and bends the knee” and apologizes.

When contacted via X, or Twitter, DM, Hennessey said there is a double-standard and less attention is given to Black-on-white crime. He declined to say whether he had been in touch with the student about the fundraiser.

This is not the first time the university has been the backdrop for a Black student dealing with taunting animallike mimicking. In a May 2024 campus demonstration over the Israel-Hamas war, a counterprotester made monkey sounds and gestures at a Black, female student. The interaction was filmed by a student journalist. The video got the attention of outgoing Georgia Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, who appeared to praise the behavior in a tweet.

University has ties to nation’s desegregation movement

Ole Miss also has a long history with racism, civil rights and segregation. In 1962, activist James Meredith was the first Black person to be admitted to the school after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor.

Then-Gov. Ross Barnett tried to block his admission but could not disobey federal law, according to the National Museum of African American History & Culture. Still, white objectors instigated a riot on campus. Two bystanders died and over 200 arrests were made.

Metcalf, Caldwell and Johnson hedged when asked if they forgive Kunes.

“I still have very mixed feelings about it,” Metcalf said.

Caldwell said she appreciated the apology but said it doesn’t change what happened.

“It’s still hurtful, and it’s still devastating that someone would go to our camera and do that,” Caldwell said.

After hearing hours of testimony over two days, Mississippi’s permit board rejected an appeal of an air permit awarded earlier in the year to SpaceXAI’s data center hub in Southaven.

The board, which makes decisions over permits issued by the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, issued its decision Tuesday, the last day of the hearing.

In March, the board approved air permits for 41 permanent gas turbines that will power SpaceXAI’s data center operations in the area, which cross over the state line into Memphis.

The Safe and Sound Coalition — comprised of Southaven residents — the NAACP and Young, Gifted & Green appealed the decision shortly after.

On behalf of the appellants, the Southern Environmental Law Center argued that MDEQ erred in writing the permit in three ways: The agency relied on limited modeling, it didn’t require SpaceXAI to use less-polluting turbines, and it didn’t require emission offsets. In areas with poor air quality — referred to as “nonattainment areas” — the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requires any new sources of air emissions to also include offsets mitigating those emissions.

While DeSoto County isn’t listed as a nonattainment area, SELC attorney Patrick Anderson argued federal law still requires offsets because the area fails to meet national air quality standards.

“All of this makes sense,” Anderson said Monday in his opening argument. “If the air is too dirty, MDEQ should not wait for action from the federal government. And, in fact, they can’t wait, they’re required to treat the source accordingly.”

MZX Tech LLC, a subsidiary of SpaceXAI that received the air permit, disagreed. Trudy Fisher, a former executive director of MDEQ who argued on behalf of MZX Tech, said the agency underwent extensive modeling of the turbines’ emissions and consulted with EPA throughout the permitting process.

“This was not a permit that was approved without careful consideration,” Fisher said.

The board’s lone dissenting vote came from state Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson, also a Republican candidate in the 2027 gubernatorial race. Gipson voted against approving the permit because he didn’t get “answers to all the questions I have posed.”

One of the few state officials to publicly question Mississippi’s data center growth, the commissioner published a memo over the summer “requiring” data centers give certain information, such as around water use, before receiving a permit from MDEQ.

In response, MDEQ spokesperson Jan Schaefer told Mississippi Today that Gipson’s memo “does not alter” what information permit applicants need to submit to the agency.

During the hearing’s first day, Gipson tried to ask about MZX Tech’s water usage, yielding objections from MZX Tech’s attorneys who argued the questions were outside the scope of an air permit hearing. Kim Turner, the state’s hearing officer, agreed with the objection.

“I want to get an answer on the water usage, which I deem, as a member of this board, relevant information for me to ask,” Gipson fired back. “And if I’m not allowed to do that, there’s no point in there being a permit board.”

Shannon Samsa, a Safe and Sound Coalition member and Southaven resident, said after the hearing that the board’s decision was “reprehensible.”

“Whoever’s interests they are serving, it certainly doesn’t appear to be those of the people who actually live here,” Samsa said in a written statement.

Reporter Katherine Lin contributed to this story.

Mike Espy knows better than anyone what it takes to blaze trails in Mississippi politics. He did it in Congress, then again in a presidential cabinet, and came close to doing it again in the U.S. Senate. 

