Senator Raphael Warnock’s Push for a More Equitable America

Every day when Sen. Raphael Warnock rushes into the gilded, fourth-floor office suite overlooking the U.S. Capitol, he has to take a moment to check if he is sleepwalking. After all, when he was born, there had been just one Black Senator elected since Reconstruction, his state of Georgia had never sent someone who looked like him to the upper chamber, and, as the 11th of 12 children born into a family of Head Start, Upward Bound, and public-housing participants, he is not your typical legislator. Plus, on the way to his suite, the first-in-his-family college grad usually walks by a statue of the namesake of the office building, an avowed segregationist from his home state.

So to say the Democrat is grounded in his truth is to undersell his mission in the Senate, where this session a record five lawmakers are Black. While it’s hard to get anything passed in a highly polarized Congress, Warnock, 55, has worked steadfastly in a bipartisan way to deliver legislation that would help close racial equity gaps in this country. After last year's Hurricane Helene, for instance, he successfully won recovery funds for Georgia’s Black farmers who historically have been shut out of federal aid. He has also championed a cap on the costs of insulin for seniors and boosted money for research on diabetes, a disease that disproportionately affects Black people. Looking ahead, he’s eyeing a renewal of a tax break for families with children and broader caps on insulin prices beyond seniors.

For Warnock, his legislative agenda is a reflection of his decades spent in the storied pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the same platform the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. served in Atlanta and where Warnock still preaches every Sunday as its senior pastor. It’s why many in the mini-city of Capitol Hill call him "the Reverend Senator Warnock” without an ounce of irony or contempt, and why he often finds a few minutes to head down near the Tidal Basin where both King and slaveholding Founding Father Thomas Jefferson have shoreline memorials. “When we invest in our children—and most poor people are children—we strengthen the future of our country and we help to ensure that the 21st century, like the 20th century, will be the American century,” he says. “For me, it is that moral and spiritual perspective that informs my work, and I try to bring that with me to Washington every single day.”

Although he has a clear knack for it, politics is not Warnock’s first love. In fact, as he tells it, he had never set foot inside a Capitol Hill building until the first Trump Administration. He traveled with other clergy to Washington to protest tax cuts that moved forward at the expense of health care and farm subsidies and was among the pastors arrested in 2017 for praying in the Capitol Rotunda. These days, he cannot help but chuckle at the karma: “Now, I’m on the Ag Committee. … I was an activist fighting for a better farm bill [and] got arrested doing so. Now, I'm helping to write the farm bill. How's that going? Not as quickly as I'd like, but we'll keep working on it.”