Last week, people living in states that made up the old Confederacy turned on the Republican Party that’s still carrying Dixie’s racist, revanchist banner.
Texas picked James Talarico for the Senate and Gina Hinojosa for the governorship, North Carolina went with Roy Cooper, South Carolina chose Annie Andrews, and Georgia put Keisha Lance Bottoms in the governor’s mansion.
And in Mississippi, the state who’s 1861 declaration of secession clearly states that they were doing it to preserve slavery, a Black prosecutor named Scott Colom with a few thousand votes (out of nearly a million) unseated Cindy Hyde-Smith, who’d single-handedly denied Colom a federal judgeship when Biden appointed him.
That state’s 1860s-era constitution’s declaration of causes opens with a sentence that leaves no room for the so-called states’ rights fairy tale the GOP continues to push.
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world.”
What’s particularly interesting and historically significant about that race is that Cindy Hyde-Smith never hid who she was.
She graduated from a “segregation academy” whose yearbook was called The Rebel and whose mascot was a Confederate colonel waving a battle flag. She sent her own daughter to a different segregation academy.
She once posted a photo of herself in a Confederate cap holding a rifle at traitor Jefferson Davis’s home and captioned it “Mississippi history at its best!” When she ran against Mike Espy in 2018 she told a crowd that if one of her supporters “invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” When President Biden put forward Colom to be a federal judge, she personally blocked his nomination.