For Espy and many other Black Mississippians who were among the first to win elected office in the state, Scott Colom’s Wednesday night victory, which will make him the first Black person to represent Mississippi in the U.S. Senate since post-Civil War Reconstruction, is both a personal celebration and the culmination of decades of civil rights organizing.

READ MORE: Colom wins: Mississippi picks another senator

Espy, the first Black person to represent Mississippi in the U.S. House since Reconstruction and the first Black person to become U.S. agriculture secretary, also unsuccessfully ran against Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith twice, in a special election in 2018 and a regular election in 2020. 

Espy served as an adviser to Colom this year, handing over his donor and voter lists in the hope that his losses “paved the road” for the senator-elect, he said in an interview.

“There is a time and place for everything,” Espy said. “This is Scott Colom’s time, and his place is in the U.S. Senate. I’m so pleased with the way he ran his campaign, and I was happy to support him.”

Espy found ways around the old power structure

Espy and Colom share similar stories of how they were initially shut out of power by incumbent politicians but persevered to use that to their advantage.  

Colom was blocked from getting a federal judgeship by Hyde-Smith. Espy was denied support from longtime Mississippi U.S. Rep. Jamie Whitten to gain congressional clout. Yet both would go on to secure other high-ranking positions. 

It’s a pattern that has played out through Mississippi’s political history. Politicians selfishly hold onto power and try to close the door on others seeking to gain it. But scrappy challengers, time and time again, jammed their foot in that door and, occasionally, yanked it open. 

Espy, in 1992, had served three terms on the House Budget Committee, steering money toward many parts of rural Mississippi. But internal rules of the Democratic caucus prevented him from serving another term on the committee. 

Still eager to divert money and projects to his impoverished district in the Mississippi Delta, Espy thought he could win Whitten’s support to secure a spot on the powerful House Appropriations Committee. 

Whitten was retiring from Congress and departing as chairman of the committee. If he had backed his fellow Mississippi Democrat, it would have given Espy a much-needed boost and likely secured him a spot on Appropriations. But the northeastern Mississippi congressman, who was initially elected as a segregationist in 1941 and had later suffered a stroke, ultimately declined to support Espy.

“After that, I began looking for a position in the government where I could have power and influence to provide for rural America,” Espy said. 

Espy asked newly elected President Bill Clinton to appoint him as agriculture secretary, a bold proposal for a young 39-year-old, three-term congressman. Espy pitched his proposal to the former Arkansas governor by scribbling on an envelope 10 reasons the president-elect should nominate him for the post. 

Asked about the historic nature of his win, Colom has said he only wants to ensure he won’t “be the last” Black person elected to the Senate from the Magnolia State. 

“I don’t want anybody to say that I did anything to hurt the next person that has the talent, the work ethic, the ability to be able to reach for their dreams,” Colom said recently. “That’s my focus.” 

Colom is focused on the next person ready to go through the door.

Wright: ‘We struggled, we toiled, we kept moving’

Flonzie Brown Wright said Colom’s win also brings to mind those who never got the chance to walk through it.

Wright was the first Black woman elected to public office in Mississippi. She said Colom’s victory reminds her of how she felt in 1965, when the federal Voting Rights Act passed. 

“The same emotions, the same anticipation,” she said. “It’s a strange dichotomy because we were jubilant but sad in another sense, because there were so many we lost who couldn’t vote.”

Wright said she often thinks about the generations who didn’t live to see this. “Many of our ancestors brought us as far as they could bring us, but they couldn’t cast a vote,” she said.

“We got here not because somebody thought it was a nice idea to treat Blacks as equal,” Wright said. “We got here because we struggled, we toiled, we kept moving, we took the defeats, we cried. But we wiped those tears off and kept on marching.”

Wright’s own march began in the 1960s, when she became an election commissioner in Madison County on Nov. 5, 1968. She served one term before moving to Jackson. She later testified before a congressional subcommittee in support of the Voting Rights Act.

She views the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision that gutted key parts of the act as a major setback. But, Wright said, every journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. Every journey has setbacks, but she sees Colom’s win as one more step toward the end of that journey.

