JACKSON — The eve of the U.S. Senate run-off election in Mississippi fell on Arekia Bennett’s 26th birthday, but she hardly paused to celebrate. Decked out in a “Fannie Lou Taught Me” T-shirt, she flitted from one end of Jackson to the other, speaking on panels and holding last-hour voter engagement events at her alma mater, Jackson State University.
“It’s not just the shirt because I’m cute, and I’m woke or whatever, but it means something to me,” Bennett, the executive director of Mississippi Votes, said in an interview.
She showed up on campus with dozens of pizza boxes, as the organization she chartered on campus, GIRL: Gathering Information Related to Ladies, prepared to host actress Erika Alexander, best known for her role as Maxine Shaw in the 1990s sitcom “Living Single.”
Bennett was nervous but excited then. But, just 24 hours later, she traded anxiety for disappointment and conflicted feelings.
Sen. Cindy-Hyde Smith was elected to serve in Washington, D.C., for the next two years, as she finishes the term of Sen.Thad Cochran, who retired last spring. She thanked God, her family, the governor and the president, in that order, when she spoke after the win. Then she started thanking the people who elected her, promising to hold true to Republican values while also unifying the rest of the state.
“You know, this win tonight, this victory is about our conservative values,” Hyde-Smith said in an overly chilled, carpeted hotel ballroom at The Westin in downtown Jackson. “It’s about the things that mean the most to all of us Mississippians: our faith, our family. It’s those things that I will take to Washington, D.C. I want to represent all of Mississippians with these values, and I will fight for it, I assure you, every single day.”
Hyde-Smith said she won because Mississippians know what is in her heart, and for many, that is precisely their issue with the senator-elect, particularly after Hyde-Smith’s “public hanging” quip and comments about suppressing the vote of “liberal folks” at some Mississippi colleges and universities quickly polarized the campaigns and by extension, the state.
While Hyde-Smith made history as the first woman elected to represent Mississippi in Congress, it is hard for some black women to celebrate strictly on the basis of gender.
“I don’t think you can do that—unite everybody by using offensive language,” Bennett said. “You felt comfortable that this is the Mississippi that is still holding this idea of white-supremacist thought, and that is problematic for me. I would love to have a conversation with her, but I am reluctant around her words in that because I don’t know if that’s true. It would be hard for me as a black person to trust that (she will unite Mississippi).”
Hyde-Smith inherits a more divided state than other Mississippi Republicans in recent memory because Hyde-Smith, and by extension, the Republican Party, did not defeat Mike Espy overwhelmingly. Hyde-Smith won the seat with 54 percent of the vote, compared to Espy’s 46.
Although turnout is lower during midterms, and often more so during a run-off, the votes show there is a significant portion of the voting population Hyde-Smith alienated and energized with her viral comments.
‘Still a Black Woman’
Arekia Bennett highlights a conundrum unfolding in the wake of this high-tide run-off. As she takes deep breaths and long pauses during the interview on Nov. 29, it is clear that she is still trying to process an election season during which she hit the streets hard with college students, resulting in nearly 2,000 newly registered voters on college campuses.
Mississippi Votes is a nonpartisan organization, and Bennett emphasized that the sheer fact that Hyde-Smith won as a Republican is not what bothers her. Instead, she feels torn as both a black person hurt by the “public hanging” comment and conflicted as a woman seeing another rise.
“It is difficult, or it can be difficult, to feel a way about somebody making a statement about public hangings when you’re the executive director of a nonprofit, but you’re still a black woman,” Bennett said.
But it wasn’t just the public-hanging comment that forced many to recall Mississippi’s ugly history with lynchings—the most in the nation from 1887 to 1950, the Equal Justice Initiative shows. Bennett didn’t like Hyde-Smith’s comments about suppressing college students’ vote either.
“Because I work with young people all the time, to say you’re suppressing people’s votes on college campuses, I took offense to that personally and took offense for people making excuses for her because you just don’t say things like that knowing you’re in the public eye and folks are always carrying cameras around,” she said.
Under Bennett’s direction at Mississippi Votes, the organization brought together veterans of Freedom Summer in 1964 alongside student ambassadors to spark registration and engagement. Bennett’s organization also made sure those in pre-trial detention could vote absentee. The Appeal reported that since Florida passed Amendment 4 restoring voting rights to many convicted felons, Mississippi is now the worst in the nation when it comes to felony disenfranchisement.
Two historically black colleges in Hinds County saw a surge in numbers at the campus polling stations between this midterm election and 2014.
In the 2014 midterms, fewer than 600 people voted at the campus polling station at Tougaloo College. This year almost 900 did. Jackson State University had fewer than 100 voters show up to the polls during the 2014 midterms, and this year almost 400 turned out. Mississippi Votes used targeted advertisements across all of Mississippi’s colleges and reached more than 500,000 of them online.
