Democrat Raphael Warnock just won Georgia’s Senate special election runoff — and made history
- 3 years ago
Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock has won a US Senate seat in Georgia, beating Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler in one of the state’s pivotal January 5 runoff elections.
Warnock’s win is a historic one; he’s the first Black senator to be elected in Georgia, which fought on the side of the Confederacy in the American Civil War. Warnock is the 11th Black candidate ever elected to the Senate, and he will be one of just three Black senators in the current Congress, along with Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Tim Scott (R-SC).
“Georgia is the home state of Martin Luther King Jr.,” Warnock told Vox in an interview this fall. “It has long been the tip of the spear for change in America. And I think that through this movement that we’re building, it once again will be a central focus for that change.”
Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, referenced the historic nature of his win during remarks early Wednesday morning. He talked about growing up in a Savannah, Georgia, housing project, “a son of my late father who was a pastor, a veteran, and a small businessman, and my mother who as a teenager growing up in Georgia used to pick somebody else’s cotton.”
“The other day, because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator,” Warnock added during his remarks.
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