Scott Colom Flips County named for KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest

Mississippi Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Scott Colom flipped Forrest County, a once reliably Republican county named for Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest.

With 97% of the votes counted in Forrest County, Colom led incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith 54% to 44% on Thursday, November 5. That represents a 29-point swing toward Democrats in a county that Donald Trump won in 2024 by a margin of 58% to 40%.

Colom, who currently has a narrow lead among the votes counted, would be the first black U.S. senator from Mississippi since 1881, during the Reconstruction period.

Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader and Confederate general from Tennessee, was the first grand wizard of the KKK during the Reconstruction period.

Forrest County includes the majority-black city of Hattiesburg, home of the University of Southern Mississippi. In 2020, a countywide vote to remove a towering Confederate monument next to the Forrest County Courthouse in Hattiesburg failed with 51% of the vote to 49%. However, about 85 percent of voters living in the college town voted for its elimination. The United Daughters of the Confederacy erected the monument in 1910 as part of a propaganda campaign to perpetuate the myth of the Lost Cause.

Ellie Dahmer (front right, at base of statue) looks up with joy after removing the veil from a statue of her husband, Vernon Dahmer, in downtown Hattiesburg on January 6, 2020. Photo by Ashton Pittman

The Confederate monument sits across from a monument erected in 2020 in honor of murdered local civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer. We find his words there: “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.” In 1966, Dahmer fought the Ku Klux Klan, who burned his home while his wife and children fled. He later died from his injuries. His wife, Ellie Dahmer, became Forrest County election commissioner.

Forrest County has a rich civil rights heritage. In Hattiesburg, many civil rights groups organized in the 1960s to fight for voting rights, in a county where a fiery Dixiecrat precinct worker forced black voters to answer absurd questions before allowing them to vote such as: “How many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?” During the Freedom Summer of 1964, the “Freedom House” on Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street served as a center of civil rights activity, with seven Freedom Schools teaching thousands of black students how to petition their government and other topics not covered in black public schools in segregated Mississippi.

In recent years, vocal residents of Forrest County have pushed for it to be renamed, with some suggesting simply dropping one of the r’s and naming it Forest County.

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