Mississippi elects its first African American to US Senate since Reconstruction

For more on this story, we can bring in our international affairs commentator, Douglas Herbert. Doug, talk us through just how significant this moment is in Mississippi. Yeah, well, look, we just heard Scott Cullum say Mississippi matters. That's the state's motto, right? Most of Democrats across America didn't even look at Mississippi up until the very 11th hour. They didn't think it had a remote chance of being in play. Thank This man turns it around. And yeah, you want to know how historic it is. We keep saying you have to go back, you know, like 150 years. You actually have to go back. Mississippi has had in its history, he will be the third black senator that Mississippi has sent to the U.S. Senate. Third in history. But the thing is, you have to go back 156 years to the very first iconic figure, a guy. you. Let's show his picture. Actually, it's sepia tone. This is how old it is. 18 seconds. 1870. His name was Hiram Revels. OK, he was sent to the Senate and he came in the period right during Reconstruction, after the ravages of the U.S. Civil War. And he came just a little bit after a month after the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had been ratified, basically allowing, you know, black people himself to be able to vote and and have these rights. It was a very brief flash in the pan. He was sent to the Senate. He was there for five years. And then there was another black senator, also during the Reconstruction era, as it's called, after the Civil War, an opening era, Reconstruction, who also served until 1881. And what happened after that is Mississippi writ large, its history, the history of the whole deep south of America, which is why this is so significant today, this black senator being elected, because the so-called Jim Crow laws came into force. They enshrined in American law. This is after slavery was abolished, right? It enshrines a whole code of laws that basically said separate but equal. Blacks were separate but equal. They couldn't go in the same entrances in hospitals. They couldn't drink from the same water fountains as whites. Separate education, classrooms, everything was segregated by color, but they were equal according to the Jim Crow laws. Those laws remained in place in Mississippi and across the deep South of America for nearly a century until the civil rights movement, a movement to which Scott Cullum paid tribute. So, yeah, Mississippi hasn't sent a Democrat to. To the Senate since 1982, that's 44 years, but I think it's even more significant what this says for an entire generation that came out, driven, older Mississippians especially, telling younger voters to go out there and fight for a civil rights era and civil rights achievements that have been very much not just in jeopardy, but have been gutted. One of the main things that drove them, I will just say to the polls, was the Supreme Court very recently gutted. One of America's most seminal civil rights pieces of legislation, the 1965 Civil Rights Voting Act, it gutted it, allowing the redrawing of black majority districts to favor Republicans, black majority districts, especially in Tennessee and other places. So you had a lot of young voters, not just people fed up with Donald Trump and his agenda or fed up with high prices driven by an unpopular war and a president with sagging popularity, But specifically, black. Young black voters and not so young black voters going there because they knew that they were seeing the Civil Rights Act being shredded and they wanted to fight back and show that they still counted, that Mississippi matters. So how did he do with them? Yeah, he did it because he called it, he was very non-political. What he did is, first of all, he's a religious man. He said his faith allowed him to do this. He did it in a way that was very unpolitical. A lot of candidates who won did not identify themselves really as Democrat, Republican. They tried to stray away from political labels. He went and spoke one-on-one to voters and listened to their concerns and talked to them in a very folksy way about just as if not saying, hi, I'm a politician running for, just talking to them. And he showed up at a Trump rally. Shortly before the election, he went to a Trump rally, not to to to jeer and not to be provocative. He just wanted to talk to the Trump voters. And he had conversations. He actually put videos of his conversations with the people who had showed up rally queuing up at this Trump rally. Pro-Trump MAGA, diehard MAGA voters. And guess what? Not all, obviously not all and not even many of them, but some of them swung to him because they liked the fact that he seemed to not only appreciate what their concerns were, but he seemed. To be listening to them, especially where the economy was concerned and affordability issues. Which clearly would help the mind. Thank you very much for that, Doug. Very well said with that.