A 150-Year History of the Black Political Struggle in Mississippi
In 1870, a Mississippi crowd watched Hiram Revels walk onto the floor of the United States Senate as the first Black person to serve in Congress. Nearly a century later, Fannie Lou Hamer sat before a national television audience in Atlantic City, describing the beatings she endured while trying to register to vote in the same state. Now, in 2026, Scott Colom made history as the first Black person elected to represent Mississippi in the Senate since Reconstruction. Yet in a state where progress has always been met with relentless backlash, Colom’s win is only the latest chapter in a much longer story.
In honor of Colom’s historic win, The Root is taking a look back at the complicated history of Black political struggle in Mississippi.
Hiram Revels (Reconstruction — 1871)
On February 25, 1870, Hiram Rhodes Revels became the first African American ever to serve in Congress. Born free in North Carolina in 1827, Revels was an ordained A.M.E. minister, Civil War chaplain, and educator who had settled in Natchez, Mississippi, before he was elected in January 1870 to fill Jefferson Davis’s vacated seat.
A Brief Triumph
Revels served until March 3, 1871. During his year in office, he fought against school segregation and disenfranchisement, warning lawmakers on the Senate floor against racial hostility in a notable speech: “If the nation should take a step for the encouragement of this prejudice against the colored race, can they have any grounds upon which to predicate a hope that Heaven will smile upon them and prosper them?”
RELATED: How Fannie Lou Hamer Outsmarted a U.S. President
Revels also argued against racial prejudice, reminding his fellow senators that the nation had recently survived the Civil War—which he viewed as divine judgment poured out upon the country for its mistreatment of an oppressed race. Reconstruction’s collapse in the late 1870s would soon lock Black Mississippians out of statewide office for nearly 150 years.
Medgar Evers (Early Civil Rights Grassroots Organizing, 1950s–1963)
Decades after Reconstruction’s collapse, Medgar Wiley Evers stepped directly into the crosshairs of Jim Crow to join the fight for civil rights. The World War II veteran returned home to Decatur, Mississippi, only to be turned away at gunpoint by a white mob when he tried to vote in 1946. Instead of backing down, he dedicated the rest of his life to dismantling the system.
Evers became the NAACP’s first state field secretary in Mississippi in December 1954—a role widely considered the most dangerous civil rights post in America at the time.
Putting His Life on the Line
Traveling down isolated Delta backroads, Evers organized voter registration drives, led economic boycotts against white-owned businesses in Jackson, and investigated racial terror, including the August 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, smuggling key witnesses out of the state to testify, according to the NAACP.
On June 12, 1963—mere hours after President John F. Kennedy delivered a landmark televised civil rights address—white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith shot Evers in the back in his driveway as his wife, Myrlie, and three young children waited inside. He died less than an hour later at Jackson’s University Hospital after initially being refused entry because he was Black.
Fannie Lou Hamer (Voting rights and the 1964 DNC challenge, 1962–1977)
Just as Medgar Evers’s assassination laid bare the fatal cost of organizing in Mississippi, a former sharecropper from Montgomery County stepped forward to carry the torch. Born in October 1917, Fannie Lou Hamer spent decades picking cotton on a Ruleville plantation before attending a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meeting in August 1962 and attempting to register to vote in Indianola—an act of defiance that immediately cost her both her job and her home, as we previously reported.
The retaliation turned brutal in June 1963, when police in Winona, Mississippi, arrested Hamer and fellow activists returning from a voter education workshop and beat her so severely in her jail cell that she suffered permanent kidney damage and a lifelong limp.
Outsmarting a U.S. President
By April 1964, Hamer had co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to challenge the state’s all-white Democratic delegation. She testified before the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City on August 22, 1964.
Speaking live on national television—despite President Lyndon B. Johnson calling an impromptu press conference in an attempt to stop her broadcast—Hamer detailed the beatings and intimidation Black Mississippians endured while trying to register, questioning whether America was truly the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Over 60 years after Hamer’s emotional testimony, the seeds she planted in Mississippi’s soil finally bore historic statewide fruit—carried across the finish line by a prosecutor from Columbus named Scott Colom.
Scott Colom (Historic Statewide Breakthrough, 2015–2026)
Scott Colom built his reputation by transforming power from inside Mississippi’s legal system. Colom—the son of Wilbur Colom, one of the state’s pioneering Black trial lawyers— graduated from Millsaps College and the University of Wisconsin Law School before he was elected District Attorney for Mississippi’s 16th Circuit Court District, becoming the first Black person to hold the post in the majority-white district.
Re-elected in 2019 and 2023, he gained national attention for pairing tough prosecution of violent crime with smart criminal justice reform. In 2026, he launched his campaign for a U.S. Senate seat, which ended with a historic victory.
Not an Ending, But a Beginning
Scott Colom pulled off one of the most stunning upsets in modern Southern politics defeating longtime Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith to become the first Black person elected to represent Mississippi in the Senate since Reconstruction and the first Black candidate to win any statewide election in Mississippi since the 19th century.
Yet as supporters celebrated a milestone 156 years in the making, Colom’s victory carries the weight of unfinished business—standing as living proof that in Mississippi, progress is never handed down; it is won through generations of persistence.
