Guarding the Door: Scott Colom, "Sinators," and Medgar Evers's Mississippi

In the closing days of the 2026 Mississippi Senate race, District Attorney Scott Colom borrowed the Delta's most talked-about movie to make an old argument. His Halloween-weekend video, "Sinators," riffs on Ryan Coogler's Sinners, the 1932 juke-joint story set in the Mississippi Delta: two men stand guard at a door while the vampires outside try to get in. In Colom's telling, the door is Mississippi's, and the vampires are the Washington interests he says have drained the state while Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith held her seat.

Watch the video: Scott Colom's "Sinators" on Facebook · on X

Guarding the Door, Then and Now

The image of a door that must be held is not new in Mississippi. For Black Mississippians, the door was the courthouse, the registrar's office and the polling place, and the people guarding it from the inside were organizers who paid for it with their lives.

Medgar Evers became the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi in 1954. From an office in Jackson he investigated lynchings and beatings, organized boycotts, and pushed Black citizens to register in a state that used poll taxes, literacy tests and terror to keep them off the rolls. On June 12, 1963, a white supremacist shot him in the driveway of his Jackson home. It took more than thirty years, and the persistence of his widow, Myrlie Evers, before Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of the murder in 1994.

Students at the Jailhouse Lawn

Evers did not work alone. In March 1961 nine Tougaloo College students sat down in the whites-only Jackson Municipal Library and were arrested. When Jackson State students rallied outside the courthouse at the trial, Evers stood with them as police turned dogs and tear gas on the crowd.

That pairing of campus energy and seasoned organizers is the same pattern HBCU students in Jackson are repeating this fall as poll monitors and get-out-the-vote marchers.

From the Courthouse to the Ballot

Colom's own career runs through the courthouse. In 2015, at thirty-two, he defeated Forrest Allgood, a prosecutor who had held the 16th Circuit seat since 1989, taking 53.9 percent of the vote across Lowndes, Oktibbeha, Clay and Noxubee counties. He became the first Black elected district attorney in the 16th Circuit's history, and the first Black elected district attorney in a majority-white voting district in Mississippi's history. Now he is asking an electorate that is roughly one-third Black — the largest Black share of eligible voters of any state, close to 40 percent — to send him to the Senate.

Using Sinners is a cultural bet. The film celebrated Delta blues, Black ownership and community joy under Jim Crow, and it drew millions who never read a campaign mailer. Colom's campaign is wagering that the same imagery can speak to Black voters, younger voters and white Mississippians who loved the movie, and that a Southern Democrat can win attention without waiting for national networks to notice. The campaign has also drawn fire: Attorney General Lynn Fitch asked Colom to pull a separate AI-generated ad she said may violate state law, a dispute the campaign has contested.

Where to See Evers's Mississippi

Readers who want to stand where this history happened have two places to go in Jackson:

• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, 2332 Margaret Walker Alexander Drive. The family's home, where Evers was killed, is now run by the National Park Service and open for guided tours. National Park Service
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, run by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, which tells the story of Evers and the movement and sits beside the archives holding Mississippi's civil rights records. Two Mississippi Museums

On Election Day, the lesson of both sites is the same one Evers taught: the door stays open only as long as people stand in it.

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