“The 1,000 miles was our goal,” Wright said. “But not everyone could walk the 1,000 miles. Some walked 50, and some walked 20. They walked as much as they could and kept stepping. They kept stepping, so we kept stepping.” 

When Colom goes to Washington soon to be sworn into office, he will become the first Black senator from Mississippi in nearly 150 years. He will climb the Capitol steps carrying all those miles with him.

This story was published by Votebeat in partnership with Mississippi Today. Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration. Mississippi Today is a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering justice, voting rights, politics, education, health and culture. Sign up for Votebeat’s free newsletters here and Mississippi Today’s free newsletters here.

HERNANDO – Dozens of people crowded into the old Trustmark Bank building in downtown on Wednesday afternoon to watch DeSoto County’s election officials pore over bins of ballots in a longtime Republican stronghold key to the political earthquake that has rattled Mississippi.

DeSoto, a Memphis suburb just below the Mississippi border, has been solid Trump country. Until now.

A jolt of Democratic enthusiasm and a slump in Republican voters appears to have delivered DeSoto County for Democrat Scott Colom, the Mississippi district attorney declared the winner Wednesday night over GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

DeSoto’s proximity to Memphis has established the county as a bright spot locally. It’s a center of economic development in America’s poorest state and the fastest-growing county amid statewide population decline, attracting Memphis suburbanites and Elon Musk-backed data centers alike.

But the county has drawn an uncomfortable spotlight since last week’s election as an epicenter of the election turmoil roiling Mississippi. This was the first federal general election in which officials across the state used unverified address data from the credit bureau Experian to render thousands of voters inactive, forcing them to cast affidavit ballots that are less certain to be counted. 

Voting rights advocates are concerned that errors in Experian’s data affected many voters who were already properly registered, forcing them to take additional steps in order to vote and blocking their access to the ballot box.

DeSoto moved more voters to inactive status than any of Mississippi’s 82 counties in the eight months between the primaries and the midterms. During that time, the county’s part-time election commissioners said, they moved to inactive nearly every voter flagged on the address lists that the secretary of state sourced from Experian’s data: more than 15,000 voters.

Over those months, DeSoto’s list of inactive voters more than doubled, leaving one in five of the county’s voters inactive by Election Day. Many didn’t find out until they came out to vote and found their names missing from the poll books in places where they had lived and voted for years.

Reports of hourslong voting lines, affidavit ballot shortages, and a now-dismissed Democratic lawsuit against DeSoto County followed soon after. 

Election protection hotlines sounded off with complaints of chaotic scenes at the polls. The state Democratic party’s lawsuit alleged that the line at one polling place got so long that someone waiting to vote passed out and had to be taken to the hospital. 

“The conditions were horrible,” said Ravonda Griffin, a local attorney hired by Colom after Election Day. “Having to stand in line for three and four hours in the rain, that is a form of voter suppression. It is, and that’s just not fair.”

In the week since, the five commissioners responsible for running the county’s elections have taken time off from their day jobs to verify and count an unexpected surge in affidavit ballots. DeSoto County reported roughly 275 affidavit ballots in 2022, during the last midterm election, according to data tracked by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. 

This year, commissioners have reported more than seven times the number of affidavit ballots: about 2,100.

The commissioners’ long hours have been punctuated by charged exchanges with residents seeking answers and accountability for the dysfunction that they say plagued this year’s midterms. 

“There’s nothing normal about this,” Sheila Jackson, a resident wearing a “Drink Water. Love Hard. Fight Racism.” shirt, said on Monday to Tim Snyder, a Republican in his first term as a county election commissioner.

Standing in the old bank drive-through lane outside the commissioners’ office, Snyder defended the commission’s embrace of the Experian data to clean its voter rolls.

“You get false positives, but it’s just part of life,” Snyder said. “You know, it’s hard to find perfect.”

Use of the Experian data has triggered fingerpointing. Experian blamed Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson’s office for misusing the data, which, the company wrote in a statement Tuesday, should not have been used to “validate voter records” — although the state’s $50,000 contract with the company specified the information would be used for voter roll maintenance.  

Watson’s office blamed county election commissioners for failing to verify the addresses before changing voters’ status, and some election commissioners are blaming the secretary of state’s office for directing them to use flawed information that caused more headaches than help.

