Hall recalls a day when she was 12 years old and baby Raphael was only 7 months old. The Warnock family has long believed its youngest son, doted on by older siblings and parents alike, was foreordained for greatness. Or you could end up a United States Senator. All it takes it being pulled over, and you could end up dead.” I’m acutely aware of how close my life as a Black man could have been to a different path. My brother was on the bottom bunk, and I was on the top bunk. “And how different my own life could have been. “It’s a context for understanding who I am,” Warnock explains. After preaching the funeral for Rayshard Brooks, an unarmed Black man in Atlanta killed by the police, Warnock drove to the prison to collect his big brother. Warnock grappled with both these realities. There is a saying in the Black community that as a man, you will be judged by 12 or carried by six. He was 33 years old.” Keith was released in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. You can’t sentence a human being to more years than life. And for that, my brother was sentenced to his physical life. “This was a nonviolent drug offense,” said Warnock.
In 1997 Keith, along with 11 other officers, was charged in connection with a conspiracy to sell drugs. Waving his little hands.”Īs a boy, he shared a room with his older brother Keith, a veteran of the Gulf War and also a police officer. 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. Had they not all been drawn to Morehouse by the college’s most illustrious alumnus? But for Warnock, the affinity was different. The declaration was received with some good-natured ribbing. Shortly after Warnock’s 2021 Senate victory, he mentioned this on a congratulatory Zoom call with about 100 of his former classmates.
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. Warnock has self-consciously followed in the steps of the African American men who changed America.
He was putting these things together to load up these old junk cars … To take care of his family. He would literally draw the thing on a piece of paper and think it through. Recalling his father’s ingenuity, the Senator’s voice soars with an emotion that is easily recognized as awe, tinged with great respect. 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. Senator Raphael Warnock at Morehouse College’s Sale Hall Chapel, on May 6 Credit - Wayne Lawrence for TIME Senator Raphael Warnock at Morehouse College’s Sale Hall Chapel, on May 6