Rolling Fork was never a wealthy place. Yet squeezed between the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers, in the heart of the black-soiled delta, it boasted a rich past. The birthplace of blues icon Muddy Waters, and of the teddy bear, the town was proud and tidy. But then, in 2023, a tornado laid waste to Rolling Fork’s heart. Two years and $40 million later, the city hall and high school are both still closed. The town’s lone laundromat is too. And though Chuck’s Dairy Bar, the town’s only restaurant, remains open, many no longer see a future here.
Nor is Rolling Fork, with its 1,800 residents, really alone: when it comes to national dysfunction, Mississippi is America’s champion. “First in everything bad, and last in everything good,” says Danyelle Holmes, an organiser for the Poor People’s Campaign. If you’re familiar with the numbers, it’s hard to disagree, with the Magnolia State beating its 49 peers in infant mortality and mass incarceration — and coming dead last in healthcare.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Raised in a shack on the edge of Rolling Fork, Ty Pinkins is convinced he can remake politics in his native state. A Georgetown Law grad, and a war hero who won a Bronze Star in Iraq, he’s already performed admirably in two statewide races for the Democrats. Especially with an unpopular GOP incumbent in the Senate, Pinkins feels the time is ripe to turn red Mississippi blue. “Voters are on the edge of their seats,” he tells me, arguing that all he’d need to win is a paltry $500,000 from Democratic bosses in Washington.
Good luck with that. Both national and state Democrats have aligned against Pinkins in favour of a 43-year-old district attorney named Scott Colom. Unlike his rival, Colom lacks name recognition, or indeed ties to the Mississippi Delta, a bulkwark of Democratic support in this, America’s poorest state. What Scott Colom does have, however, is the right surname. Scott, after all, is the son of Will Colom, a major Democratic Party donor.
Now, finally, Pinkins has had enough, forsaking the Democrats and announcing plans to run for the Senate as an independent. Yet if he’s abandoned the party his family has backed since black Mississippians gained the right to vote, back in 1965, his tale is anything but done.
Whoever you ask in Mississippi, they’ll tell you that the Republicans are vulnerable. In 2020, Cindy Hyde-Smith earned the GOP’s narrowest Senate victory in Mississippi in almost four decades. And, five years later, she isn’t doing much better, saddled with dreary poll ratings after a somnolent tenure. Yes, Republicans hold all eight statewide offices, and huge majorities in the statehouse and senate. But Democrats have a path forward in a state that is 39% African American: strong black turnout, alongside just 22% of the white vote, could make a liberal competitive.
In 2023, Brandon Presley used that very formula to come within 26,600 votes of defeating his Republican opponent for governor — with Pinkins hot on his heels. Certainly, his Delta roots are an electoral boon. A vast alluvial floodplain, home to 13 of Mississippi’s 82 counties, the region’s swamps and cotton fields host a third of Mississippi’s black residents. And if that’s significant from an electoral perspective, Pinkins can also use his upbringing to understand voter fears.
“Ty came from the bottom of the bottom,” says Lenora Wynn, his cousin. We met at “Pinkinville”, the plot of land outside Rolling Rock where the extended family once lived. “There’s only so much you can see from the cottonfield,” Wynn adds. “We had a simple beginning.” In this, Pinkins shared much with his neighbours: around 40% of all Deltans are poor.
But if that shared background helps Pinkins secure his black base, his horizon spans far beyond the Delta. An 21-year army veteran, he left Mississippi for tours in Germany, Okinawa, Iraq, as well as a stint in the White House as a military aide. Unlike many southern politicians, that makes him equally comfortable in black and white spaces. At a rally in Jackson, the state capital, Pinkins thrilled his white audience with bits of his grandmother’s wisdom. “‘Baby,’” he cried, “‘when the storm comes don’t cuss the wind, gather the neighbours and sing louder than the thunder.’” Afterwards, a white lesbian in a rainbow t-shirt wrapped him in a bear hug. As one relative puts it, “Ty can code switch.”
