Mississippi votes in first Black Senator from the State in latest race for Congressional changes!
Thank You For The Blue Wave
A Prayer for America at the Breaking of a New Day
| Before we analyze what happened, perhaps we should pause long enough to thank the voters, the ancestors, new leadership, and the possibility that an old political paradigm is giving way to something new. Thank you. Before the pundits finish parsing the precincts, before the consultants claim their victories, before the politicians begin positioning themselves for what comes next, let us pause. Let us breathe and let us say thank you. Thank you to the Creative Source Energy that moves through all things, that animates life, bends the arc of seasons, stirs the conscience, awakens the sleeping spirit, and reminds us that no condition created by human beings is permanent. Thank you for yesterday. Thank you for the great blue wave that rolled across America. Not because blue is inherently righteous and red inherently wrong. No political party owns goodness. No party has a monopoly on truth. No election absolves anyone of the obligation to govern justly. But sometimes a wave is more than a wave. Sometimes it is a cleansing. Sometimes accumulated frustration, suffering, hope, and moral exhaustion gather themselves in to something powerful enough to say: Enough. Enough of governing by chaos. Enough of waking each morning wondering what fresh outrage will dominate the day. Enough of attacks on the vote. Enough of treating health care as though sickness recognizes political affiliation. Enough of turning immigrants into objects of fear rather than seeing human beings, families and children searching, as generations before them searched, for safety and possibility. Enough high gas prices and eggs so high that mothers leave them on the grocery store shelves. Enough of policies that forget the poor, the elderly, the struggling mother, the working father and the frightened child. Enough of drama masquerading as leadership. Enough confusion. Enough graft. Enough corruption. Enoughself-dealing. Enough government organized around the appetites of the powerful rather than the aspirations of the people. And so, Creative Source, thank you for the wave. Thank You for the Doors Opening Thank you for Georgia, for Keshia, Penny, Sean Waites, and the rest. Thank you for the possibility that a Black woman can stand before the people of Georgia and ask not merely to participate in government, but to lead it. Think about that for a moment, Georgia, the soil of slavery, the soil of segregation. The soil on which Black citizens once risked jobs, homes, livelihoods, and sometimes their lives simply for attempting to exercise the franchise. The soil on which my mother, at eighteen, rode her bicycle to town to register to vote because her father did not want trouble with the ruling class. And now we stand before another turn in that long story. History does not move in a straight line. We know that too well. Progress can be won, and progress can be taken away. But sometimes history turns around and looks back at us. Sometimes it says: Look how far you have come. Now decide how much farther you are willing to go. Thank you for New Mexico. Thank you for an America in which Native American leadership can move from the margins of our national political imagination toward governors’ mansions and halls of power. Thank you for Black leadership. Thank you for Native American leadership. Thank you for women stepping forward to lead. Thank you for Black men with the courage to stand with Black women. Thank you for all the people whose ancestors were once told that this democracy did not belong to them, but who kept insisting upon their belonging anyway. They marched, prayed, organized, and they registered. They were turned away, and they came back. They were threatened, and they came back. Their children came. And their grandchildren. And now another generation walks toward doors those ancestors Thank you. History’s Poetry And thank you for what is happening in the United States House of Representatives. A Black man could hold the Speaker’s gavel. The new House must elect its speaker, and we should not get ahead of that constitutional process. But pause and contem plate the possibility. A Black man presiding over the House of Representatives. A Black man holding the second-highest office in the presidential line of succession. There are moments when history almost writes its own poetry. Thank you for that possibility. But most of all, thank you for new beginnings. Because perhaps that is what yesterday was really about: Not revenge. Not humiliation. Not replacing one tribe with another. A beginning. We have lived for years inside a political paradigm powered by anger, grievance, spectacle and perpetual conflict. It taught America to confuse attention with leadership and cruelty with strength. It discovered that keeping people frightened, furious and divided could itself become a governing strategy. Perhaps that paradigm is exhausting itself. Perhaps something within the American spirit has grown tired of being angry. Perhaps we are remembering that government does not have to be theatrical to be strong. Leadership does not have to be loud to be courageous. Power does not have to humiliate. And disagreement does not have to become hatred. So thank you, Creative Source, not merely for politicians who won