SAVANNAH, Ga.: Raphael Warnock’s roots showed little promise of a future that led to the U.S. Senate.
He grew up in Savannah in the Kayton Homes public housing project, the second youngest of 12 children. His mother as a teenager had worked as a sharecropper picking cotton and tobacco. His father was a preacher who also made money hauling old cars to a local scrapyard.
My daddy used to wake me up every morning at dawn, Warnock told a hometown crowd at a drive-in rally two days before his election Tuesday. He said, `Boy, you cant sleep late in my house. Get up, get dressed, put your shoes on. Get ready.’
Pushed by his parents to work hard, Warnock left Savannah and became the first member of his family to graduate from college, helped by Pell grants and low-interest student loans. He earned a Ph.D. in theology that led to a career in the pulpit, eventually as head pastor of the Atlanta church where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached.
Now Warnock, 51, will go to Washington as…