) Mississippi sent the first Black senator in American history. Hiram Revels was seated in 1870, in the seat Jefferson Davis had left to run the Confederacy. Blanche K. Bruce followed in 1875 and left in 1881. Mississippi didn’t send another Black senator for 145 years.
2) In 1890 the state rewrote its constitution to take the vote away from Black citizens. Six years later its own Supreme Court said so. The convention, the court wrote in Ratliff v. Beale, set out to “obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race.”
3) Part of that constitution is still law. Section 241 bans people convicted of certain crimes from voting for life, and the framers picked the crimes they thought Black people were likelier to commit. A Fifth Circuit panel struck it down in August 2023. The full Fifth Circuit put it back in July 2024.
4) Statewide candidates also had to carry a majority of state House districts on top of the popular vote. That rule was written to stop Black-backed candidates. Mississippi voters got rid of it in November 2020.
5) Mississippi’s constitution banned interracial marriage until 1987, twenty years after Loving v. Virginia. The repeal got about 52% of the vote.
6) What about the 13th Amendment, the one that abolished slavery? Mississippi didn’t certify its ratification until February 2013.
7) In May 2016 a federal judge ordered Cleveland, Mississippi to desegregate its schools. That was 62 years after Brown v. Board of Education.
8) The Confederate battle emblem stayed on the state flag until 2020. Mississippi still marks Robert E. Lee’s birthday on the same day as Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
9) The last Democrat to win a Senate race in Mississippi was John Stennis, in 1982. Stennis signed the Southern Manifesto against integration in 1956. Stennis voted against the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Before any of that, as a prosecutor, he won death sentences for three Black men whose confessions came from whippings.
10) Colom beat Cindy Hyde-Smith. She went to a school founded to avoid integration. In 2018 she joked she’d be “on the front row” at a “public hanging,” in the state with the most recorded lynchings in America. In 2023 she blocked Colom from becoming a federal judge.
Good one.