elections. Thank you for the people who remembered their power. Thank you for every elderly voter who stood in line. Thank you to every young citizen who voted for the first time. Every Black voter whose ancestors were denied the ballot. Every Native American voter whose people inhabited this land long before the United States of America. Every woman who remembered the generations of women who could not cast a ballot in their own names. Every immigrant who became a citizen and exercised citizenship at the ballot box. Every Republican who crossed a party line because conscience required it. Every independent who refused to be captured by a political tribe. Every Democrat who remembered that democracy is not a spectator sport. Thank you for all of them. And now, Creative Source, give us something harder than victory. Give us wisdom. Do not let yesterday’s winners become tomorrow’s arrogant rulers. Let them understand that the wave did not lift them so they could admire themselves from higher ground. Let them protect the ballot rather than manipulate it. Let them defend health care rather than ration compassion. Let them see immigrants as human beings. Let them remember forgotten communities. Let them guard the Constitution even when doing so is inconvenient. Let them understand that public office is a public trust, not an opportunity for personal enrichment. Let them govern without vengeance. Let them seek justice without becoming consumed by retribution. And let them remember that the people who voted against them are Americans too. Because if this blue wave merely changes who possesses power, it will eventually recede. But if it changes our understanding of power, something greater may have begun. Something New Is Being Born. Maybe yesterday was not simply America changing parties. Maybe it was America changing direction. Maybe the old paradigm really is passing. Not without resistance. Not without noise. Not without one final furious effort to persuade us that chaos is normal and division inevitable. But passing, nevertheless. And somewhere beneath all that noise, perhaps something quieter is being born: New leadership. New voices. New ideas. New possibilities. A new generation looking at the institutions of this country and saying: We belong there too. So, this morning I do not want to begin with analysis. I want to begin with gratitude. Thank you for the voters. Thank you for the possibility of correction. Thank you for democracy’s stubborn capacity to surprise us. Thank you for the ancestors who dreamed beyond the boundaries imposed upon them. Thank you for the children who can look toward governors’ mansions, congressional chambers, and other seats of power today and see possibilities their grandparents could not. Thank you for the wave. And when the water recedes, as all waves eventually do, may it leave behind something cleaner than what it found: More justice. More compassion. More truth. More humility. More democracy. More America. And after the shouting of this long political season finally grows quiet, may we recognize what was moving beneath it all: The ancient creative energy of life itself, forever pushing humanity toward consciousness, forever reminding us that darkness is a condition but never a destiny, forever whispering that no old order lasts forever. Yesterday America voted. This morning America awakens. Thank you for the new day. Amen!  Harold Michael Harvey is an award-winning author, journalist, and public commentator whose writing explores politics, voting rights, history, race,and America’s ongoing struggle to make democracy live up to its promise. He is also an Award-winning author and publisher at Cascade Publishing House. Chronicler of Black history, community, and justice
For most of my life, I have heard the old declaration in one form or another: “The South will rise again.” The White boys in the all-boys high school, where I was a fly in the buttermilk in the mid to late 1960s, spoke unapologetically about this possibility, as if I were not in the room. If they had suddenly remembered that I was in the room, it didn’t matter, because it was inevitable: the South would rise again. For generations, those words carried unmistakable historical baggage. They were often less a prophecy than a lament for a social order defeated at The Courthouse at Appomattox, Virginia, but never completely surrendered in the American imagination. The election of Scott Colom to the United States Senate is more than another Democratic victory in an extraordinary election year. It is an encounter between America’s present and America’s unfinished past. Colom will become Mississippi’s first Black United States senator since Reconstruction. Think about the distance contained in that sentence. Mississippi, the earth from which some of America’s deepest racial contradictions grew, has elected a Black man to the United States Senate: Not appointed, not selected by a Reconstruction-era legislature, but elected by the people. The arc between those moments reaches almost the length of the nation’s struggle over who gets to belong to its democracy. When the South First Rose There was another South after the Civil War that Americans too often forget. It was the South of Reconstruction. For one breathtaking historical moment, men who had been enslaved became lawmakers. Black male citizens voted, held public office, helped write state