escarpment

Colom wins Forrest County

This surreal result from Tuesday has all the American historians agog, and for good reason. I found Scott Colom's last ad before the midterm elections quite moving...

Forrest County in Mississippi is named in honor of the first Grand Wizard of the KKK. The statewide vote for the U.S. Senate seat hasn't been settled yet, but Colom is leading with the slimmest of margins; the smartest pollsters are calling a Colom win as "very likely". There is no question, though, that he has flipped Forrest County.

Even in a Democratic blue tsunami of epic proportions, with numerous highly unexpected flips from red-to-blue all across the country and in all sorts of races, this particular county result stands out in both actual fact, and in historical significance. But I'll leave the likes of HCR to comment on this in way more depth. ::chuckle::

Can't wait to read such analyses!

Update: Heather hasn't yet, but Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse has — "Mississippi Goddamn", in his Campaign Trails website yesterday. A quote...

Consider Forrest County, which was named after the Confederate general who founded the Ku Klu Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest.

This was a county where the politics of white supremacy were protected by voting registrar Theron Lynd, who used the state's so-called "literacy test" to deny qualified black voters from registering, even as he let illiterate whites sign up with no problem. While his predecessor had registered a handful of black voters to show he wasn't completely biased, Lynd refused to register any for several years. The Civil Rights Division waged a long war against him, but it ultimately took the Voting Rights Act to break his power.

And now an African American running for Senate is winning Forrest County by a margin of 54%-44%.

And here's another one, also from yesterday, written by Civil War historian Kevin M. Levin in his Substack Civil War Memory, "The Coalition Jim Crow and the Lost Cause Was Built to Stop". A quote...

Of all the former Confederate states, the Lost Cause narrative has enjoyed the longest half life in Mississippi. Its role throughout much of the twentieth century served to rally its white citizens around a shared history and a future that always assumed they would remain in charge while African Americans remained a subordinate class.

This past week’s results points to a very different future.

Regardless of the result of the state-wide election, Scott Colom will win in Jefferson Davis County… as well as Forrest County, named after slave trader, Confederate general, and Klan Leader, Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Those two maps, set side by side, compress a century and a half of Mississippi history into a single glance. The counties where enslaved people were forced to labor in the greatest numbers in 1860 are now the places where their descendants, joined by allies across racial lines, are reshaping the state’s political future.

Extraordinary.