Scott Colom, 44, is a son of Columbus, Mississippi, a seventh generation Mississippian. The child of Dorothy Winston Colom, a retired Chancery Court judge, herself the first Black judge in the history of her district’s court, and Wilbur Colom, an attorney and former Republican campaigner, once a member of the transition team of President Ronald Reagan and the first Senate campaign of Thad Cochran—ironically, the first Republican campaign to claim a statewide Mississippi office in over 100 years.
Colom, a Millsaps graduate with a Law degree from the University of Wisconsin, spent significant portion of his university career abroad, including a 16-month stint in rural Guyana
In his campaign, Colom managed to thread a particularly fine needle—making the election a referendum on historically unpopular Republican policies without reducing the contest to a mere skirmish in an essentially national battle.
Nowhere was that strategy clearer than Colom’s appearance at an emergency Trump rally in support of Cindy Hyde-Smith in the fading days of the campaign, itself one of the surest signs that the state’s ruby red reputation was seriously in jeopardy.
In the video that the senator-elect’s team released, there was little friction between Colom and the long convoy of Trump voters. Anxiety over high prices. A desire for the U.S. military to depart from its voluntary expedition into Iran. A pointed request to keep AIPAC and the Israel lobby out of American politics. It was as if the Trump faithful themselves were making the case for Colom’s campaign.
Hyde-Smith herself had done little to personally pitch her own campaign to those present, speaking for roughly ten minutes before one of President Trump’s characteristically rambling hour-and-a-half long appeals. Remarkably, Colom found a way to make a more extensive retail pitch to Hyde-Smith’s core base than she did.
“At the end of the day, you’ve got to put Mississippi above D.C. politics,” Colom told the Mississippi Free Press on Aug 25, 2025. “You can trust Senator Wicker to do that. You cannot trust Senator Hyde-Smith to do that. She is going to do whatever Mitch McConnell, you know, Ted Cruz, (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) thinks. She cares more about what they think than what we think.”
Blanche K. Bruce arrived in the Senate with his own era nearly behind him. It was 1874 when the Mississippi State Legislature, still appointing national legislators at the time, sent him to Washington. Reconstruction, the unfinished reconciliation and enfranchisement of the newly freed Black American citizens liberated in the Civil War, was nearing its end in Mississippi.
The very same year he took office the revanchist forces of white supremacy, including paramilitary bands like the Red Shirts, successfully extinguished Black participation in statewide elections at the barrel of a gun. This “Mississippi Plan” provided a model for other post-Confederate states to crush nonwhite franchise, and as the federal government backed down from using military force to disperse the militias, Bruce stayed on in Washington D.C., a living relic of a lost era.
It did not pass notice to the men who shared the chamber with Bruce that his congressional career represented the fading promise of equal representation for an enormous swathe of the South.
“Mr. Bruce,” said Republican Sen. John Logan, “the respected Senator from Mississippi, stands alone upon this floor as the last representative of four million people who through trials and bloodshed were brought to a view of the promised land only to be sunk into the depths of renewed despair.”
Bruce’s term expired on March 3, 1881, years after the departure of federal troops from the South. Taking his place was Sen. James Z. George, a former Confederate slaveowner, the Democrat who would serve as the chief architect of Mississippi’s nakedly racist 1890 constitution, which through literacy tests, poll taxes and legislative apportionment would make organized Black electoral action an impossibility.
Bruce’s replacement did not mince words: his goal was the infinite suppression of Black political power. “The plan,” he said the year the new constitution was adopted, “is to invest permanently the powers of government in the hands of the people who ought to have them—the white people.”
The plan was successful. From that day in March nearly 150 years ago, no Black Mississippian would serve in any statewide elected office, not during the long years of Black Codes and Jim Crow, with countless Black sharecroppers forced back into punitive labor and effective slavery, or the ebb and flow of the KKK, reanimated again and again, or the hundreds upon hundreds of lynchings in Mississippi alone. Nor the long days of the Civil Rights era, with its terror bombings and assassinations, nor any other days to come.
Not until today.
“Whenever I think about making history,” Colom told TheGrio in September, “I also think about my obligation to future generations and making sure that I perform and have the ethics and the values, the vision, that make it easier for the next person to be judged on their merits,” to ensure, he said, that it would not be another 150 years before his feat is repeated.
