Mississippi’s miraculous midterm mirrors a national story

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Scott Colom seemed to be pushing against an impossible weight of history, but through a celever and relentless campaign, he prevailed ...

The rivalry between Earvin “Magic” Johnson, the smiling, flamboyant Michigan basketball sensation, and Larry Bird, the sardonic, understated pure shooter from Indiana, is generally regarded as the birth of the modern NBA, transforming the image of a moribund league when they were drafted by Los Angeles and Boston respectively in 1979. Their rivalry was elemental, encompassing east and west, black and white.

Johnson remains one of Michigan’s gilded sports heroes, but on Wednesday he reminded people of his family’s origin story. “My father Earvin Johnson Sr was born in Mississippi,” he wrote. “I wish he was alive to see Scott Colom become the first Black senator from the state in over 140 years.”

Johnson senior was born in Wesson, Mississippi in the summer of 1934. His obituary photograph, in which he wears a white fedora to match a white suit, white shirt and white tie offers a strong clue as to where his son acquired his taste for sartorial glamour. Johnson senior was a sharecropper’s son and part of the mass migration who moved to the industrial north in the booming 1950s, finding work with General Motors and raising his family in Lansing.

“Four million people left the South because of the racial terror in the South – intellectual capital and creative talent lost because of hate,” said the politician Mitch Landrieu during the emotional minutes before Colom took the stage for his victory speech in Tougaloo College in Jackson on Wednesday. “I think race is this nation’s Achilles heel. In America we will never realise our full selves until we get past and through this racial division we still have.”

As it turned out, Colom’s first words as Mississippi’s first black senator since Blanche Bruce, in 1875, was less a triumphalist politician’s victory lap than a quietly extraordinary homily. The most miraculous, and emotional, of the midterm elections stories was the last to arrive.

No more than 10 people showed up. Colom was no greenhorn: he was an attorney whose family is…

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