Growing up in Little Rock, we had a line for every national ranking that came out. Education, obesity, income. It didn’t matter which list. If Arkansas landed 48th or 49th, somebody would shake their head, and somebody else would say it: Thank God for Mississippi. Implying that at least we weren’t last. It wasn’t a nice thing to say, and it wasn’t a good reason to feel good about ourselves, but it was a confidence booster we had.
On November 11, eight days after the midterms, Cindy Hyde-Smith conceded, and Scott Colom became Mississippi’s senator-elect. He won by fewer than 5,000 votes out of nearly a million. Most headlines call him the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction, which is true and still undersells it. Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce were picked by the state legislature in the 1870s. Mississippi voters had never sent a Black man to the Senate themselves. Now they have.
This one’s personal. Scott’s twin brother, Andrew, is a friend from college, and seeing him on CNN, grinning in front of a wall of Colom for Senate signs, made me proud in a way that felt like family, for a race I couldn’t even vote in.
*****
I was at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery (everyone should go!) in October, and I’m still thinking about it. The building documents what was done to people. What I walked out with was how they kept going, through the slave trade and Jim Crow and every rule written to keep them out of rooms like the Senate. I only recently learned the term foundational Black Americans, for those of us who descend from people enslaved in this country. The word I’d underline is foundational. That refusal to quit is the inheritance, and it’s in my veins. My mother grew up in West Helena, Arkansas, right across the river, and one of her parents came from Mississippi. The state we used to joke about is part of where I come from.
Selfishly, it does something for me too. In Montgomery, I said out loud that I should never walk into a pitch with any doubt that I can build something special. Watching Mississippi in November, I believe it a little more. Whether it’s a senator, a cultural movement, a fashion institution, healthcare, or a venture firm, my people have always had stress wood, the fibers a tree only grows when the wind pushes on it. We’ve been the fibers for this country, and it’s made these cities, these states, this country, and this world stronger, richer, and more worth the human experience.
Even Arkansas’s own Bill Clinton was counting One Mississippi, Two Mississippi. So the next time my home state lands near the bottom of some list, or my industry (venture capital) puts out another stat that says nothing will change, I’ll probably say it again.
Thank God for Mississippi. I just mean it differently now.
With gratitude,
Earnest