Senator Raphael Warnock’s Win Is One for the History

ALPHA PHI ALPHA FRATERNITY, INC, MU LAMBDA CHAPTER ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Senator Raphael Warnock’s Win Is One for the History Books

By Astead W. Herndon Published Jan. 5, 2021 Updated Jan. 8, 2021

A Baptist preacher born and raised in Georgia, he will become his state’s first Black senator, breaking a barrier with distinct meaning in American politics.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock spoke on the campaign trail about his life experiences as a Black man born and raised in the South.Credit... Nicole Craine for The New York Times

GARDEN CITY, Ga. — There have been so few Black Democrats elected to the Senate that when Vice President-elect Kamala Harris campaigned for the Rev. Raphael Warnock in Savannah this week the pairing spoke volumes, even if unintentionally, about racial representation in statewide office.

In purely partisan terms, a leader of the Democratic Party was seeking to rally voters in an important Senate runoff election, the results of which will determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the chamber. But it was also a rare chance for one Senate barrier breaker to pass the torch to another. Ms. Harris was the first Black woman and woman of color to serve as a senator from California. Mr. Warnock will become the first Black senator from Georgia.

During his speech at the event with Ms. Harris, Mr. Warnock described being arrested by police officers at the U.S. Capitol during protests and political action over the years “I wasn’t mad at them. They were doing their job and I was doing my job,” Mr. Warnock said. “But in a few days I’m going to meet those Capitol Hill police officers again and this time they will not be taking me to central booking. They can help me find my new office.”

Mr. Warnock’s victory over Senator Kelly Loeffler early Wednesday is a fitting culmination to an election cycle in which, hours after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declared the president-elect, he told Black voters, “You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.”

It is also a generational breakthrough for Southern Black Democrats.

Mr. Warnock, 51, the pastor who took the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, spoke on the campaign trail about his life experiences as a Black man born and raised in the South. He ran for office in a state where people in predominantly Black neighborhoods waited in disproportionately long lines to vote last year, and where one study found that more than 80 percent of the residents hospitalized for coronavirus in the state were Black — vestiges of systemic racism in the democratic and health care systems.

Political power in the former Jim Crow South, where few Black Americans have been elected to statewide office, is inextricably linked to race. And Mr. Warnock’s place in the political universe is distinct from the election of Ms. Harris, or Northerners like former President Barack Obama, previously a senator from Illinois, and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Together, Mr. Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the other Democratic candidate, have the chance to expand the legislative agenda of Mr. Biden. But Mr. Warnock alone was seeking to overcome a barrier reinforced in the South over and over again, crystallized in a saying that became popular during the civil rights movement: “The South doesn’t care how close a Negro gets, just so he doesn’t get too high.”

On Tuesday, Black Democrats in Georgia said such history was not lost on them. Neither was how long it took the party to seriously pursue the possibility of success in Georgia.

“It took Democrats forever to invest in Georgia,” said Frazier Lively, a 71-year-old who lives in Macon and attended a recent rally. “Now you would hope what’s happening here is a message to what’s possible going forward.”

Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/ us/politics/raphael-warnock-georgia-senate.html