1 A Spark of the Divine This is what the Lord says: "Maintain justice and do what is right, for my salvation is close at hand and my righteousness will soon be revealed." (Isaiah 56:1, NIV)On January 5, 2021, Georgia voters did an amazing thing. In a contentious and historic runoff election, they chose me as Georgia's first African American senator and the first black Democrat from the South ever to serve in the U.S. Senate. It was an honor for me and a monumental victory for a region that still holds so many painful vestiges of slavery, discrimination, and racial oppression. During that same runoff, in another historic win, my counterpart and brother, Jon Ossoff, the son of an immigrant, was elected as the first Jewish senator to represent Georgia. Together, we flipped a red state in the old Confederacy, becoming the first Georgia Democrats to be sent to the Senate in twenty years. A century prior, Georgia had been represented in the U.S. Senate by noted racist and anti-Semite Thomas Watson.
Ossoff's and my victories were more than symbolic. With the Senate now divided 50-50 along party lines, our two seats, together with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris-the first Asian, the first African American, and the first woman to serve in that high office-gave Democrats an effective majority.
This was my America, I thought to myself proudly in the early morning hours of January 6. My then-eighty-two-year-old mother, who picked cotton as a teenager in Waycross, Georgia, had joined with others in record-breaking voter turnout. For me, an enduring image from that day was of her hands, which had once picked somebody else's cotton, picking her youngest son to be a U.S. senator. My father, a patriotic U.S. Army veteran, small-business entrepreneur, and holiness preacher who lifted abandoned cars on weekdays and lifted broken people on weekends, did not live to see this day. He had died more than a decade earlier at age ninety-three. But I could feel his pride as I became only the eleventh black senator in American history. In the heart of old Dixie, in the place where my dad, as a young soldier in uniform, once had been forced to give up his seat on a bus to a white teenager, it seemed that an emerging multiracial majority was leading the country. The country seemed to be tiptoeing toward our highest and noblest ideals. With my chest puffed out and my head held high, I was so very proud of this new emerging South and of what we'd accomplished as a nation. That morning,
Morning Joe, Good Morning America, and other morning news programs invited me onto their shows to talk about the monumental change we had achieved. With a sly smile, I announced to my friends and family that I knew I had arrived because I was on
The View talking to Whoopi Goldberg!
But my victory lap was short-lived. By lunchtime my phone began to buzz with alerts. Something terrible was happening at the Capitol building. We all know what came next. In the early afternoon of January 6, the other side of our complicated American family story emerged. The ugly side. Goaded by President Donald Trump, a violent mob of more than two thousand people descended upon the U.S. Capitol hoping to stop the count of the electoral votes that would certify Joe Biden as winner of the 2020 presidential election. They breached perimeters, stormed the building, and assaulted some 170 Metropolitan and Capitol Police officers. Outside, they had built gallows with a noose, and they called for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence. They desecrated the people's house, vandalizing and looting offices, breaking windows and furniture, and smearing human excrement on the walls. They terrorized civil servants, staffers, and lawmakers, who were forced to take shelter in undisclosed locations. Their involvement in an attempted coup led, directly or indirectly, to the deaths of at least nine people.
Pundits and observers of that fateful day often dismiss the mob as political and social outliers. "That's not who we are as a country," they say. That may sound good and feel good, but I disagree. If we're honest, January 6 is exactly who we are, and who we have always been. Here's the thing. Like all families, our America is complicated. Our beloved country is both the hope of January 5 and the horror of January 6. Both the miracle of democracy and the oppression that runs counter to democracy are right there in our charter documents. Our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights are all evidence of the enormous possibilities we represent, as well as of our brutal human flaws and failures. Both days are at the very core of who we are, and who we might yet become. The continuing struggle for people of goodwill in this country must be to help push this nation closer to the hope of January 5. As once stated by the Russian author and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "The line separating good and evil runs through the heart of every man." Maimonides puts it this way: "The universe is equally balanced between good and evil. . . . Your next move will tip the scale." I ask, what will be America's next move?
If we are honest, over the last couple years, we have moved closer to the politics of January 6 than January 5. After all, the insurrectionist president was elected to a second term. And in one of his first official acts, he issued pardons for all the nearly 1,600 mob members charged or convicted with crimes connected to the attack on the Capitol, including those who assaulted police officers. Trump even commuted the sentences of fourteen militia members who had been charged with seditious conspiracy. Since his election, there has been an unabashed and unrelenting assault on the hard-fought progress that has finally made it possible for someone like me to serve in the U.S. Senate.
Our progress toward the hope of January 5 is fragile. At this point, a whopping fourteen black people, five of them black women, have had the title of United States senator since the nation's founding 250 years ago! To date, out of more than two thousand senators, only sixty-four have been women! Because this kind of progress in government, corporate, and other spaces is apparently too much to bear, Trump and his allies have succeeded in making the very idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion radical, controversial, and in some cases illegal. In a nation of immigrants, immigrants-both undocumented and legal-have been subjected to organized cruelty and rendered unsafe. The cords that hold us as one people united in our vast diversity are frayed, and the common ground we sometimes take for granted, increasingly fraught.
We are in a rough place right now, fighting to save our fragile democracy. As a man of faith, I often say that I believe democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea. It is the notion that each of us has within us a spark of the divine. Therefore, we ought to have a vote and a voice in the direction of our country and our destiny within it. One person, one vote. This revolutionary idea of self-governance is rare, precious, more the exception than the rule throughout world history. The rank authoritarianism that created so much repression, destruction, and devastation in the twentieth century has come raging back like a mutant strain of a deadly virus in the twenty-first. The story of that fight is being written in real time, ironically as our nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of this grand experiment. The outcome cannot be taken for granted.
