BLACK LIKE ME: SCOTT COLOM’S VICTORY AND MISSISSIPPI’S 145-YEAR JOURNEY THROUGH RACIAL TERROR
From John Howard Griffin's account of segregation to Isabel Wilkerson's examination of America's racial caste system, Mississippi's history provides a powerful context for understanding a remarkable political moment.
A BOOK THAT CHANGED MY UNDERSTANDING OF AMERICA
In 1977, I was working at the Tom Redcam Library in Kingston, Jamaica where I came across a book that would forever influence my understanding of race in America. It was John Howard Griffin's “Black Like Me,” an extraordinary journal published in 1961 documenting a white man's deliberate journey into the terrifying world of Black existence in the American South. In the book, Griffin had darkened his skin, shaved his head, and travelled through the segregated South in 1959, determined to experience and document what it meant to be Black in America. What he encountered though, was not merely prejudice. It was racial terror.
Mississippi was particularly harrowing. There, Griffin discovered a society in which the colour of a man's skin determined where he could sleep, eat, travel, work, or even look another human being in the eye. But what struck me was the realization that Griffin had not changed as a human being. His intelligence, character, education, and humanity remained intact. Only his skin colour had changed. Yet that single alteration transformed his entire existence. That was America. And Mississippi was among its darkest manifestations.
THE MISSISSIPPI THAT AMERICA CREATED
Mississippi was not simply a place where racism existed. It was a state in which racial domination had been institutionalized, protected by law, reinforced by economic exploitation, and maintained through intimidation and violence. It was the same Mississippi where in 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till, who had travelled from Chicago to visit relatives was murdered. It exposed the barbarity of a society in which a Black child's alleged violation of racial conventions could become a death sentence.
Eight years later, Medgar Evers, the Mississippi NAACP field secretary, was assassinated outside his home in Jackson. His crime? Challenging segregation, registering Black voters, and demanding the constitutional protections supposedly guaranteed to every American. These were not isolated atrocities. They were manifestations of a political and social order designed to keep Black Mississippians subordinate.
Behind the murders stood generations of economic dispossession, educational deprivation, political disenfranchisement, and institutional humiliation. Mississippi's 1890 Constitution helped entrench this order through voting restrictions calculated to eliminate Black political influence. The freedom promised by emancipation had been systematically betrayed.
ISABEL WILKERSON AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF OPPRESSION
Four decades after reading Griffin, I encountered Isabel Wilkerson's two masterful works, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” and “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” Wilkerson's scholarship provided a broader historical framework for what Griffin had witnessed, as The Warmth of Other Suns chronicled the Great Migration, when millions of Black Americans abandoned the South in search of opportunity, dignity, and freedom.
They were not merely pursuing better-paying jobs. Many were escaping a suffocating racial order in which their ambitions were restricted, their labour exploited, and their lives perpetually vulnerable. Mississippi was central to that exodus.
In Caste, Wilkerson examined the deeper architecture of American racial inequality: a hierarchy in which human beings were assigned social standing largely by birth. Read together, these three books present an indictment of a nation that proclaimed liberty while maintaining an elaborate system of racial subordination. And they make the events of November 2026 in Mississippi particularly compelling.
SCOTT COLOM AND THE RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES SENATE
On November 11, 2026, the Associated Press declared 43-year-old Democrat Scott Colom the winner of Mississippi's United States Senate election. Colom defeated Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith in a remarkably close contest, becoming Mississippi's first Black United States senator since Reconstruction and its first popularly elected Black senator. The result remains subject to formal certification. The historical irony is extraordinary as Mississippi produced America's first Black United States senator, Hiram Rhodes Revels, in 1870. Blanche K. Bruce followed in 1875, serving until 1881. Both were chosen by the state legislature. Then came the dismantling of Reconstruction, the restoration of white supremacist political power, Jim Crow, racial terror, and the systematic suppression of Black voting rights.
For 145 years, Mississippi sent no Black representative to the United States Senate. Now, the electorate has chosen Scott Colom. This is not simply another Democratic victory or a Republican defeat. It is a historical milestone situated against nearly a century and a half of exclusion.
THE IRONY OF CINDY HYDE-SMITH
There is another remarkable dimension to Colom's election. In 2023, President Joe Biden nominated Colom, then a district attorney, for a federal judgeship. Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith withheld her approval, effectively blocking his nomination through the Senate's traditional judicial confirmation procedure. She cited concerns about his record and political associations. Three years later, the same Scott Colom defeated Hyde-Smith in an election to represent the entire state of Mississippi. The man she helped prevent from becoming a federal judge has now been chosen by Mississippi's voters to become a United States senator. History occasionally produces ironies that no novelist could improve upon. A VICTORY, BUT NOT THE END OF THE STRUGGLE
We must resist the temptation to conclude that Colom's victory signifies the disappearance of racism in Mississippi. It does not. The economic and social consequences of generations of segregation, discriminatory policies, and exclusion cannot be eliminated by one election. Mississippi continues to confront substantial challenges involving poverty, healthcare, educational opportunity, and racial disparities.
Nor should we overlook the political realities of Colom's victory. His campaign addressed affordability, healthcare, and economic opportunity, attracting a coalition that extended beyond racial identity.
It is essential that we recognize the critical distinction that Colom’s election demonstrates the possibilities of political change, but it does not guarantee the transformation of the institutions that shape everyday life. Symbolic representation matters, but substantive equality requires much more.
FROM RACIAL TERROR TO POLITICAL POSSIBILITY
When I first read Black Like Me in 1977, Medgar Evers had been dead for only fourteen years. In that year the Voting Rights Act was barely twelve years old. The world Griffin documented was not ancient history. It existed within the living memory of millions of Americans.
Nearly fifty years after I encountered his remarkable journal, Mississippi has elected a Black man to the United States Senate.
I think of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, the countless unnamed victims of racial violence, and the millions who fled the South because remaining meant accepting lives circumscribed by oppression. I think, too, of those who stayed, organized, marched, registered voters, and challenged a system determined to silence them.
Scott Colom's victory belongs within that historical continuum. It certainly cannot erase the terror Griffin documented or the suffering Wilkerson chronicled. But it reminds us that the political arrangements once considered permanent can, through generations of struggle, be changed. Mississippi has not erased its past. It has written a new chapter.
And for those of us who remember the Mississippi of Black Like Me, that chapter deserves to be read with the full weight of history in mind
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