All the same, politics in Mississippi is about more than bear hugs. In his 2024 Senate campaign, Pinkins recruited team leaders across every Mississippi county — what Matt Barron, a political strategist, calls “cutting turf”. But when the general election came around, Pinkins lost by 25%. Why? Because by leaping into the race, Pinkins upset what many insiders here call the “gatekeepers” of the Democratic Party. A case in point here in Bennie Thompson. He may have made a name for himself nationally, chairing a Capitol Hill committee into the January 6 violence, but Mississippi’s lone Democratic congressman apparently continues to pull strings back home. According to Pinkins, Thompson withheld vital campaign funds and endorsements after he dared run without official backing, allegedly refusing to even acknowledge the upstart former soldier at campaign events. Neither Thompson nor his media representatives replied to a request for comment.
Yet despite going bankrupt bankrolling his 2024 Senate run without party help, Pinkins promptly announced his candidacy for the 2026 race, before breaking with the Democrats altogether. Leon Brown, another cousin, isn’t surprised. “He’s one that don’t quit.” And, truth be told, gatekeepers have defined Pinkins’ whole life. Back in 1986, it was a racist seventh-grade math teacher, who failed him out of spite. At the time, it seemed like Pinkins was destined to a lifetime chopping cotton — just like his parents, and his grandparents before them. When he read his grade that humid afternoon, Pinkins fell to his knees and cried. Even 39 years later, the incident still stings. “I was ready to give up,” he says.
But racism wasn’t Pinkins’ only obstacle — and here we arguably get closer to understanding the seeming elevation of people like Scott Colom. “There is a class structure in Rolling Fork,” says Shawonder Harris, yet another Pinkins’ cousin. “And our parents chopped cotton.” In the Delta, the region’s tiny black professional class connives with whites to keep poor blacks at the bottom of the socioeconomic pile. That’s hardly new: W.E.B. DuBois was infamous for making his peace with the racist white establishment, accepting that a “talented tenth” of African Americans might eventually achieve racial uplift.
Desperate to escape places like Pinkinville, these attitudes die hard, with DuBois’s teachers and grocers replaced by elected politicians. With hard-won sinecures vanishingly rare, self-service in Mississippi too often trumps the public good. “You have to navigate agendas to amass power and influence,” says Eva Posner, a liberal political tactician. “Over time, you do that enough, the person in the mirror changes. That line in the sand moves. In an industry powered by power, it is very easy to be corrupted.”
Taken together, it’s little wonder that the Pinkins clan characterises these gatekeepers as the “Black Boulé”. Officially, the Boulé is an invitation-only organisation of prominent African Americans. In practice, says Harris, it symbolises the “intersection of classism and racism” that so exemplifies Mississippi’s Democratic gatekeepers. Never mind that Thompson and Will Colom, a lawyer and car dealer, sharpened their political teeth under civil rights icons like John Lewis. By the Nineties, they’d morphed into complacent members of the Black Boulé, more than happy to cut thrusting newcomers down to size. As Posner vividly puts it, it all speaks to a political class willing to “get dementia on national television” rather than simply retire.
In this, of course, Mississippi is far from unusual. How else to explain Joe Biden’s doddering attempts at re-election last year? But, as so often in the Deep South, the price of gatekeeping feels especially stark. “Mississippi is a crime scene,” says Holmes, “and the gatekeepers are the accomplices” — even suggesting that the state’s African American establishment is built on the exploitation of poor blacks. In Holmes’ telling, that goes far beyond dolling out campaign contributions. Rather, she claims, as does Delta whistleblower Fred Chambliss, that Thompson heads up a thoroughgoing political machine, one greased by thick wedges of cash.
“For the gatekeepers to let you in,” Pinkins agrees, “you better be like Santa Claus, with a sack of money to give to the national party and Bennie Thompson’s friends.” Will Colom, to be sure, has plenty of sacks. Since 2016, he has given many thousands to both state and national Democrats. There’s no evidence of any illegality here, but Colom’s generosity appears well-timed: around the same time that he made a substantial donation to the DNC, President Biden nominated his son for a Mississippi federal judgeship, a bid ultimately blocked by none other than Cindy Hyde-Smith. Three years on, it’s hard not to get the sense that other sacks of money are boosting Scott’s Senate bid.
