I arrived in Los Angeles on Tuesday, the day Mississippi voters went to the polls in a fiercely fought racially charged runoff U.S. Senate race. The Deep South state with the highest documented lynchings in America, is predominantly rural and falls just short of 3 million residents.
According to the Equal Justice Initiative, more than 600 African Americans were lynched in Mississippi from 1877 to 1950.
Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith opened deep wounds among African Americans when she said that if a supporter invited her “to a public hanging” she would be in “the front row.”
Shortly after the public hanging remark, a video showed Hyde-Smith on the campaign trail appearing to joke about suppressing votes at some colleges. It was a “great idea,” she told supporters, to make it “just a little more difficult” for “liberal folks in those other schools” to vote. Critics suggested she was referring to the state’s historically black colleges.
Then more details were dredged up, including a 2014 picture she posted on Facebook showing her posing with a Confederate cap and a musket at the opening of a museum dedicated to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, and her attempt as state senator to pass a bill in her district to name a stretch of highway after Davis.
Mississippi is the only state in America that still incorporates a Confederate battle emblem on its state flag.
Still, the dynamics of the campaign that saw her as a shoo-in changed. The Senator was pushed on the defensive as major corporations such as Walmart, Aetna, AT&T, Union Pacific and Pfizer asked her to refund their campaign contributions.
In a sign how worried Republicans were, Trump who won 58% of the Mississippi vote in 2016 presidential election, campaigned for the Senator in Tupelo and Biloxi on Monday night, the eve of the election.
Two nooses were found hanging from trees at the state Capitol on Monday.
“We are hanging nooses to remind people that times have not changed,” reads one of the signs, according to the Mississippi Department of Finance and Administration, which oversees the Capitol Police.
Mississippi is not a part of the New South. The conservative state hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1982. True to its racist roots, it re-elected Hyde-Smith who during the campaign said she would continue to “stand up for the conservative values of Mississippi.”
“Mississippi has changed,” said Tonquese Lacey, 46, a Mississippi government worker. “But you know, sometimes the more things change, the more they stay the same.”