constitutions, and entered the Congress of the United States. Mississippi sent Hiram Revels to the United States Senate in 1870. He became the first African American ever to serve there. Blanche K. Bruce followed him and became one of the most consequential Black political figures of the Reconstruction period. Across the South, Black political leadership emerged in places where only a few years earlier Black men and women could themselves have been bought and sold. One of those men was Jefferson Franklin Long. His story has always possessed particular meaning for me because so much of it unfolded in my hometown of Macon, Georgia. Long had been enslaved. He became a successful tailor and businessman in Macon. During Reconstruction, he traveled Georgia encouraging newly freed Black men to register and vote, and fought White mobs at polling places to preserve the right of Black men to vote. Then, in 1870, he was elected to Congress, becoming Georgia’s first African American member of the United States House of Representatives. Imagine the symbolism: a man who had lived under enslavement entered the halls of the government that enslavement once helped sustain. Even more remarkably, Jefferson Long became the first Black member of Congress to address the House of Representatives from its floor. He took to the well to argue passionately against allowing Confederates to hold public office after rebelling against the Constitution. There stood an American who had once legally been property speaking as a representative of American citizens. That was the first rising, not the Confederacy. Democracy! Then Came the Counterrevolution Reconstruction frightened those who believed political power was their inheritance, and no Black man had the right to wield political power. So, American history turned. Reconstruction was dismantled. Black political participation was attacked. White supremacist governments regained control across the South. Jim Crow hardened inequality into law and custom. Violence and intimidation enforced what legislation could not. The remarkable experiment in interracial democracy that followed the Civil War was interrupted. But it was never entirely extinguished. The dream moved. It moved through Black churches. Through historically Black colleges, through families, through teachers who taught children that citizenship belonged to them even when society said otherwise, through organizers whose names history remembers and thousands whose names history does not. It moved through Brown v. Board of Education, through Montgomery, through Greensboro, through Birmingham, through Selma, through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and eventually it made its way back to the ballot box. Georgia Gives Us a Glimpse We saw another chapter open in Georgia in 2021 when voters elected Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the United States Senate. The symbolism was difficult to miss. Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, occupied a pulpit inseparable from the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and then entered the United States Senate. Ossoff, a young Jewish Georgian (the only Georgian maga hates more than the Negro), entered alongside him. Georgia sent a Black Baptist preacher and a Jewish man to represent a state that had once been one of the central battlegrounds of segregation. The political coalition itself said something about the changing South. Now Georgia has moved again. In November 2026, Georgians elected Keisha Lance Bottoms governor, making her the first Black woman elected governor of any state in American history. Georgia had never before elected either a Black person or a woman to its highest state office. Now it has done both in one person. Something is moving beneath our feet. And Then Texas Look west. Texas has elected Gina Hinojosa governor. A Mexican American woman from the Rio Grande Valley will lead a state shaped profoundly by the collision and coexistence of Mexican, Indigenous, Anglo and African American histories. She becomes Texas’s first Latina governor and ends more than three decades in which Democrats were unable to capture the governorship. Mississippi. Georgia. Texas. These are not peripheral places in the American story. They are the South, and that is precisely why these elections may mean more than their individual results. They suggest that the political imagination of the South may be changing. From 1619 to 2026 We should be careful with historical moments. One election does not erase centuries of injustice. A Black senator does not end racism. A Black woman governor does not eliminate inequality. A Latina governor does not resolve the nation’s conflicts over immigration, citizenship, and belonging. An electoral wave is not the same thing as a permanent political transformation. It will not stop MAGA from hating, or chickens from laying eggs. History teaches us humility. Reconstruction itself teaches us that progress can be followed by retrenchment. But history also teaches us to recognize openings when they appear. Since Africans arrived in English North America in 1619, much of the American story has revolved around a central question: Who belongs inside the meaning of “We the People”? For centuries, the answer expanded painfully. Enslaved people became citizens. Black male Citizens became voters. Black male Voters became officeholders. Black male officeholders