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Raphael Warnock and the Solitude of the Black Senator
Raphael Warnock and the Solitude of the Black Senator The Georgia pastor will be just the 11th Black U.S. senator. His victory came amid an attempt to delegitimize election results — a pattern for more than 150 years.
By Theodore R. Johnson
Illustration by Dakarai Akil
In late January 1870, the nation’s capital was riveted by a new arrival: the Mississippi legislator Hiram Rhodes Revels, who had traveled days by steamboat and train, forced into the “colored” sections by captains and conductors, en route to becoming the first Black United States senator. Not long after his train pulled in to the New Jersey Avenue Station, Revels, wearing a black suit and a neat beard beneath cheekbones fresh from a shave, was greeted by a rhapsodic Black public. There were lunches with leading civil rights advocates; daily congratulatory visits from as many as 50 men at the Capitol Hill home where he was the guest of a prominent Black Republican; and exclusive interracial soirees hosted by Black businessmen, including the president of the Freedman’s Savings Bank.