It’s official: for the first time since Reconstruction in 1875, Mississippi has elected a Black senator to Congress. Decades of Black-led movement work delivered this win—from organizing across the state to fight the racist redistricting after Louisiana v. Callais to driving a 35% increase in voter turnout since the last midterm election to mobilizing hundreds of volunteers to make sure every vote was counted.
The mainstream Democratic Party counted Mississippi out, but Mississippi organizers didn’t count Mississippi out. Instead, they worked tirelessly to overcome some of the nation’s most restrictive, racist voting laws. Democratic candidate Scott Colom won by less than 5,000 votes, a victory made possible by thousands of conversations and grassroots organizing.
Colom defeated incumbent Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith—an anti-democratic neo-Confederate who openly supported white supremacy. In 2023, Hyde-Smith voted to block Colom from a federal judge appointment, citing his support of trans people. And now he’s unseated her in the Deep South and is headed to Congress.
While Black voters powered his victory, it’s notable that Colom received 25% of white votes—a 14-point increase for Democrats from 2024. SURJ threw down early in this race and stayed until every vote was counted, flanking Black organizers and taking responsibility for white voters. At the onset of this race, Black organizers were clear they needed a small number of white voters to show up alongside the Black voters in order to win.
So we got to work. Early on this year, we held a powerful webinar about the importance of fighting back against the gutting of the VRA and the role of white people in flanking Black political power in the South that featured Rukia Lumumba, long-time Mississippi organizer. She reminded us: “We need y’all. We literally need white organizers to organize other white people.”
We deployed our phones program into the state, and members had over 1,000 conversations with white voters in Mississippi. They were tough, long conversations, but exactly the kind of conversations SURJ members excel in.
This past week, we have been showing up big to ensure every vote was counted. We mobilized our membership to join Black Voters Matter’s phone banks for ballot curing that held over 40,000 conversations with voters who needed crucial information to make their votes count. And SURJ leaders traveled to Mississippi to support grassroots election certification efforts—including the rural county where, in 1964, civil rights activists James Chaney, a Black man from Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, white men from New York, were murdered by members of the KKK for registering Black people to vote.
It’s true now as it was then: Black Southern organizing expands democracy for all of us. Like expanding the electorate and protecting us against racist gerrymandering and putting power back in the hands of the people and away from ruling elites. It’s our job to bring more and more white people away from the racist lies of the right and into an understanding that the freedom struggle in the South is our fight, too.
Today, we are celebrating the powerful, historic work of Mississippi organizers. And we are doubling down on our organizing in the South, bringing more and more white people into Black-led movements for justice.