It was a Mississippi murder case that led to the landmark Supreme Court decision finding confessions could not be coerced through violence and torture.
In 1934, a Mississippi prosecutor urged a jury to convict three Black men of murdering a white man. Before their one-day trial, which saw them each found guilty and sentenced to death, one of the three men had refused to confess to the crime even after being nonfatally hanged twice and whipped by an agent of the state. The two others were beaten in custody until they confessed.
“The record of the testimony shows that the signs of the rope on his neck were plainly visible during the so-called trial,” wrote the lone dissenting judge following the guilty verdict.
The prosecutor in that case was John C. Stennis. He was also the last member of the Democratic Party to be elected senator in Mississippi.
Stennis was a member of the old Democratic Party, the Dixiecrats who opposed abolition and whose membership began to flip after President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted the working-class friendly policies of the New Deal. As a senator, Stennis rejected Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned school segregation. He voted against both 1960s Civil Rights acts and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He tried to block the establishment of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a federal holiday. He served until retirement in 1988.
The Democratic Party then was the “longstanding party of power in Mississippi,” William Sturkey, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, told TPM, “and it was the party of white supremacists.”
As Scott Colom, a Democratic Mississippi district attorney, continues to lead incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) in the state’s midterm election results, commentators including this author have noted that he would be the first Democrat Mississippi sent to the Senate since 1982. But that statistic doesn’t communicate the historical significance of Colom’s election, and what it means for the seismic shift in Mississippi voter engagement and electorate principles.
“It’s something completely new, because that, I thought, would’ve been impossible even just a few months ago, that a Black man could be elected senator out of Mississippi,” Sturkey said. “I can’t imagine this happening at any point before now since Reconstruction.”
Throughout his campaign, Colom has separated Mississippi from the long shadow of its deeply racist past while highlighting the ways the state has emerged into a new present and is poised to enter a celebrated, diverse future. He highlighted the local talent that worked on his entertaining, viral campaign ads. And he cast Hyde-Smith as a relic, more radical than other members of her party from the state in the ways she wielded her power to block the confirmation of Black appointees.
The Hyde-Smith brand of GOP politics is the one which shares its legacy with Mississippi’s last elected Democratic senators, Robert Luckett, director of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, told TPM.
Democratic ideals shifted post-FDR, but the last Deep South Dixiecrats held onto power for half a century more. Black people in the 1930s and 1940s began leaving the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln after Democrat FDR’s New Deal was perceived as a boon for poor and working-class people and Black Americans. White people, however, didn’t leave the party in corresponding shifts, said Luckett, until the 1960s brought the Civil Rights Movement. In the meantime, the fractured party saw white supremacist Democrats support more progressive, newer candidates, block progressive intraparty legislation, and insert explicitly divisive policy into otherwise progressive laws. One powerful Mississippi senator insisted on excluding from the New Deal provisions that would’ve benefit Black people.
“When the shift starts, the conversations that are being had in white southern Democratic circles are very explicitly, ‘Look, we need to maintain Jim Crow every way we can, and the best way we can is to stop shouting the N-word, and stop, you know, lynching people,’” Luckett said.
To find Colom’s ideological ancestor requires reaching into the truncated, historical bright spot of post-Civil War Reconstruction.
“I think when we think about this we do have to think very directly back to the 1870s,” said Luckett. “That is the inheritance of Scott Colom. It’s certainly not John C. Stennis.”
Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, the last two Black men elected senators in Mississippi, served from 1870 to 1871 and from 1875 to 1881, respectively. Members of the pre-shift Republican Party, it is the inheritance of those senators and that politics of that moment to which Colom belongs.
Conflating Colom’s success with the last Democratic senators in Mississippi “suggests that the Democrats have always been consistently this pro-Civil Rights party and it forgets realignment, and it flattens that history,” Hilary Green, professor of Africana studies at Davidson College, told TPM.
Beyond their political connection, the moment that could see Colom make history shares its successful on-the-ground political organizing with the Reconstruction era. Green calls this period the third Reconstruction.
“I think it’s a spirit of Revels and Bruce, and what happens in that short-lived period of Black political organizing and success, that then translates again during the Civil Rights Movement…,” said Green, “And now we’re seeing that again.”
Green expected Colom’s race to be more competitive than national forecasts suggested, but didn’t initially think he’d win. Sturkey never saw it coming.
Even Mississippi-based Luckett was surprised that the coalition Colom needed in order to win turned out in large enough numbers.
“His race and what it means in the state of Mississippi is more consistent than the parties have been,” Sturkey said. “And the fact that a Black man got elected here and now is completely unique, much more than the fact that he was Democrat.”