Colom rejects any such links. “I am not one of the largest contributors to the Mississippi Democratic Party,” he tells me. “I stepped down as member Democratic National Committee representing Mississippi,” adding that he’s not yet sure if his son is even running for the Senate.
Thompson himself is at the centre of other allegations. According to staffers, he once used his chairmanship of Congress’s Homeland Security Committee to threaten credit card companies with regulation in return for campaign donations. Current and former Thompson staffers have also operated a party-planning side hustle, in which they earned $20,000 from lobbyists for events they staged in their boss’s honour. As for the man himself, Thompson is one of the richest DC politicians in Mississippi, with an estimated net worth of $3.25 million. “This is a normal pattern and practice,” says Holmes, suggesting that if Thompson, or his close associates, can’t gain from a municipality, he simply has no interest. John Walker exemplifies these cosy arrangements. Thompson’s personal attorney and campaign advisor — as well as godfather to his daughter — Walker headed the firm that has represented both the state’s biggest airports and Thompson’s hometown.
Whatever the truth, and as so often in Mississippi, this is a persistent problem. Local Republicans are hardly free of scandal themselves, with the local GOP implicated in a $77 million welfare scandal, one allegedly promoted by football hall-of-famer Brett Favre. Little wonder experts say it’s a coin toss between the Magnolia State and neighbouring Louisiana for the most corrupt in the union. Either way, this explains why the arrival of a clean-slate candidate like Pinkins is such a threat to the Democratic establishment — especially when he can woo blacks and whites both, thereby breaking the Thompson machine’s hold over the Delta and the state’s Democratic Party.
That still leaves one more question: why would the Democratic establishment in DC indulge such behaviour? The answer comes with a strange kind of logic. Long used to being short of funds, compared to plutocrat-friendly Republicans anyway, establishment Democrats still believe every candidate failing can be fixed by campaign cash. “It is donor relations, not a campaign strategy,” says Posner, arguing that though party poohbahs know Scott Colom is bound to lose his Senate race in Mississippi, that doesn’t matter as long as his father stumps up the funds for more winnable races in other states.
Not that Mississippi is necessarily destined to remain in hoc to dubious candidates forever. As insurgents like Donald Trump so vividly prove, peppering voters with pricey TV ads is no longer a guarantee of success, while the walking disaster that was Kamala Harris shows that funding isn’t everything. To be sure, money remains a vital ingredient in the American political stew: but cash without the grassroots won’t win campaigns. Besides, Democrats these days generally have enough funds to be competitive. The problem, Posner says, is that they never invest in the necessary political infrastructure, instead relying on the tried-and-tested Boulé.
For the moment, then, money and power remain the language of Mississippi’s political class. In mid-June, Will Colom is meant to have phoned Pinkins with a promise of future campaign funds — apparently wrapped in a warning. “Ty,” Colom allegedly said, “you know I have accumulated a lot of resources over the years. They are available to you. If you and Scott go against each other, I don’t want it to get dirty.” As far as Pinkins himself is concerned, the threatening subtext is clear: “‘If you don’t drop-out, it will get dirty.’” Colom denies making any threat, implied or otherwise. “I never said anything to Pinkins about running against Scott Colom for Senate,” he tells me. “Not a word.”
Either way, such allegations don’t surprise Holmes. “Nothing,” she says, “will go to the Mississippi Delta if you aren’t part of the in-crowd.” As for Ty Pinkins himself, he doesn’t seem willing to sell his integrity cheap. The night before he announced his independent bid, I spoke to him from his Vicksburg home. On that muggy Mississippi night, he sounded buoyant for tomorrow — even as he offers a warning to his former party’s gatekeepers. “If Tyrone from the Mississippi Delta says, ‘I’m no longer a Democrat,’ there’s a problem.” That’s surely true from a moral perspective. But depending on how the next few months go, it could soon pose vast electoral issues for the likes of Bennie Thompson too.
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Author: Jeff Bloodworth
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