Raphael Warnock and the Solitude of the Black Senator

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.

The members of the Senate were eager to meet him, too. Revels’s election was the product of newly enfranchised freedmen who had voted 115 Black members into Mississippi’s Legislature, which then chose him for office in Washington. (Senators were not directly elected by the people at the time.) Mississippi’s seats in the Senate had been vacant since 1861, when it seceded from the Union and its members resigned — one of whom, Jefferson Davis, gave a farewell address in that august chamber and, exactly four weeks later, was inaugurated as president of the Confederacy.

Before Revels could be sworn in and officially seated, Mississippi had to be readmitted to the Union. So he busied himself with visits to his nephew in Baltimore, attending dinners and parties held in his honor and repeatedly returning to the Senate. Word of the “new Negro senator” quickly spread across the country, with dispatches about the “thick-set mulatto, with a decidedly African but pleasant physiognomy, and bland, agreeable manner,” as Philadelphia’s Evening Telegraph described him, filling newspaper columns and American imaginations. The Black press brimmed with praise; Washington’s weekly New Era cited Revels’s patriotism for his service in the Union Army and declared him “a wonderful improvement, in loyalty at least, upon Jefferson Davis.”

Other organs were less charitable. “The negro, aside from the disgrace of being such, is an unmitigated scoundrel,” wrote The Public Ledger of Memphis, Tenn. The Chicago Republican went further, suggesting that the new senator’s race “brings into prominence, as a practical question of great interest and importance, the issue of his eligibility.” It was this specific inquiry — whether Black Americans met the citizenship requirement for service in Congress — that foreshadowed the challenge Revels presented to an adolescent democracy still climbing out from the rubble of the Civil War.

On Feb. 23, Mississippi was formally readmitted to the nation, and Revels could finally take his seat. Just as the chamber was preparing to swear him in, Willard Saulsbury, a senator from Delaware, objected; other senators soon joined, citing the Constitution’s requirement that a person must be a citizen of the United States for at least nine years before becoming a senator. The Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford determined that Black people could not be citizens, and the 14th Amendment, which established birthright citizenship, had been ratified only in 1868. The recalcitrant senators argued that Revels was ineligible because he could claim, at most, two years of American citizenship. Senator James Nye of Nevada responded to his colleagues by noting they were still fighting the Confederacy’s cause, pointing out the “magnificent spectacle of retributive justice” found in a Black man’s taking the place of the traitorous former senator Jefferson Davis, who would have preferred his successor enslaved.

The Senate engaged in a fiery debate for three days, with Revels taking in the spectacle from a seat in the chamber while his colleagues carried on about him as if only the furniture were there. Beneath the veneer of competing readings of the Constitution lay the unavoidable question that continues to test America’s first principles: Can a democracy shaped by Black participation be legitimate?

On Jan. 6 of this year, on the floor where Revels’s citizenship and eligibility were debated in 1870, dissenting senators rose again, during the counting of the Electoral College votes, to call illegitimate the results of the presidential election that would also elevate Senator Kamala Harris to be the first Black vice president. Overnight, and in large part thanks to the same Black voters whose high turnout and overwhelming support delivered the state of Georgia to Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Harris, the Rev. Raphael Warnock won a runoff election to become just the 11th Black U.S. senator in history and only the second Black senator from the South since Reconstruction.

But within a few hours, the news of his victory and its significance was drowned out as a violent horde — seditious rioters led by a veritable lynch mob — attacked the Capitol on President Trump’s exhortations to “take back our country.” In the same building that Jefferson Davis once defiantly exited in order to wage war against the United States, and on the same day the Senate was set to send one Black member to the vice presidency and gain its first Black member from the state of Georgia, an insurrection swelling with white nationalists paraded the Confederate battle flag through the halls of Congress.

Revels’s path to the United States Senate coursed through the sacred pulpits of the Black church and the towering bluffs of a military encampment along the Mississippi River. He was born free in North Carolina in 1827, was educated in religious schools and then became a teacher and minister in the Methodist Church. Though he was a free Black man in the era of slavery, his skin color more than his status stamped his American experience. He traveled extensively, teaching and preaching to free and enslaved Black people alike, being careful to avoid language in his sermons that a monitoring white public might interpret as inciting rebellion.

As the nation descended into war, Revels contributed to the Union cause wherever he could, first raising a Black work battalion in Maryland and then an all-Black regiment in Missouri. By 1864, he had joined the Union Army as a chaplain and went to Mississippi to minister to Black soldiers there who had bravely fought in the Battle of Vicksburg, a turning point in the conflict that concluded the day after the Battle of Gettysburg ended. With the war decided and slavery abolished, newly freed Black Americans found the early days of Reconstruction full of hope and trouble.

The promise of life free from bondage was quickly met by a fierce resistance to Black agency. Black codes, a set of laws restricting the rights and freedoms of Black people, were enacted across the Southern states as white authorities sought to recapture the racial order that the war disrupted. Vagrancy laws were weaponized to force Black people into exploitive labor agreements and incentivized white surveillance of their movements and activities. And yet states seeking readmission to the Union had to grant freedmen access to political power. The expansion of American democracy to accommodate Black participation was interpreted as a threat to those who considered politics to be the divine and exclusive province of white men.

