![]() ![]() “He said we gotta address these things because we love this country and we ought to fight for things that are right,” she says. And he told the story of that bus ride to his children repeatedly as the years passed, says King, a nonprofit consultant. He salvaged a “For Whites Only” sign and kept the Jim Crow relic in his house. The elder Warnock moved from his bus seat, but he never forgot the episode. Some were beaten or lynched for wearing their uniform in public. Black veterans returning from combat after both World Wars were routinely ordered to move off sidewalks for White pedestrians and shunted to the “colored” sections of trains or buses. One of the ironies of that period is that Black veterans sometimes faced more danger walking around in their uniforms at home than abroad. “The bus driver asked him to remove himself to another seat so that a teenage White boy could sit down,” says Valencia Warnock King, one of the late pastor’s daughters. As the bus took on more passengers during the trip, the driver turned to Warnock. He quickly learned otherwise.Īfter the war ended, he boarded a public bus in his Army uniform to return home to Savannah, Georgia. Like many veterans, he hoped that life would improve for him when he returned from the war. Jonathan Warnock joined the US Army during World War II. Warnock’s father had a complex brand of patriotism But as these two stories from his life illustrate, he broke sharply from tradition in several key ways. Jonathan Warnock was no radical in the sense that he advocated a violent revolution or a massive redistribution of wealth. When people call him an anti-American radical, he responds in part by citing his father’s military service.īut the impact of the elder Warnock on his son’s ministry and politics is more profound than most people realize Warnock says those who attempt to link him with an angry Black pastor’s sermon confuse moral outrage with hatred. “The man who saw the value in a junk car that another person had thrown away during the week preached to people who themselves felt discarded,” Warnock says. A compact, wiry man, he worked so hard hauling hunks of metal that he often closed his eyes while eating dinner because he was so exhausted. He was a Pentecostal pastor who salvaged abandoned cars while raising 12 kids in a public housing project with his wife, the Rev. This man was Warnock’s father, the late Rev. This pastor was a Black World War II veteran who flew an American flag in front of his house, hung portraits of American presidents on his walls and led a church that recited the pledge of allegiance before every Sunday morning worship. Critics never seem to mention him, but this pastor was also radical in his own way. ![]() Raphael Warnock an unpatriotic radical who celebrated the “hatred” of a fiery Black pastor who, in a notorious sermon, once declared that God damned America.īut there’s another, little-known pastor who inspired Warnock, the Democratic nominee for Georgia’s upcoming Senate runoff election. ![]()
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