How Warnock and Ossoff’s victories evoked the history of the Black freedom struggle – CNN

"When I think about the arc of our history, what Georgia did (on Tuesday) is its own message in the midst of a moment in which so many people are trying to divide our country, at a time we can least afford to be divided," Warnock told CNN's John Berman on Wednesday morning on "New Day," even before the assault on the US Capitol and multiracial democracy.

Warnock, who will be Georgia's first Black senator and the first Black Democrat to represent a Southern state in the Senate, has been the senior pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church since 2005.

More specifically, the senator-elect is the senior pastor of the same church where Martin Luther King Jr., arguably the most well-known face and voice of the civil rights movement, preached from 1960 until his assassination in 1968.

Since King's death, Ebenezer -- beloved as "America's Freedom Church" -- has retained its centrality in the fight for racial equality.

In addition, Ebenezer served as a kind of refuge following the shooting at the "Mother Emanuel" African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

Not to be ignored: the fact that Ossoff's triumph will make him Georgia's first Jewish senator.

That a Black man and a Jewish man, both from the Deep South, are about to go to Washington as senators recalls a similar alliance from the civil rights era.

Consider that historians estimate that up to half of the White students who participated in Freedom Summer -- the 1964 campaign to ramp up the number of registered Black voters in Mississippi -- were Jewish.

It was this particular kinship that Warnock echoed on Wednesday morning, as he fit himself and Ossoff into history.

"We now represent the state of Georgia. I think Abraham Joshua Heschel -- the rabbi who said when he marched with Dr. King, he felt like his legs were praying -- I think he and Dr. King are smiling in this moment," Warnock told CNN. "We hope to make them proud."

Read the original:

How Warnock and Ossoff's victories evoked the history of the Black freedom struggle - CNN