A fateful decision to use credit bureau data to clean voter rolls

Before Watson, a Republican, handed down address lists sourced from Experian’s data to every county statewide last year, the state had solely relied on government information, including U.S. Postal Service data, to do the routine job of cleaning the rolls of voters suspected to have moved.

His office announced that Experian’s data would “strengthen the integrity of elections.” But in March, Mississippi Today first reported that errors in Experian’s information had gone unverified at every stage of the voter roll maintenance process, leading election officials to inactivate voters who were properly registered and hadn’t actually moved.

David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney who is now executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, said Mississippi’s use of commercial data raised concerns that the state was improperly disenfranchising voters.

“You don’t have to be an expert on election law to be looking at Mississippi right now and thinking, ‘There must be a better way of doing this,’” Becker said. “I don’t know of any other state that uses commercial data as a single check and bases inactivation based, at best, on a flawed data set for voter maintenance purposes.”

In DeSoto, both Snyder and fellow Republican election commissioner Sissie Ferguson confirmed in separate interviews that the secretary of state’s office put pressure on county election officials to use the Experian data to clean the voter rolls. Ferguson said state officials specifically called out DeSoto County at an election commissioner conference in January. 

“We were told, ‘Y’all still have 15,000 that you haven’t worked,’” Ferguson said, referring to the number of voters flagged in the lists drawn from Experian’s data.

Watson’s office did not respond to a request for comment on Ferguson’s recollection of the conference.

Ferguson said she could tell the records were flawed, and in some cases didn’t change a voter’s status when she knew for sure they hadn’t moved. 

 “I recognized two or three of mine, and I thought, ‘That’s not true. He didn’t move, his dad did,’ so I didn’t make him inactive,” she said.

Watson has defended his deployment of the Experian data as a tool that empowered election commissioners to better clean the voter rolls and said county officials are responsible for the actual work of inactivating voters in Mississippi.

“Their job is to make sure they verify the information,” Watson said on a talk radio show Monday. “And I’ve heard people say, ‘Well, you pass the buck.’ What I am doing is explaining how the law works. I cannot make an election commissioner do his or her job.”

State law requires election commissioners to use “reliable information” to clean the voter rolls. In the announcement of the Experian deal, Watson’s office said Experian’s information would “bring a new level of reliable data” to the process.

Other jurisdictions that have checked voter rolls using Experian data took steps to verify the data in ways that Mississippi didn’t. For example, in West Virginia, election officials mail voters a notice asking them to verify their address before changing their registration status. 

But in Mississippi, state law requires election officials to move voters to inactive status at the same time as they mail the notices. Mississippi Today confirmed cases in which the notice was mailed to the unverified address sourced from Experian’s data. When the address was incorrect, properly registered voters who were moved to inactive status never got a notice to correct their status.

On Tuesday, Colom criticized Watson for relying on Experian, even though the company warned the secretary of state’s office in their contract that it couldn’t guarantee the “accuracy or reliability” of its data.

 “Experian told him they were not reliable, and he did it anyway,” Colom said at a news conference about the election. “This chaos is a result of that decision.”

Watson’s office has stopped deploying Experian data and shifted to what he told Mississippi Today was a better source, from the data broker IDI. 

“It’s not that we moved on because we didn’t like Experian,” Watson said. “We moved on because we’ve gone with what we thought was a better product.”

Watson has conceded that the Experian files weren’t perfect and that some legitimate voters might get improperly flagged.

“Now there’s an aggressive approach to cleaning the voter rolls,” he said in the radio interview. “Is there going to be a little bit of pain? Perhaps. Did people have to wait an extra 5-10 minutes to vote affidavit? Perhaps.”

Experian wrote in a statement that election officials shouldn’t rely on its data as a basis to inactivate voters. 

“Our supplemental address information provided at that time was not designed or intended to validate voter records,” Experian spokesperson Scott Anderson said of the company’s deal with Mississippi. “Decisions regarding voter registration policies, procedures and record updates are made solely by election officials in accordance with applicable local, state and federal laws.”

A surge in affidavit ballots in DeSoto

Jennifer Morrell, a former Colorado elections official who now serves as CEO of The Elections Group, a consulting firm that advises elections leaders around the country, said that Mississippi’s election laws and processes had to be seen in the context of the state’s long history of using the voting process to disenfranchise Black residents.

