When Mississippi holds special elections to fill two seats in the state House of Representatives, on Nov. 3, 2026, the ballot in one will carry a familiar surname: Imelda Brown, widow of the late Rep. Bo Brown, who is among three candidates seeking to succeed her husband in House District 70, the Jackson seat he held until his death in June.
Seven candidates qualified for the two races by the Aug. 20, 2026, deadline. The winners will finish terms that run to January 2028.
Bo Brown, a Democrat, died June 8 at 81 after a long illness. He had represented the majority-Black northeast Jackson district since 2020 and spent a lifetime in the city’s public life before that, teaching and coaching in Jackson public schools, serving three terms as president of the Jackson City Council, and working for the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In the House, he sat on the Judiciary B, Medicaid and Transportation committees. Alongside his widow, two other candidates qualified for the seat, Marcus Cheatham and James Lott III. The race, like the other, is nonpartisan.
The second vacancy belonged to Rep. Price Wallace, a Republican from Mendenhall who died June 3 at 64, five days before Brown. Wallace, a poultry farmer, had held House District 77 in Rankin and Simpson counties since 2018 and chaired the House Constitution Committee, where he led an effort to restore the ballot initiative process that the state Supreme Court struck down in 2021. Four candidates qualified to succeed him: Christopher Dunn, Dianne Gaddis, Melissa Sullivan and Craig Williams.
Gov. Tate Reeves set both elections in June.
The districts sit on opposite sides of the state’s political and racial divide, and the contrast is old. District 77, in the suburbs southeast of Jackson, is majority white and reliably Republican. District 70, in the city, is majority Black and reliably Democratic. Brown succeeded Kathy Sykes, another Black Democrat, in 2020, and the seat has anchored Black representation in the capital city for decades. The pattern reflects a Jackson metro area sorted by race and party, the white suburbs of Rankin County on one side and the majority-Black city of Jackson on the other.
District 70 also sits inside the redistricting the legislature is now weighing. It is one of the majority-Black Jackson-area districts a joint committee is preparing to redraw following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this year in Louisiana v. Callais, and the winner of the special election could see the district’s boundaries change before the term ends. Whether that happens depends upon what the committee produces and whether Reeves calls a special session to adopt new maps before the end of the year.
Because both elections are nonpartisan, candidates appear without party labels, and a runoff on Dec. 1, 2026, would follow in either race if no one wins a majority. The elections fall on the same day as the federal midterms.
Image: Late state representatives Bo Brown (L) and Price Wallace (via their respective Facebook pages)
