JACKSON — On every wall of U.S. Senate candidate Mike Espy’s office in Jackson hangs a photo or a painting that means something to the Yazoo City native. On a Friday afternoon in August, he points to a painting of Mississippi civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, describing as his “matriarch” the woman who co-founded the Freedom Democratic Party and famously demanded equal representation for black voters at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
In 1994, when Espy was President Clinton’s secretary of agriculture, the U.S. Justice Department launched an investigation amid accusations that he had illegally accepted gifts from companies he was in charge of regulating. Espy resigned that December, but insisted he was innocent, refusing a plea deal that would have reduced 36 felony charges to a misdemeanor and risking years in prison. In 1998, a jury found him not guilty on all counts; a sketch artist’s image of the moment the verdict was read now hangs in his office.
Espy has neither sought nor served in public office since that time; this year’s U.S. Senate special election marks Espy’s re-entry into politics as he runs in the special election for the seat formerly held by his friend, Republican Sen. Thad Cochran. If he wins, he will make history as the first black U.S. senator from Mississippi since the Reconstruction era, just as when he became the first black congressman from Mississippi since that period after the Civil War when the federal government made it easier for black people to both vote and run for office until Jim Crow segregation laws again suppressed black voting power…