The Future of Black Politics is at Stake in Georgia

The legacy of the civil-rights movement may hinge on Raphael Warnock’s reelection campaign.

- By Zak Cheney-Rice

On the day Herschel Walker was born, in March 1962, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in The Nation, The President has proposed a ten-year plan to put a man on the moon. We do not yet have a plan to put a Negro in the State Legislature in Alabama.’ Electing Black officials was a key goal of civil-rights activists, who believed it would make lawmakers more accountable to Black interests, and King had become convinced that they were running out of time. Every second of inaction from the federal government, he argued, emboldened the southern ruling class and breathed new energy into its efforts to block desegregation. By the time Raphael Warnock was born in 1969, the Eagle had landed on the moon, but King had been killed, Georgia had two segregationists as U.S. senators, and the path to answering the reverend’s challenge was still dark.

Five decades later, Warnock, Georgia's first Black senator, is defending his seat against Walker, the Republican Party’s first Black U.S. Senate nominee in the state. It is a historic spectacle. Just two years ago, Georgia lagged behind Mississippi and South Carolina in never having elected a Black senator; in January, a Black man is guaranteed to continue to represent the state. But given whom Warnock is running against, the race seems less like a fulfillment of King’s vision than a perversion of it. There are sharp contrasts between me and my opponent,” Warnock said, peering over his rimless glasses, at every stop on his Georgia bus tour this summer.