I Believe the Light Will Come

February 28, 2024

When she first ran to represent district 68 in the Mississippi statehouse, Zakiya Summers made a campaign stop at a church, and asked her husband to help her distribute flyers in the parking lot. A few minutes after they started, he returned. So many cars in the lot carried Confederate flag tags or bumper stickers that he just did not feel safe distributing her campaign literature. Summers won the election, and every day when she entered the statehouse in Jackson, she passed the state flag, with the Confederate flag in the corner.

Her fellow lawmaker Christopher Bell also ached when he saw the flag, which aside from its painful and racist symbolism, was hurting the state economically. In 2020, the NCAA pulled tournaments from Mississippi because of the flag. Bell introduced legislation to change the flag, and a bipartisan coalition came behind it.

The raising of a new flag represents a new chapter and underscores the value of representation, as Summers and Bell — both fellows in the E Pluribus Unum class of 2021 — discuss in this short film. There is a long way until the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel is reached, but as Bell says, “I believe the light will come.”