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.
The candidate proudly displays photos of his father and grandfather, men who were both historic in their own right. His grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Huddleston, was born the son of former slaves, but went on to found a health-care company, owned 36 funeral homes, owned a newspaper with more than 100,000 subscribers and built a hospital in Yazoo City—the very hospital where Espy was born in 1953.
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
