WASHINGTON – If only Nina Simone were alive to see what just happened in Mississippi.
A Black man. Elected to the Senate. In Mississippi.
Democrat Scott Colomdefied almost a century and a half of history to defeat Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith in a race so close that Colom wasn't declared the winner until Nov. 11, more than a week after the election. The last time Mississippi sent a Black man to the Senate, the guns and the cannons of the Civil War had been silent for just a decade.
Mississippians, tired of high gas prices, rising food costs, and the unpopular policies of President Donald Trump, made their voices heard at the ballot box.
The voice I heard was Nina Simone's.
In 1963, the classically trained pianist and vocalist with a husky,
rich contralto sat down at her piano, enraged by the racially motivated murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the church bombing that killed four little girls in Alabama. She let her anger spill out in song.
In less than an hour, legend has it, she had written what would become one of the defining anthems of the Civil Rights Movement. Always blunt, she called her composition "Mississippi Goddam."
“Alabama’s gotten me so upset,” the lyrics went. “Tennessee’s made me lose my rest. And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.”
A few months later, when Simone debuted the song at Carnegie Hall in a performance recorded for an album, she introduced it with a defiant, two-sentence preface. "The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam," she announced to the audience, emphasizing the expletive.
"And I mean every word of it," she added.
Listen below to Nina Simone's Mississippi anthem
In the Senate election, Colom spoke for people tired of being left behind, just as Nina Simone had given voice to the frustrations of people denied basic civil rights in the Jim Crow South, enduring life in the back of the bus, billy-club beatings and outright murders.
Hyde-Smith, Colom's opponent, came across to many voters as out of touch. When a television interviewer asked her what Republicans were doing about the high cost of beef, Hyde-Smith, a cattle rancher and Mississippi’s former agriculture commissioner, gave an answer straight out of the French Revolution.
"You know," she said, "you have so many proteins to choose from."
She might as well have declared, "Let them eat cake."
Colom turned his opponent's faux pas into one of the election’s most memorable campaign ads. A man flipping burgers on a backyard grill looks directly into the camera and exclaims: "Pick another protein? I’d rather pick another senator instead."
Voters did.
Watch Colom's original ad below
Colom’s victory was arguably the crest of a seismic blue wave in an election that drowned out Republicans and swept Democrats back into power, giving them their largest majorities in over a decade in both the House and Senate.
In Mississippi, Colom’s triumph elicited shock, awe and jubilation. Basketball legend Earvin "Magic" Johnson celebrated on X, writing, "My father Earvin Johnson Sr. was born in Mississippi. Man, I wish he was alive to see Scott Colom become the first Black senator from the state in over 140 years!"
Videos posted on social media showed other Mississippians cheering, crying, dancing, and singing out in exaltation.
With Colom’s election, they can finally reclaim the title of Simone's song, not as a protest anthem, but as a paean to progress.
Change, though, didn’t come without a fight.
Colom, a district attorney, ran for Senate only after he was denied a federal judgeship. Former President Joe Biden nominated him for the lifetime post in 2023, but Hyde-Smith single-handedly blocked him from getting a confirmation vote. Senate tradition gives members veto power over judicial appointments in their home state.
Though he said losing the judgeship was never his motivation, Colom entered the Senate race against Hyde-Smith. On election night, before all the votes were counted but confident in her victory, Hyde-Smith boasted to her supporters that she was the reason Colom was not a federal judge.
"I blocked Scott Colom from being a federal judge," she said, adding prematurely, "and you blocked him from being a U.S. senator."
But when all of the votes were counted, Hyde-Smith, not Colom, was the one left without a job.
Simone died in 2003 in France, where she spent the last years of her life in self-imposed exile from American racism, disillusionment and the backlash she had endured over her activism.
More than half a century after she wrote them, her verses still resonate as Mississippi’s senator-elect prepares to take office, carrying the weight of history and the burden of expectation:
“Just try to do your very best
“Stand up be counted with all the rest
“For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.”
Michael Collins writes about the intersection of politics and culture. A veteran reporter, he has covered the White House and Congress. Follow him on X: @mcollinsNEWS
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How a Nina Simone song resonates in Scott Colom Mississippi Senate win
