The Rev. Irene Monroe and the Rev. Emmett G. Price III spoke to Boston Public Radio on Monday about the historic Senate runoff election results in Georgia last week. The Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff both defeated their Republican opponents, marking the first time in over two decades that Georgia will have two Democrats for senators.
"[Warnock] is a litany of firsts," Monroe said. "The first Black U.S. senator elected from Georgia, the first Black Democratic senator elected in the South, and when he gets sworn in he'll be the eleventh Black senator elected in the United States."
The legacy of the late Georgia Democrat Rep. John Lewis lives on in both Warnock and Ossoff, Price said.
"Warnock was John Lewis' pastor, and his colleauge Jon Ossoff was John Lewis' intern at one point," he said. "Warnock is a representative of part of the dream of the individuals who preceded him as Black ministers, Black clergyfolks and Black people, who never imagined that the state of Georgia would ever send anybody of color to represent them."
The election results prove that Southern politics are changing, Monroe added.
"What I saw was the old South giving way to the new South," she said. "We can't overlook Jon Ossoff as well, because this is the new South — a Black man and a Jewish man, both of them outsiders in the South."
Monroe is a syndicated religion columnist, the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail and a visiting researcher in the Religion and Conflict Transformation Program at Boston University School of Theology.
Price is a professor of worship, church and culture and the founding executive director of the Institute for the Study of the Black Christian Experience at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
Together they host the All Rev’d Up podcast, produced by GBH.
