When I was preparing for Washington Week Friday I was thinking through the Scott Colom victory in Mississippi. Was the Supreme Court right when it watered down the Voting Rights Act? The majority on the Court says the South has changed. Mississippi just elected a Black senator. So, was the Court right?1
The answer requires, among other things, distinguishing between progress represented by the Colom victory and whether that progress says anything about the ongoing forces that resist progress. Those can still be around, humping it full bore, regardless of Colom’s victory. Colom won 97 percent of Black voters and 27 percent of white voters. Race still sorts Mississippi.
Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic about the Mississippi Senate race.
“Mississippi today is not the Mississippi of Dark Journey, but we are living in a world inextricably shaped by it. Multiracial democracy in America is young; it emerged only in the lifetimes of the people who are still currently governing the country.”
We are shaped by it and some of the people governing right now— the president, in fact— are practicing techniques first used against Mississippi’s first Black senator.
In February 1870, when Hiram Revels of Mississippi arrived to become the first Black senator ever, Senate Democrats, then the party of the white South, tried to keep him from taking his seat by arguing that he hadn’t been an American citizen long enough. You know who made the same move? Who used a citizenship claim to deny a Black man his rightful place in American democracy? President Donald Trump, who promoted the lie that Barack Obama wasn’t a citizen. The lie made him. In April 2011, the political scientist Michael Tesler found, Republicans who believed Obama was foreign-born rated Trump nearly 40 points higher than Republicans who didn’t.
Serwer quotes Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Colom’s win can’t settle the question for another reason: the Court ruled on something his race didn’t test. The ruling was about district maps. The Voting Rights Act let Black voters sue when politicians drew House and state legislative districts that split Black communities into pieces, leaving them outnumbered in every district. The Court made those lawsuits nearly impossible to win. A Senate race has no districts. The whole state votes in one contest, so no one can draw lines to split Black voters up. Colom’s win shows what Black voters can do when their votes can’t be divided. It says nothing about whether they still need protection in the races where their votes can be.