My roots are planted deeply in Georgia soil.
…A child who grew up in the Kayton Homes housing projects of Savannah, Georgia. Number 11 of 12 children.
… A proud graduate of Morehouse College and the Pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the spiritual home of Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Lewis.
…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 Waycross, Georgia, used to pick somebody’s else’s cotton. But 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.
BLACK VOTERS TIP THE SCALE
Warnock, senior pastor of the church where Martin Luther King Jr. preached through the height of the Civil Rights movement until his assassination, made history with a surge in Black turnout.
To be sure, a narrow win out of 4.4 million votes involves plenty of variables. But Black voters were a force in the early vote and on Election Day. Notably, it wasn’t just in metro Atlanta, but also in rural and small-town counties across South Georgia, where Black turnout has historically lagged.
That means it was an alliance spanning from the most affluent Black residents of Atlanta, including recent transplants to Georgia, to those Black Georgia natives who hail from the most economically depressed pockets of the state.