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. His victory marked a major shift in a state with the nation's largest proportional share of Black people but where white conservatives have largely held political power for decades.
“There have been a lot of elections wherein Black folks didn’t really seem like they had a chance. If you look at the demographics of Mississippi, it’s one of those places where, demographically, it shouldn’t be that way. It’s a large Black population,” said Justin Hansford, director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University. “It’s really radical for a place like Mississippi to say we want to go in a direction that is different from where we’ve been for the last 150 years."
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.
Nicole Austin-Hillery, president and CEO of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, said the election of a Black senator in Mississippi at this moment “hearkens back to what our democracy is about — it is about ensuring equal justice for all and that everyone has a voice.”
“Connecting the historical context of Mr. Colom’s win to the fact that there had not been that level of representation in that particular state for almost 150 years really underscores that this moment is showing us that this is an elevation of power and voice for people that is really a true example of equity,” she said.
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