In a journal kept by James McHenry, a Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, McHenry recounts a story about the last day of the convention when a woman from Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, a convention delegate and governor of Pennsylvania, an important question about the new system of governance.
She asked, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
"A republic," he replied, referring to a government in which people elect their leaders. "If you can keep it."
If you can keep it. In response to that daunting challenge, I have often found myself praying, "Lord, help!" But if we are inclined to pray, we must pray with our lips and our legs, our hands and our feet. There is an old West African proverb that says, "When you pray, move your feet." Ours is the world's oldest and greatest democratic republic. But great patriots have always had to move their feet-to stand and fight to win it, to keep it and to expand the meaning of its promise. It was the movement of feet at the Battle of Saratoga that began to turn the tide for American troops in their valiant fight for freedom, convincing them that they could indeed be victorious in the struggle against the tyranny of the British. Harriet Tubman, a deeply spiritual and prayerful woman, moved her feet to secure not only her own freedom but also the freedom of some seventy other enslaved persons during thirteen incredibly dangerous missions to the South. With an eloquence consecrated by principled action, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and other abolitionists moved their feet, a president, and a nation toward emancipating itself from the ugly contradiction of slavery. The stories of women's suffrage, civil rights, and the dignity and inclusion of the disabled as well as the LGBTQ+ community standing up at Stonewall are all chapters inked in the blood, sweat, and tears of citizens who dared to move their feet. They understood, like Benjamin Franklin, that it is a republic if you can keep it.
In other words, if we are not careful, we could lose the very thing that makes us America. After all, our democratic republic-a nation represented by a government "of the people, by the people, for the people"-is a decided departure from most of human history. It is clear from the story that McHenry shared in his journal, which is housed at the Library of Congress, that those who laid out the grand vision for this nation recognized from the beginning that democracy is vulnerable to the whims of those who are hungry for power, who wish to squeeze out the voices of the people and rule over them.
There is built-in protection, though: freedom of speech, even speech that criticizes the government; freedom of religion; the right of assembly; equal protection under the law; checks and balances of power preserved by three
coequal branches of government. And all of this is facilitated and maintained by the right of individual citizens to vote. Thus, the protection of our democracy hinges on voting rights, because the right to vote is preservative of all other rights. That fight drew thousands of women into the streets of the nation's capital on March 3, 1913, for a historic demonstration calling for a constitutional amendment that would guarantee women the right to vote-an amendment that would take another six years to win congressional approval. That fight led Medgar Evers, the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, to travel throughout the state, registering and organizing black voters-activity considered so threatening that a white supremacist murdered him in his driveway on June 12, 1963. That fight drew African Americans and their supporters of all races to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in March 1965, for a series of marches, including one brutal day that became known as Bloody Sunday.
That day was March 7, 1965, and John Lewis was just twenty-five years old when he and other civil rights activists led about six hundred marchers across the bridge on what began as a fifty-four-mile journey on foot from Selma to Montgomery, the Alabama state capital, to push for voting rights. But local police and state troopers, some on horseback, were waiting with tear gas canisters, billy clubs, and cattle prods to stop their progress. We've seen the black-and-white photos and grainy television news footage of the officers' vicious attack on the marchers. Lewis was beaten so badly he had to be hospitalized; an iconic photo shows him on his knees as a state trooper swings a billy club toward his head. Images of the violence unleashed on the peaceful marchers shocked the nation.
Lewis would become one of the heroes of the movement, and he would never lose his fire for voting rights. His presence and the suffering he endured on Bloody Sunday to make voting a possibility for future generations always loomed large many years later when, as his pastor, I had the honor of leading Sunday "Souls to the Polls" bus rides with him through Atlanta during election season. Bloody Sunday was a shameful but pivotal moment that ultimately pushed Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, outlawing discriminatory practices, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, aimed at disenfranchising black voters. Consider this! In the five years after its passage, almost as many black voters registered in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina as in the entire century before 1965, according to U.S. Justice Department estimates.
For nearly fifty years, that towering federal legislation provided significant voting rights protection. But a precipitous slide backward began in 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court gutted sections of the Voting Rights Act that required states and jurisdictions with a history of discriminatory practices to get preclearance from the U.S. Justice Department before changing any voting policies. In
Shelby County v. Holder, the high court's conservative majority struck down the formula in section 4 of the Voting Rights Act that determined which states and localities were required to get prior approval. The ruling essentially ended the preclearance requirement and opened the floodgates for a torrent of voter suppression measures. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a powerful dissent that "throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." Her words proved to be prophetic.
On the same day as the
Shelby ruling, Texas state officials announced they would implement a law with a strict photo identification requirement that had been blocked previously in the preclearance process. The law listed seven acceptable forms of identification-a Texas driver's license, state personal identification card, state license to carry a handgun, U.S. military identification card, U.S. citizenship certificate, U.S. passport, or Texas election identification certificate. These IDs were acceptable only if they included a photograph; they also needed to be current, not expired. It was one of the strictest voter identification laws in the country, and the list of acceptable forms of identification was the shortest of any state. After years of court challenges, the measure eventually was struck down by a federal appeals court, which found the Texas law discriminatory against the state's black and Latino citizens. But vicious voter suppression efforts have continued nationwide, even targeting activists who have the audacity to help give poor, poorly educated citizens a voice at the polls.
Copyright © 2026 by Raphael G. Warnock. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
