The video above is the best 20 minutes you will spend online today. In fact, the speech is the best maiden speech in the Senate ever. Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, whose election in January helped to turn Georgia Blue for the first times in decades and was crucial in bringing the chamber under Democratic control, gave a masterful inaugural speech that was both rousing and a sharp rebuke of the GOP’s voter suppression tactics.
The speech received a rare standing ovation on the senate floor earlier this week. The reason being is that the newly minted Senator is also the senior pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, “the cradle of the civil rights movement” as it was the church that was the spiritual home of civil rights giant the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This moment was years in the making and the good senator rose to the occasion.
Dig this. When Raphael Warnock was born, the holder of the senate seat he currently occupies was none other than arch-segregationist Herman E. Talmadge.
Senator Talmadge’s father Eugene Talmadge, who was also the former governor of the state, had this to say, “The South loves the negro… in his place. But his place is at the back door.” When once asked how he and his supporters might keep Black people away from the polls, he picked up a scrap of paper and wrote a single word on it – pistols.”
We stand with the senator when he says, “Ours is a land where possibility is born of democracy.” This is our country too. We cannot cede it to the enemies of tomorrow. Let’s Get It!
S/O to Aunty Amy Goodman & @democracynow for airing the video in its entirety earlier this week.
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