First Person - There have been many shocks in American politics the past few weeks, but there's nothing that quite compares to the election of Senator Scott Colom in Mississippi.
Colom, a Democrat and Black district attorney, stunned poll watchers by narrowly defeating the white Republican sitting US Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith.
The final vote, which took more than a week to confirm, shows Colom winning by a narrow 4000 or so votes - a result pretty much nobody outside of Mississippi saw coming even in the face of a mighty "blue wave" for Democrats nationwide.
The Associated Press and CNN projected Colom as the winner on Thursday (NZ time).
It is impossible to fully describe the magnitude of a Black Democrat winning a Senate seat in Mississippi, a state that's been deeply Republican for decades and has a long, sordid history of oppression of Black voters.
Colom will be the first Black senator in Mississippi since 1881 - and that man was born a slave.
He's also the first Democrat elected there since 1982. The campaign of Colom, 43, seemed filled with energy, compared to the lethargic efforts by Hyde-Smith, 67.
Sixty, seventy years ago, he could have been killed for even trying to vote in Mississippi, where the Ku Klux Klan and others fought any attempt by Blacks to…
