The Atlantic City Lineage: Fannie Lou Hamer, the Ladner Sisters, and Bennie Thompson's Sixty-Year Road to Scott Colom

On CNN's Erin Burnett OutFront on the night of Nov. 11, former Rep. Jamaal Bowman reminded a national audience that Rep. Bennie G. Thompson learned his politics from Fannie Lou Hamer. The record bears him out. As a Tougaloo College political science student in the 1960s, Thompson went into Sunflower County to register Black voters for Hamer's campaign for Congress. He has never let the debt go unspoken. "Part of who I am," he told the House on her centennial in 2017, "can be attributed to my association with Ms. Hamer."

That sentence is the hinge of a sixty-year story. Scott Colom's victory in Mississippi's Senate race did not begin with a 2026 campaign. It began in the Delta churches and cotton rows where Hamer, the Ladner sisters, Victoria Gray, Annie Devine and thousands of local people built the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and where a teenage volunteer from Bolton learned what organized Black voters could do.

The Theorist from Ruleville

For decades Hamer was remembered as a singer and a sufferer: the sharecropper who was fired for trying to register in Indianola in August 1962, beaten in the Winona jail in June 1963, and who told the Credentials Committee she was "sick and tired of being sick and tired." Keisha N. Blain's Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America (2021) insists that this portrait is too small. Blain reads Hamer as a political thinker whose speeches carried a coherent program: democracy has to be practiced by the poorest people in a community, not delegated to brokers who speak for them; voting rights mean little without economic security; and freedom is indivisible. "Nobody's free until everybody's free," Hamer told the founding meeting of the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971.

Blain's reading matters for Mississippi politics because it explains why the movement Hamer led did not dissolve after its most famous defeat. Her ideas were meant to be organized, not admired.

"We Didn't Come for No Two Seats"

The MFDP was founded in April 1964 because the regular Mississippi Democratic Party excluded Black citizens from its precinct meetings and conventions. Freedom Summer volunteers and local organizers held parallel meetings in every part of the state and sent a 68-member delegation to Atlantic City. Hamer's televised testimony on Aug. 22 forced the nation to watch. President Lyndon B. Johnson's allies offered two at-large, nonvoting seats. Hamer and the delegation refused. "We didn't come all this way for no two seats," she said, "when all of us is tired."

Blain treats that refusal as strategy, not temper. A token seat would have certified the regular party's claim to speak for Mississippi. Refusing it kept the question open. In 1965 Hamer, Victoria Gray of Hattiesburg and Annie Devine of Canton carried the challenge to Congress itself, contesting the seating of the state's all-white House delegation. The House dismissed the challenge that September, but the three women became the first Black women to sit on the House floor as contestants. By 1968 a biracial Loyalist Democratic delegation, with Hamer among its members, was seated at the national convention in Chicago in place of the regulars.

The Daughters of Palmer's Crossing

The movement had deep local roots, and few families show them better than the Ladners. Dorie (1942–2024) and Joyce (born 1943) Ladner grew up in Palmer's Crossing, a Black community outside Hattiesburg. As teenagers they formed an NAACP Youth Council under the guidance of Vernon Dahmer, the Forrest County NAACP leader, and Clyde Kennard, who tried to integrate what is now the University of Southern Mississippi. Both men were destroyed by the state and the Klan: Kennard was framed and imprisoned and died of cancer in 1963; Dahmer died after Klansmen firebombed his home in January 1966.

Through Dahmer and Kennard the sisters met Medgar Evers at state NAACP meetings in Jackson. Expelled from Jackson State in 1961 for supporting the Tougaloo Nine's library sit-in, they moved to Tougaloo College and into the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Dorie worked as a SNCC field secretary in the Delta and Natchez and helped build Freedom Summer. Joyce went on to write Tomorrow's Tomorrow (1971), a landmark study of Black girlhood, and later served as interim president of Howard University.

The Ladners embody Blain's point about Hamer's politics. Their movement was not a single protest. It was a network of youth councils, mentors, campuses and kitchen tables that carried people from one generation of risk to the next.

Mississippi didn't flip. Mississippians flipped it.

