A Way Out of No Way

January 1, 2022

Senator Reverend Warnock made history in 2020 when he won a run-off election that flipped control of the Senate, becoming the first Black senator from Georgia, only the 11th Black senator in U.S. history, and only the second from the South since Reconstruction. His entire life, as told here, is a triumph. He grew up in Savannah's Kayton Homes housing projects, graduated from Morehouse College, studied at the Union Theological Seminary while serving at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, and at age 35 became the youngest ever senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. served. His political activism (from Medicaid expansion to opposing the death penalty) has gone hand and hand with his religious convictions, and in his maiden speech to the Senate, he summed up his life as embodying the pain and the promise of his country.

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May 1, 2022
Georgia's first Black senator reflects on family, faith, and democracy. Warnock (b. 1969) recounts his unlikely journey from Savannah to Washington, D.C. His mother once had picked cotton and tobacco; his father, in the hauling business, also served as a minister. With 12 children, the family struggled financially, and when Warnock seemed headed for the ministry, he worried about earning a decent living as a pastor. A bright student, he decided to attend Morehouse College, Martin Luther King's alma mater, where he thrived. At 19, he was selected to join a task force to study the correlation between teen pregnancy and infant mortality, "the only teenager," he recalls, among appointees from 16 Southern states. The first college graduate in his family, Warnock went on to Union Theological Seminary, where he encountered "a fellowship of thinkers and disciples whose lives challenged me and changed me." He became increasingly moved to speak out on issues such as HIV/AIDS, criminal justice reform, capital punishment, and voting rights. In 2001, Warnock was recruited to become senior pastor at Douglas Memorial Community Church in Baltimore. Four years later, he was the successful candidate in a pastoral search at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, whose congregation, he notes, "was full of political heavyweights, community servants, and civil rights movement icons, including Congressman John Lewis, Christine King Farris (Dr. King's older sister), and Coretta Scott King." With the encouragement of Lewis, Stacey Abrams, and others, Warnock entered the senate race in 2020, which resulted in his historic win. Still Ebenezer's pastor, Warnock believes "that democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea. It affirms that we are all children of God, that we all have within us a spark of the divine, and therefore a right to help determine the direction of our country and our own destiny within it." A thoughtful celebration of a spiritually rich life.

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May 6, 2022

Rev. Warnock won Georgia's U.S. Senate special election race in January 2020, becoming the first Black elected U.S. Senator from that state. Approaching his November 2022 reelection bid, Warnock here provides his statement of personal and political identity. Tracing his journey from Savannah's public housing as a free-lunch kid through the Upward Bound program on to Atlanta's Morehouse College and then Union Theological Seminary in New York City, he writes of beneficial public policies and being blessed with family, friends, and mentors. He outlines lessons learned in his view of an unfolding Christian ministry avowing the worth of every human being and engaging issues of the day from mass incarceration, which entrapped one of his older brothers, to voting rights, and more. His engaging self-portrait depicts a transformation that carried a poor black church boy from straitened but fortuitous circumstances through a continuing civil rights movement to make what in his view was once unthinkable now doable. VERDICT Warnock's intimate account of life-changing moments and the arc of events in Georgia and America holds wide appeal and will particularly appeal to readers of faith.--Thomas J. Davis

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.