Mississippi Votes for Its First Black Senator in Nearly 150 Years

JACKSON: Mississippi residents faced a "nerve-wracking" wait to see whether the southern state elects its first Black senator in more than a century as vote-counting dragged on Sunday after this past week's . Voters who spoke to AFP in the state capital Jackson on Saturday anticipated that history could be in the making in the whisker-close race between Democrat Scott Colom, an African-American man, and Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith, a white woman. With 97 percent of the vote counted by Sunday afternoon, Colom was 2,574 votes ahead of Hyde-Smith -- a gap of just 0.3 percentage points. Mississippi has not elected a Democratic senator since 1982, and Colom would be its first Black senator in nearly 150 years -- since the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War that ended slavery. Gregory Glass, a 47-year-old restaurant owner, himself an African-American, said a victory for Colom would be "historic" but admitted to having "bittersweet" feelings about that. "It should have happened sooner than that, especially in Mississippi, in a state that has so many African-Americans in it," said Glass. According to the US Census Bureau, more than one-third of the state's population, long viewed as a bastion of Republican politics, is Black. A victory for Colom would also put another staunchly Republican state -- including Texas, South Carolina and Kansas -- in the Democrats' column for Senate in Tuesday's election. The midterms were a resounding win for Democrats, who seized control of both houses of Congress as voters nationwide delivered a stinging rebuke to . But the count is not over yet.