This is why I continue to believe in the promise of America. This is why I love my country, even when voters are forced to vote again and again in “a vestige of the ugly side of our complicated American story.”

“Because we always have a path to make our country greater, against unspeakable odds, here we stand together.” Senator Raphael Warnock spoke truth last evening.

• The four most powerful words in a democracy, “the people have spoken.” 
• A vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and for our children. 
• A teenager growing up in Waycross, Georgia, my mother used to pick somebody else’s cotton and tobacco. Tonight, she helped pick her youngest son to be a United States senator.
• Let me be clear. The fact that millions of Georgians endured hours in lines — and were willing to spend hours in line — lines that wrapped around buildings and went on for blocks, lines in the cold, lines in the rain, is most certainly not a sign voter suppression does not exist. Instead, it is proof that you, the people, will not allow your voices to be silenced. And I am proud to stand with you. 
• I believe that democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea. The notion that each of us has within us a spark of the divine…We all have value. And if we have value, we ought to have a voice. 
• We stand here tonight on broad shoulders. Our ballot is a blood-stained ballot. We stand here on the shoulders of the martyrs. Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, two Jews and an African American who lost their lives fighting for that great American right to vote. Viola Luizzo and James Reeb, white sister and the white brother who also lost their lives. Fannie Lou Hamer, that indominable Mississippi sharecropper. And my parishioner, God bless his memory, John Lewis.

Senator Raphael Warnock’s victory speech:

There’s a time to celebrate, then — as Senator Warnock’s father said every morning — it’s time to go back to work. The defense of democracy never ends.

More to come…

DJB