It’s hard to describe the mood in the air in Mississippi right now.
Scott Colum’s victory – the first Democratic senator elected since 1980, the first Black senator to serve the state since Reconstruction, the first ever Black senator to be elected directly by the people of Mississippi – is a sea change that seemed both inevitable and impossible six weeks ago.
50 years from now, his name will be in history books.
But it should never be forgot that history is made not by heroes but by movements, and as important as Scott is, this happened because thousands of folks worked really, really hard, for generations, to make this happen, mostly with no credit or recognition.
In the Civil Rights Museum here in Jackson, there is a wall filled with mug shots of the Freedom Riders – men, women, children who rode busses from the North to Jackson to break the de facto segregation on interstate busses. In doing so they took on the southern states, the KKK and the Kennedy administration. Some died, some were tortured, many were arrested.
Without looking, most folks could not name 5 of them. And yet, they changed the world. The youngest arrested was Hezekiah Watkins, who serves as a docent to the Civil Rights Museum here. He isn’t 80 years old.
Neighborhoods across the country still have elderly folk in them who rode those busses, risked their lives, were imprisoned and in some cases tortured, and most people don’t even know their names, don’t recognize them for who they are.
That is the work of movements – we do our part to move the promise of a better world for all of us further, to scooch it closer to reality. Not everybody knows who did what. But as my daddy told me, we can do great things if we don’t have to fight about who gets the credit.
My buddy David LaMotte taught me that if we believe history is made by charismatic heros, then when things go wrong, he have to wait for one to show up. But if we believe history is made by movements, then we just have to find other folks who want the same thing, and figure out where we fit.
I’m ridiculously glad to be living in a Mississippi that elected Scott Colom. I’m so grateful for the thousands of folks whose work moved this closer to reality, until it became a thing we have done, rather than a thing we dreamed of.