In the years immediately following the war, Revels returned to Mississippi to lead a Methodist church. Recognized for his intelligence and amiable manner, Revels was elected to his first political office as an alderman in 1868. He landed in the state assembly the next year and at the heart of the debate about Black Americans’ citizenship 18 months after he entered politics.

On Feb. 25, 1870, Hiram Revels was finally sworn in to the Senate on a party-line vote, with the Republican Party of Lincoln in support and the Democratic Party, then home to white nationalists, opposed. A crowd had assembled in the Senate galleries to get a glimpse of this moment when a Black American took national office — a moment so electric and polarizing that the vice president chairing the session had to reprimand those in attendance for their impassioned “manifestations of feeling.” The New York Herald described a suffocating anxiety in the room as Revels approached the clerk to take his oath of office, “as if the appearance of some monster was expected in the Senate chamber.” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer’s headline the next day was even more direct: “The Mississippi Gorilla Admitted to the Senate.”

Revels served just a year in the Senate because of the expiration of the special term to which he was elected, but in 1875, Mississippi’s Legislature elected another Black man to the Senate. Blanche Bruce, the son of an enslaved Black woman and a white man who considered her his property, is the only American to have gone from slavery to the Senate. His political ascendance paralleled a fracture in the state’s Republican Party over the issue of Black citizenship — one side divesting from the fight for civil rights and the other increasingly uninterested in appealing to white segregationists. Bruce, imposing and barrel-chested, aligned himself with this second group and won a full term in the Senate, where he fought for benefits for Black veterans, tried to desegregate the Army, was an advocate for Native American equality, opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act and demanded an investigation into the racist hazing of the Black West Point cadet Johnson C. Whittaker.

By the time Bruce’s term ended in 1881, so had Reconstruction. With federal troops no longer enforcing civil rights protections, white segregationists’ violent and methodical retaking of the South, where more than 90 percent of Black Americans lived, blocked them by racial terrorism and measures like grandfather clauses, poll taxes and literacy tests from voting booths and elected office, systemically removing Black citizens from the democracy.

It would be more than eight decades before the Senate seated another Black member. As millions of Black Americans left the South in the Great Migration in search of economic and physical security, the political opportunities that slowly became available would include the House of Representatives, but the Senate remained out of reach. The 1966 election of the Massachusetts Republican Edward Brooke to the Senate, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was significant not just because of his race but because he belonged to the party that had begun courting disaffected Southern Democrats. At a time when the Black Power movement and a demand for racial equality was replacing the respectability politics of the civil rights movement, Brooke, a World War II veteran, represented a more palatable version of Blackness to a skittish nation.

Brooke’s politics, an evolution of those practiced by Revels and Bruce a century earlier, would come to be the playbook for those Black senators who came after him. Brooke toed the line on race-consciousness and colorblind conservatism, declaring: “I do not intend to be a national leader of the Negro people. I intend to do my job as a senator from Massachusetts.” But he was no partisan yes man. He refused to support, or even be photographed with, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, who opposed that year’s Civil Rights Act and dog-whistled his way through the South by championing states’ rights; he shot down two of President Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees because of their retro-grade civil rights stances; and he was the first Republican to call for Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate scandal.

By the time he left the Senate in January 1979, a political language had emerged that eerily invoked the period after Reconstruction: “law and order,” often a euphemism for maintaining a particular social and racial order; “states’ rights,” as cover for skirting civil rights protections in the Constitution; “personal responsibility,” an evasion of the systemic economic subjugation of Black Americans. In this way, any policy issue — school desegregation, unemployment rates, housing, criminal justice — could be discussed in colorblind terms while still producing the cumulative effect of removing or complicating Black people’s inclusion and participation. Black electoral power and representation grew significantly in the years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, but the perceived legitimacy of American democracy was still deeply rooted in white leader-ship commanding the mantle.

The Senate has had only seven Black members in the 40 years since the end of Brooke’s term, three of whom were appointed by their state’s governor to fill vacancies. All but one have come from states outside the South: South Carolina’s Tim Scott is the first since Reconstruction and the only Republican. Illinois has been home to three: Carol Moseley Braun, the first Black woman to be a U.S. senator, Barack Obama and Roland Burris. Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Mo Cowan of Massachusetts, whose appointment to the office lasted just five months, fill out the lonely group. It was only eight years ago that, for the first time in the nation’s history, the Senate had more than one Black member.

The progress of the 21st century, however, would run headlong into the haunting racism of the 19th century. The rapid rise of Senators Barack Obama and Kamala Harris to the national stage, accompanied by the growing electoral influence of Black Americans, resurrected white reactionary backlash, manufacturing a crisis of legitimacy by questioning their eligibility for the highest offices in the land. The Senate debate about Hiram Revels a century and a half ago traced out the peculiar contours of the birtherism conspiracy that trailed Obama during his campaign and once he was in office — and which was used by Donald Trump to boost his own political fortunes. Distorted readings of the 14th Amendment challenged whether Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, was eligible to be vice president.

