THE REVEREND SENATOR

RAPHAEL WARNOCK UNDERSTANDS HIMSELF AS A MAN born of a mighty lineage that he regards a “moral tradition.” He begins with his father, a self-taught metal worker, collecting cast-off vehicles, disassembling them, and selling them for parts. Recalling his father’s ingenuity, the Senator’s voice soars with an emotion that is easily recognized as awe, tinged with great respect. “He would create these mechanisms. He would literally draw the thing on a piece of paper and think it through. He was putting these things together to load up these old junk cars… To take care of his family. A way out of no way.”

Warnock has self-consciously followed in the steps of the African American men who changed America. He often quips that although he was born the year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, it was King himself who recruited Warnock to Morehouse College, a historically Black men’s college from which he would graduate in 1991. Shortly after Warnock’s 2021 Senate victory, he mentioned this on a congratulatory Zoom call with about 100 of his former classmates. The declaration was received with some good-natured ribbing. Had they not all been drawn to Morehouse by the college’s most illustrious alumnus? But for Warnock, the affinity was different. His older sister Joyce Coleman Hall recalls that her younger brother began reciting King’s sermons when he was only 5 or 6 years old: “He quoted them with such sincerity, with weight in his voice. Waving his little hands.”

Warnock’s life story is somehow sepia and Technicolor at once. He is the 11th child born to working-class parents in Savannah, Ga. The number 11 itself gives off a mystical vibe, and the sheer number of kids seems to beckon to an earlier time, an earlier South. But this story is, at the same time, a modern one. They are a blended family.