“Why am I here tonight? To see a dream come true. I’m 71 years old. I’ve lived here most all my life. The wall is finally, finally coming down a little.” –Lynn Watkins, Mississippi voter   

Scott Colom is going to the United States Senate!!

My name is Ben, I’m a volunteer with Seed the Vote, and I’m writing from Jackson, Mississippi with my heart still pounding. This week, Cindy Hyde-Smith conceded the race to Scott Colom and at last, the counties are about to certify the vote today. It’s official. 

I have to tell you what I experienced on Wednesday night.

I was in the crowd at Scott’s victory celebration at Tougaloo College, and I have never felt such overwhelming jubilation. People danced the electric slide while we waited for him. The whole crowd sang the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” in unison. When Scott finally walked to the podium, parents hoisted their children high above the crowd so they could see this moment with their own eyes. I watched those kids’ faces light up, and I thought about what the future will mean for them. The motto of the college is “where history meets the future.”  That’s exactly what happened the night of the victory celebration.

People here have been fighting for this moment their whole lives. Their parents and grandparents have fought for it. On Wednesday night, the fight for Black representation in the Deep South turned a page. 

The weight of this historic moment can’t be overstated. Mississippi has the highest share of Black voters of any state. Yet until this month, its voters had never once elected a Black senator. Never. The two who served during Reconstruction were chosen by the legislature. Then, in 1890, Mississippi rewrote its constitution to take the vote away from Black citizens for generations.

Scott Colom just smashed through that wall. He’s also the first Democrat Mississippi has sent to the Senate since 1982!

How did it happen? Black organizers have been planting seeds across the Mississippi Delta for decades. When the Supreme Court gutted part of the Voting Rights Act with the disastrous Callais decision, it became a rallying cry. Turnout in Mississippi jumped 13 points over the last midterm, in a state that has done virtually everything imaginable to keep working people and people of color from the ballot box. 

Before the election, Mississippi’s Secretary of State updated the voter rolls with faulty Experian credit data that resulted in a great deal of confusion on Election Day. Officials moved or closed more than 130 polling places since 2024. Thousands of valid voters were marked “inactive,” and all told, more than 15,000 affidavit ballots had to be reviewed one by one across 82 counties.

At the time, we had no idea how many affidavit ballots actually needed to be certified. We didn’t have a list of voters to call. So, we called as many voters as possible, asked if they had cast an affidavit ballot, and helped them get to their circuit clerk’s office with ID before the deadline. This was no small task.

Thanks to you and our national coalition, the Black Voters Matter phone bank made over 740,000 calls and had more than 40,000 conversations with voters who needed to know about the many hurdles needed to ensure their voices were heard. More than 1,600 volunteers took part, many for shift after shift. This is what democracy looks like.

That’s why I dropped everything and came here. I’ve been volunteering behind the scenes with Seed the Vote for months on communications, data, and canvassing. When it became clear this race in Mississippi  would come down to every last ballot, I went straight from knocking doors for Abdul in Michigan to traveling across Mississippi to help Seed the Vote Action’s local partners cure ballots and observe the count. 

Irene, who recruited me, described what observers ran into:

“We had counties where clerks told people they would be meeting at 10 a.m. the next day. But when people arrived at 10, they had already started counting at 6. And people were already waking up at 5 a.m. to drive from Jackson. It was nuts.”

We kept showing up anyway, driving wherever the coalition needed us deployed. We worked alongside election lawyers and NAACP leaders, and even phone-banked out of the same office Medgar Evers once worked from as the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi.

Seed the Vote volunteers on the road in Mississippi, driving wherever the coalition needed us.

And then came the moment I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

The day after the celebration, my partner Chris and I stopped for lunch at Betty’s Place in Indianola, a soul food restaurant housed in a former gas station. Betty Campbell, “Ms. Betty,” cooked for B.B. King for 20 years and now runs this family restaurant around the corner from the B.B. King Museum. (I had the pulled pork sandwich, hands down the best ever – and I lived in the South for five years.) 

When I went to pay, the cashier told me he was also a pastor, and that his whole family had watched Scott’s victory celebration the night before. He said, “Moments like this are birthed, but only with great effort. They never just happen.”

And then, right there in the restaurant, he began to sing an old spiritual. He sang it all the way through, and his voice carried over the noise, through the walls, and out to Chris at our picnic table. In that song I heard suffering. And I heard joy and hope; hope and joy.

Friend, the wall is coming down, and we helped bring it down together. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

“We have so many incredible people who’ve been leading this work and tilling this soil, and now we’re reaping the harvest from the fruits of our labor… the work of our ancestors has been realized.”

–Waikinya Clanton, Southern Poverty Law Center

This is a crosspost with Seed the Vote Action, a 501(c)4 organization, fiscally sponsored by the Center for Empowered Politics. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.