In a noteworthy turn of history, former Senator Joe Biden of Delaware — who served as vice president to the first Black president and will now serve as president with the first Black vice president — occupied the same Senate seat as Willard Saulsbury, the man who first objected to seating Revels in 1870. The echoes of eras past resound in present-day America, where Black Americans’ participation in the nation’s leadership is seen by some not as a fulfillment of its founding ideals but as an existential threat to them.

This is the history that Raphael Warnock stepped into when he declared his run for the Senate. His Republican opponent, Senator Kelly Loeffler, accused him of being a “Marxist radical,” ran a political ad that darkened Warnock’s skin and surveilled his sermons to find language supporting the campaign’s contention that he harbored “anti-American hatred.” The day before voters were set to choose between Warnock and Loeffler, President Trump declared, “Warnock is the most radical and dangerous left-wing candidate ever to seek this office, and certainly in the state of Georgia, and he does not have your values.”

Cotton, as the old folks say, is hell to pick. When the soft white tufts burst through, they conceal the seeds buried within and the sharp bolls in which they sit. The harvest comes forth in late summer, when the Southern humidity is at its most oppressive. Enslaved Black people often spoke of the pain coming and going — greeting you in the fingertips from the barbed bolls and chasing you in the sun’s unblinking heat on your back and the fear of an overseer’s lash. Over time, those hands grew callused and a little bit more resilient. For Black Americans, the picking has often been prickly business.

Warnock summoned this history in the emotional opening moments of his victory speech. Reflecting on his mother’s teenage days picking cotton to eke out a living in rural Waycross, Ga., Warnock captured the progress of a people and a nation in a single sentence: “Because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator.”

Tim Scott, a lifelong resident of South Carolina, has highlighted the same journey within his own family. He often notes that his grandfather could not read or write after being forced out of third grade to pick cotton but lived to see his grandson elected to both the House and the Senate: “Our family went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime.” Scott is a loyal member of the Republican caucus in the Senate. Often circumspect, he still manages to talk forthrightly about race at times while signaling to a wary nation that he is not an extremist, in one instant declining to join the Congressional Black Caucus and in the next holding court on the Senate floor for three days in one week on the subject of Black people and law enforcement, sharing how he’d been racially profiled by the Capitol Police while wearing the Senate lapel pin that belongs only to members, and how the officer stated, “with a little attitude,” as Scott recalled: “The pin I know. You I don’t. Show me your ID.”

Warnock, who grew up in the housing projects of Savannah as the 11th child of Pentecostal preachers, will have to navigate this same troubled atmosphere, balancing a certain sense of responsibility to the race with the prestige of an office still quite allergic to assertions of Black agency. The intrinsically American Puritan work ethic he inherited from his Army veteran father and his deep admiration for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. kept him focused on his education, and he decided to attend Morehouse College, the historically Black all-male institution in Atlanta, just as King did. Warnock leveraged the pulpit of the Black church to advocate for policy. He started out as a youth pastor at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City and ascended to become senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the same house of worship where King preached and is buried. Along the way, he encouraged Black clergy members and others in the community to be tested for H.I.V. when many were especially wary, pressed for criminal-justice reforms and was arrested without incident in a 2017 peaceful demonstration in a U.S. Senate office building for protesting efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Warnock recognized the unique obstacles and hazards that Black politicians and Democrats face in Southern states that have been reliably Republican for decades. He would need to increase Black turnout by making implicit appeals to the benefits of representation, champion a progressive policy agenda to win over white liberals and accentuate his everyday Americanness so as not to trigger the racial sensitivities of a capricious white public. Warnock’s political ads featuring an appealing beagle took direct aim at those attempts to cast him as ill-suited to represent Georgia in the Senate, throwing satirical jabs at suggestions that he was incompatible with the culture of real Americans and a danger to democracy.

In one ad, he is seen strolling down a neighborhood sidewalk with the beagle and affectionately cradling the dog while dressed in the uniform of the American suburbs — a blue button-down shirt underneath an outdoorsy vest. “I think Georgians will see her ads for what they are,” Warnock says of Loeffler’s attacks, with a genial smile, before he drops a dog-waste bag in a trash can and then turns back to the beagle. “Don’t you?” Political scientists noted that the ads were a subtle but powerful rebuttal to the insinuations about his values and sensibilities — and to the stereotypes and hysteria that shadow Black men, even those who are pastors and hold public office.

On the Sunday after his election triumph, and after Trump supporters invaded the Capitol in a deadly threat to politicians, police officers and democracy itself, Warnock delivered a sermon. “Just as we were trying to put on our celebration shoes,” Warnock lamented, “the ugly side of our story, our great and grand American story, began to emerge.” Like Revels before him, Warnock’s sense of justice and his understanding of the fullness of the Black experience had been crystallized during his time leading congregations, and his religious faith served to bolster his devotion to the American project. The nation had come so far from those perilous years after the Civil War and yet perhaps not so very far at all. “As we consider what happened — the ugliness of it all — I want us to recognize that we didn’t see in that moment the emergence of violence,” Warnock said. “I want you to see the ways in which the violence was already there.”

Source: Elections - nytimes.com