BOLTON, Miss.— It was here, in this majority-Black town of 441 people, that Rep. Bennie Thompson attended a segregated junior high school. It was where his father spent a lifetime working as a mechanic and paying taxes, but never enjoying the right to vote. And it was where the future congressman, in the early 1970s, campaigned for mayor while packing a gun, after receiving threats from white people loath to give up their political power. So it came as little surprise, to those who know Thompson
Rep. Bennie Thompson , chair of both the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and the HouseÕs Homeland Security Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 16, 2022.
Thompson, who is also chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, has spent nearly 30 years on Capitol Hill, but his leadership of the Jan. 6 committee represents his most significant turn in the national spotlight. And it is thematically consistent with a public life that was forged in Mississippi when disenfranchisement was achieved by chicanery, intimidation and violence.
Thompson and other Democrats surely recognize that a withering critique of Trump is more powerful coming from a Republican. At the same time, the close alliance that Thompson appears to have forged with Cheney has softened his reputation as a fierce partisan reluctant to work with Republicans. His activist record dates to his time in junior high, when he was arrested for participating in a demonstration in Jackson, Mississippi, after hearing speeches by Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was assassinated by a white supremacist in 1963.
Two other Black candidates had also won alderman races in Bolton that year. The town clerk, Thompson said, initially refused to work with them, addressing them with a racist slur. In 1973, white residents challenged Thompson’s election as mayor, accusing him of illegally registering out-of-town voters. The election, he said, generated eight lawsuits.
The year before he went to Congress, an incident unfolded that recently prompted Rep. Matt Gaetz, the hard-right Trump supporter from Florida, to falsely claim that Thompson “actively cheer-led riots in the ’90s.” In Congress, Thompson has worked on higher education equity issues, opposed Trump’s border wall and successfully brought large federal spending projects to his district, which includes the poverty-stricken Mississippi Delta and the majority-Black city of Jackson.
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