“When you look at all the ways that Mississippi makes it harder for people to vote, it’s not hard to see a direct line from the Jim Crow era straight to the present day system,” Morrell said. 

Voters across DeSoto County reported lines as long as three hours to vote on Election Day, with folks arriving before dawn and people standing in chilly rain to cast their ballots. 

Poll workers, voters and the Democratic Party’s lawsuit alleged various polling places — including the high school serving the county’s most populous precinct — ran out of envelopes for affidavit ballots and that there weren’t enough voting machines in some places to handle the number of people who wanted to cast ballots. 

In her two decades of voting in Walls — a small town on the county outskirts bordering the Mississippi River — probation officer Heather Cavallo has become used to Election Day being an in-and-out affair. But during this month’s election, she said, it was a two-hour ordeal.

Throughout the day, a line snaked out of the town library that serves as the local polling place for more than 3,500 voters. By the time Cavallo’s son and husband came out to vote later that day, they were even more unlucky. The clouds that covered the skies when she came out to vote at lunchtime had morphed into showers and then thunderstorms by election night.

For three hours, the two men stood in the rain to cast their ballots, Cavallo said. Her husband, who had headed to the polls after a long shift at his construction job, didn’t get to vote until an hour-and-a-half after workers closed the polls to newcomers. By that point, the thunderstorms were raging so hard that they prompted flash flood warnings throughout the county. 

When her son got to the end of the line, he found out his name wasn’t even in the poll book.

He was among the one in five voters in the county who were inactive, so the 26-year-old cast an affidavit ballot. All there was left to do was wait and see if his vote would actually count.

“I’m at a loss,” Cavallo said. “I have seen nothing like this.”

But for Cavallo, it was all worth it to get to be one of the voters who flipped the Republican stronghold blue for Colom.

Ferguson downplayed complaints about voting. 

“They stand in line every day at Walmart and Kroger, and they don’t complain,” she said. 

Mississippi Today reporter Taylor Vance contributed to this story.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Madeline Nguyen is an investigative reporting fellow at Mississippi Today and is based in Jackson. Contact Madeline at mnguyen@mississippitoday.org.

Jubilant supporters of Scott Colom hugged, danced and wiped away tears Wednesday night on the campus of Tougaloo College as they celebrated his election as Mississippi’s first Black U.S. senator since a few years after the Civil War.

“For me, this journey started with a prayer. And in Mississippi, our prayers often change the course of history,” Colom told the crowd at the historically Black college in north Jackson hours after he defeated Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

The Associated Press called the race for Colom eight days after Election Day, with the vote count slowed by an unusually large number of provisional ballots that many people were forced to cast because they had been moved to inactive status based on unverified credit bureau data that Secretary of State Michael Watson’s office provided to local election officials. Hyde-Smith, who has been in the Senate since 2018, issued a video statement congratulating Colom and wishing him well.

The Tougaloo choir sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and a recording of “A Change is Gonna Come,” a movement anthem sung by Mississippi native Sam Cooke, played over loudspeakers before Colom appeared onstage on Wednesday’s cool autumn evening, amid trees draped with Spanish moss. During the Civil Rights Movement, the college provided safety for young people who protested and chipped away at Mississippi’s white supremacist society that violently enforced segregation and suppressed voting access for Black people. 

Tougaloo Student Government Association President Aznii Welchlin is a native of west Jackson. She said she’s always been a “radical and optimistic thinker.” Growing up, people would often shut down her ideas, but she said she always had a sense that a day like this would come.

“We did it, y’all,” Welchlin said from the stage. 

Terry Rogers II, a senior studying political science at Tougaloo, spent Tuesday driving students in a college van between local government offices to check on their ballots as the election remained unresolved. A day later, the 21-year-old was scrolling CNN when he saw the network projected Colom as the winner. He and a friend took a moment to cry.

“This is what we’ve been praying for, for years, for generations,” Rogers said. “This makes me want to continue to be a Mississippian. This makes me love my state even more than I already did.”

Mississippi has been plagued by “brain drain,” with college educated residents fleeing to seek jobs and a more progressive environment in other states. Rogers said Colom’s triumph will help revamp Mississippi’s national image.