From Bolton to the Second District

Bennie Thompson came out of that same network. Born in Bolton in 1948, he graduated from Tougaloo in 1968, the campus that sheltered the Ladners and hosted mass meetings throughout the movement years. Canvassing for Hamer in Sunflower County, he later recalled, he learned that Black residents of his own hometown did not vote. He went home and organized it. In 1969 he and two other Black candidates won seats on Bolton's board of aldermen and were seated only after a federal court ruled in their favor. He became mayor in 1973 and a Hinds County supervisor in 1980.

Others cracked the same doors. Robert G. Clark Jr. of Holmes County won a seat in the Mississippi House in 1967, the first Black member since Reconstruction. Mike Espy won the Second Congressional District in 1986. Thompson succeeded him in 1993, and he has pointed out with pride that it is the district Hamer tried to win in 1964, when Mississippi barred most Black citizens from the ballot.

Hamer herself turned to economic power. In 1969 she founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County so that Black families could not be starved out for voting. Blain shows that Hamer saw land, food and votes as one struggle. Thompson's decades on agriculture, rural health and Delta development reflect the same premise.

The Harvest in 2026

Mississippi didn't flip. Mississippians flipped it.

On Nov. 11, the Associated Press called the race for Scott Colom over Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, 473,336 votes to 468,667, with Ty Pinkins at 20,234, a margin of 4,669. The shape of the vote is familiar. It rests on the Delta and Hinds County, on affidavit ballots cured by volunteers one voter at a time, and on precinct workers whose parents and grandparents first organized under the MFDP's banner.

The regular party that shut Hamer out in 1964 claimed to speak for all of Mississippi. Sixty-two years later, the people it excluded have helped choose the state's senator. Blain's title comes from Hamer's own words about the work that remained. "I'm not going to stop fighting," Hamer insisted, "until I am free." The Delta never stopped.

The win also closes a circle opened in Reconstruction. Mississippi sent the first two Black senators in American history: Hiram Revels, seated in 1870, and Blanche K. Bruce, who in 1875 became the first Black senator to serve a full term. After Bruce left office in 1881, no Black Mississippian sat in the Senate for nearly a century and a half. Colom would be the third. The third time is the charm, and this time it was earned precinct by precinct.

When Colom spoke that night, he began with prayer and faith, and he reached for the same lineage. He named Hiram Revels as Mississippi's first senator. On Veterans Day, he invoked Medgar Evers, the World War II veteran who came home from France and was turned away from the polls in Decatur. He invoked Hamer, who believed that being sick and tired could move a nation to change. Veterans of the movement were in the room. NAACP President Derrick Johnson put it plainly: local people make the difference. Faith and work, Colom said, go together.

He also spoke about the people the campaign met: farmers hurt by tariffs, a single mother who crossed into Alabama to find work, families squeezed by gas and oil prices, and a kidney transplant patient who worked on the campaign anyway.

Much of the national commentary missed that story. Cable panels talked about the candidate's message, personality and broad appeal, or reduced the race to who funded whom. They rarely mentioned organizations, grassroots mobilization, long-term field preparation, or the case for competing in all fifty states instead of a handful of battlegrounds. Money matters, but it did not build the precinct networks of the Delta. Local people did, over sixty years.

Colom chose to celebrate at Tougaloo College, the campus where Thompson learned to organize and where the MFDP and SNCC found shelter in the 1960s. Read the story of Tougaloo.

Further Reading on HistorianSpeaks

• Sanctuary on County Line Road: Tougaloo College and the Cradle of Mississippi Resistance
• Fannie Lou Hamer, Civil Rights Activist
• Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi Freedom Fighter
• Remembering the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964
• The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the U.S. Capitol, 1965
• Victoria Gray Adams, Founding Member of the MFDP
• Unita Blackwell, MFDP Delegate and Mayor
• Dorie Ladner, 1942–2024: The Passing of a Civil Rights Icon
• Clyde Kennard, 1960
• Vernon Dahmer Sr. and the KKK Attack, 1966
• Medgar Evers Assassinated, 1963
• Where Medgar and Myrlie Met: Alcorn and the Student Vanguard
• The Sovereign of the Delta: Bennie Thompson
• Holding the Chamber Floor: The Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus
• Guarding the Door: Scott Colom, "Sinators," and Medgar Evers