became governors, senators, judges, mayors, members of Congress and presidents. Each generation pushed against the boundaries inherited from the one before it. Perhaps what we are witnessing now is another widening of the American circle. The New Southern Coalition Something else deserves attention. None of these developments could happen through Black political participation alone. Nor Latino participation alone. Nor white liberal participation alone. The arithmetic will not permit it. These victories require coalitions: Black voters, White voters, Latino voters, Asian American voters, young voters, women, Black men voters, workers, professionals, people of faith, people with no religious affiliation whatsoever, urban voters and, increasingly in selected places, suburban and rural voters willing to reconsider old political assumptions. That may prove to be the most consequential development of all because the future of Southern politics may not ultimately be about one racial group replacing another. It may be about Americans discovering that their futures are tied together. That would represent something larger than an electoral realignment. It would represent a psychological one. Reconstruction, Again There is an extraordinary symmetry to Scott Colom’s election. During Reconstruction, Mississippi became the state that sent America’s first Black senator to Washington. Then came nearly a century of disenfranchisement and segregation. Now Mississippi has sent another Black man to the United States Senate. History has not traveled in a straight line. It has made a long circle. But perhaps it is better understood as a spiral. We encounter the same fundamental American questions again, but each generation encounters them from a different place. Jefferson Franklin Long once walked from Macon into Congress carrying the hopes of people only recently released from bondage. Hiram Revels walked into the Senate from Mississippi. Raphael Warnock walked from Ebenezer Baptist Church into that same chamber. Keisha Lance Bottoms will walk into Georgia’s Governor’s Mansion. Gina Hinojosa will enter the governor’s office in Texas. And Scott Colom will walk into the United States Senate representing Mississippi. Different people. Different centuries. The same unfinished question: Can America finally become the democracy it has always claimed to be? The South Has Risen Before When I hear someone say that the South will rise again, I now want to ask: Which South? The South of secession? Or the South of Reconstruction? The South of the auction block? Or the South of Jefferson Franklin Long? The South of Jim Crow? Or the South of Martin Luther King Jr.? The South that closed the voting booth? Or the South that is now sending a Black man from Mississippi to the United States Senate? There has never been only one South. There has always been another South struggling to be born within it. A South of Black freedom. A South of interracial democracy. A South of courageous white allies. A South shaped by Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian and European histories. A South capable of remembering its wounds without remaining imprisoned by them. Perhaps that South is rising now. If it is, the implications reach well beyond partisan politics. Because what could emerge is not simply a Democratic South or a Republican South. It could eventually become something much more important: a democratic South. A South in which political power is no longer automatically associated with race. In 1865, the Republican Party offered Black people entrance into political office; by 2026, Black political power is mostly flexed in the Democratic Party. A South in which ancestry does not determine belonging. A South in which people who once stood outside the doors of power govern inside them. A South in which difference becomes less a source of fear and more a source of possibility. That would constitute a paradigm shift worthy of the phrase. The Second Reconstruction The first Reconstruction attempted to rebuild the South after enslavement. The civil-rights movement attempted to reconstruct American citizenship after Jim Crow. We now stand near the threshold of another reconstruction, one not imposed by armies or written solely through legislation, but produced through the changing consciousness of the American people themselves. I do not know whether this moment will last. None of us does. History warns against premature declarations of victory. But history also tells us that moments come when seemingly isolated events suddenly become visible as part of something larger. Mississippi may be one of those moments. Georgia may be another. Texas may be another. Perhaps, when historians look back on these years, they will see not simply a collection of surprising elections but the early architecture of a different American South. A South that finally stopped trying to resurrect yesterday. A South prepared to build tomorrow. After more than four centuries of struggle since 1619, perhaps America is beginning, however imperfectly, to understand something that should have been self-evident from the beginning: We do not rise by pushing someone else down. We rise together. So let the old proclamation be heard once more. But let us give it a new meaning. The South has risen again. And this time, may it rise toward freedom. |
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