Cindy Hyde-Smith Is Pretty Much Who You Thought

Here’s a really good article from the Jackson Free Press about Cindy Hyde-Smith, the appointed Republican US Senator now running for election in her own right against Democrat Mike Espy. It’s a more detailed and complex story than the way it’s been presented when aggregated in other publications. Hyde-Smith went to one of the notorious segregation academies set up in the deep south to escape desegregation in the public schools. She in turn sent her daughter to the descendent of one of those academies, which remains almost exclusively white. Hyde-Smith herself comes off in the story as mostly a cypher and a weather vane but one whose tendency and instincts have always been toward the worst aspects of the state’s racist past and present. Hyde-Smith was actually a Democrat until about a decade ago. It’s a good read.