As Rogers spoke to Mississippi Today, a fellow student came by and shouted at him: “He won! You see that? You see that?”

Rep. Justis Gibbs, a Democratic state lawmaker, was at his Jackson law office when the race was called for Colom. He said everyone stopped working and screamed for joy.

“Scott Colom’s victory marks a true turning point for Mississippi,” Gibbs said. “Voters showed up and showed out. His authenticity on the campaign trail and remarkable ability to connect with Mississippians in both rural and urban communities have injected new energy and momentum into the Mississippi Democratic Party.” 

Scott Colom’s wife, Nadia, was a fixture on the campaign trail. She helped organize a taco truck that went to college campuses, with a “pick another protein” theme plucked from one of his viral campaign ads. She also moderated panels at several events. At her husband’s victory party, she said she knew from her first date with Scott Colom how much he wanted to make a contribution to his state.

“You did it, and I could not be more proud,” Nadia Colom said.

She said the stress of taking care of their two daughters and running a business while her husband was away campaigning felt like a “ton of bricks” at times.

“Come last Wednesday morning, for every brick I felt, there were counties like Noxubee, Lowndes, Oktibbeha, and my own Clay County that were filled with voters who dared to take back our voice in D.C.,” Nadia Colom said. “That removed the bricks.” 

U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who has been the only Black member of Mississippi’s congressional delegation since he was elected in 1993 and the only Democrat since two other House members were defeated in 2010, declared: “I now have a partner in Washington. I now have a partner who understands that health care is important in Mississippi.” 

Thompson said he met the Rev. Martin Luther King and Fannie Lou Hamer during his time as a Tougaloo student.

“It is fitting and proper that we’re here this evening to continue that legacy of getting it right,” Thompson said. “Guess what? We have picked our senator. We’re not picking another protein. We’re gonna do it the old fashioned way, we’re just going to get it done.” 

Colom said “he kept the faith” even as calls to donors went unanswered and fewer than 10 people showed up to some of his town hall meetings. He said that during his travels around the state, he met people who worked multiple jobs to make ends meet.

“God didn’t want us to get this the easy way. He wanted us to get it the Mississippi way,” Colom said of his campaign.

“All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this,” Colom said. “I had the courage to believe that we could show the country that Mississippi matters.”

Colom told the crowd that he will have faith and remain in prayer.

“I make a solemn commitment to each and every Mississippian today,” he said. “In every decision I make, I will never forget the most important thing is, Mississippi matters.”

WASHINGTON — The Associated Press on Wednesday declared Democrat Scott Colom the winner in the race for U.S. Senate in Mississippi after several counties reported updated results — including those of last-to-count provisional ballots.

READ MORE: Colom wins: Mississippi picks another senator

Colom led Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by 43 votes following the final election night update in Mississippi, which arrived at 2:03 a.m. CT from Pike County.

Not only has Colom’s lead grown larger as counties in Mississippi have completed their vote count and reported on the outcome of their review of provisional ballots in the days since, but he’s won the vast majority of these final updates — in every region of the state and in all but the most Republican counties — by a large margin.

The AP called the race for the Colom just before 5 p.m. CT after officials in Jackson County updated its vote count with an additional 2,173 votes. The update put Colom up by 4,669 votes out of 962,237 counted, or 0.5 percentage points.

To come back and take the lead, Hyde-Smith needed to win these final vote updates in Republican-leaning counties such as Jackson. Instead, Colom won the update in Jackson by just over 1 percentage point.

The AP estimates there are fewer than 12,000 votes remaining for county election officials in Mississippi to review before the deadline Friday for counties to certify their election results. Many of those votes left to count are provisional ballots, which are called affidavit ballots in Mississippi, and a good number may not ultimately be counted once they are reviewed and assessed by election officials.

There is no recount law in Mississippi: Hyde-Smith would need to persuade a court to order a review of the election. In many states, the standard for conducting a recount is a margin of 0.5% percentage points between the top two candidates.

There have been about 40 recounts in statewide elections since 2000. Only three have resulted in a new winner and all three were decided by hundreds of votes, not thousands. There is no precedent this century for a recount overturning an election with a margin as wide as the one in Mississippi.