Colom won narrowly, by about 7,000 votes out of more than 950,000 cast. He ran up huge majorities in Jackson, the state capital and largest city, and in other majority-black cities and counties. But he also carried a half dozen white-majority counties and cut heavily into the Republican majorities in the Gulf Coast region including Biloxi and Gulfport.

But perhaps the most striking result was his victory in Lafayette County, the white-majority county which includes Oxford, site of the University of Mississippi. In 1962, racist mobs blocked the enrollment of African American James Meredith, until National Guard troops were sent in by President John F. Kennedy. Donald Trump carried Lafayette County by 22 points in 2024, but Colom won a narrow victory last week.

Such figures are an unanswerable rebuke to those who claim that racial attitudes have not changed radically in the United States over the past 60 years, and particularly in the Deep South. Colom’s own campaign demonstrated that. He not only addressed a meeting in the county where Emmett Till was murdered and held an event outside the house where Medgar Evers was shot from ambush, he also appeared at the Neshoba County fair (in the county where Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were detained by sheriff’s deputies and murdered by Klansmen).

The Colom victory is only the most striking result of a wider process. The state of Georgia elected its first African American governor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, who also carried several white-majority counties. Democratic pediatrician Annie Andrews won the US Senate seat in South Carolina held for 48 years by arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond, then for 24 years by Republican Lindsey Graham, defeating Graham’s sister Darline. Democrats swept statewide races in Texas and retained a congressional seat in Alabama despite a racial gerrymander.