On Giants & the Men Who Become Them

A Mississippi Senate Race, a Cinderella Story and the Beautiful Unpredictability of Becoming

There are moments in life when the past and present collide so beautifully that you have to stop and catch your breath.

The Mississippi Senate race featuring Scott Colom is one of those moments. What has unfolded has the makings of a Cinderella story for the century.

Think about this:

Fourth grade. The playground. Blowing bubbles, minding our business and somehow finding ourselves being chased by a mob of boys who may or may not have included Clarence Jones and a few other young men from the early 1980s who shall remain unnamed. Those were the days when our biggest political concern was who got to play on the swings and who was going to get caught running across the playground.

Who among us could have imagined then what life would become?

Who would have thought that the little boys and girls running around that playground would grow up to occupy boardrooms, courtrooms, classrooms, executive offices, political arenas and places of influence that our parents and grandparents could only dream about?

Who could have predicted the number of success stories that would emerge from our generation? Or, for that matter, the amount of loss, heartbreak, disappointment, sacrifice and tribulation we would have to endure along the way?

Life has a peculiar way of taking ordinary beginnings and producing extraordinary endings.

And sometimes, if we are fortunate enough to live long enough, we get to witness the transformation.

There are giants among us.

Men and women among us have grown into the magnitude of their purpose. The ones who have survived things that should have broken them, navigated spaces that were never designed with them in mind and somehow found a way to leave the door open behind them.

We are walking in spaces where, not so long ago, we were not permitted to share the oxygen in the room.

For generations, Mississippi has been a complicated place to dream big or dare to dream at all. It is a state rich in history, culture, resilience and extraordinary people, but also burdened by a history of racial exclusion and political power structures that have been difficult to penetrate.

And yet, here we are.

Enter Scott Colom.

A Black Mississippi prosecutor, a son of this state, a man whose political journey has taken him from local public service to the doorstep of one of the most powerful legislative bodies in the world.

Colom was elected district attorney in 2015, defeating an incumbent who had held the office for three decades. Now, more than a decade later, he has taken on Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith in a state that Donald Trump carried by nearly 23 percentage points in 2024.

Read that again.

Mississippi.

A Democratic Senate candidate.

A Republican incumbent.

And a race so unexpectedly competitive that the nation has been forced to look again at a state it too often assumes it already understands.

As of Nov. 5, Colom held a razor-thin lead in unofficial results, with thousands of ballots still outstanding and the outcome not yet determined.

Colom has made a race that many considered an impossible undertaking into a genuine political contest.

If he prevails, he could become Mississippi’s first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction and the first Democrat elected to represent the state in the Senate since 1982.

Consider the weight of that possibility.

Consider the generations of people who fought, marched, organized, prayed, sacrificed and gave their lives for the opportunity to participate in a democracy that did not always recognize them as participants.

Consider the grandmothers who registered voters, the fathers who worked two jobs, the mothers who insisted their children pursue an education and the communities that kept believing even when the evidence suggested they had every reason to stop.

Sometimes history doesn’t announce itself with trumpets. Sometimes it arrives in the form of a man from Mississippi who simply refuses to accept that the odds are the final word.

This race isn’t about Scott Colom. It is about possibility.

It is about what happens when preparation meets opportunity. It is about what happens when a generation that once watched certain doors close begins to see those same doors opening.

It is about the realization that the little boys and girls we once knew are now making decisions, shaping institutions, challenging traditions and changing the trajectory of communities.

There is something profoundly moving about witnessing that transformation.

I think about those playground days and wonder how many of us recognized the greatness standing beside us and within us. How many of us overlooked the future because we were too busy living in the present?

The boy giving chase might become a judge. The girl blowing bubbles might become an author, an executive, a leader or a voice that reaches far beyond the neighborhood where she grew up.

The quiet kid in the classroom might become the person everyone eventually turns to when the stakes are highest.

We don’t always recognize giants when they are growing.

Sometimes, we have to wait until life has tested them, stretched them, humbled them and positioned them before we understand what we were witnessing all along.

There is no greatness without a story. There are losses that never make the newspaper, disappointments that never make the campaign biography and private battles that the public will never know about.

The men and women we celebrate have lived entire lives outside the moments for which we applaud them.

That is why I am especially interested in the story behind the headlines.

Because the most remarkable part of this Mississippi Senate race may not be the numbers on an election results page. It may be what those numbers represent: a willingness to imagine something different in a place where imagination has historically been constrained by circumstance.

And isn’t that what a Cinderella story is really about?

Not simply that someone unexpected gets an opportunity, but that someone who was never supposed to make it this far arrives at the very moment when the world has to reconsider what is possible.

Perhaps the glass slipper isn’t a political victory. Perhaps it is the audacity to compete when the odds say you shouldn’t. Perhaps it is the courage to stand in a room where your presence alone challenges generations of assumptions.

Perhaps it is simply refusing to let other people write the ending.

As I watch this unfold, I am reminded that our lives are interconnected in ways we rarely appreciate in real time. The people we knew as children are still part of our story. The places that shaped us are still part of our identity. And the experiences we thought were insignificant may have been the beginnings of something much larger.

We have experienced extraordinary triumphs. We have buried people we thought would be here forever. We have weathered storms, celebrated milestones, raised families, reinvented ourselves and survived things we once believed we couldn’t.

And somehow, we are still here.

Still becoming.

Still witnessing.

Still making room for the next generation of giants.

Let us take a moment to appreciate the magnitude of what we are witnessing. Let us recognize the significance of a campaign that has challenged the political expectations of an entire state. Let us remember that history is not only made by the people who win. Sometimes it is made by those who dare to make winning imaginable.

To the boys and girls of the early 1980s, to the ones who grew up, stumbled, succeeded, lost, loved, endured and became more than anyone could have predicted:

Look at us.

Who would have thought?

The playground seems so far away now. But perhaps the greatest lesson of all is that we should never underestimate the people running around on it.

Because there are giants among us.

And sometimes, the most extraordinary thing about a giant is that we remember when he was just a boy.