Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia works out of the Russell Senate Office Building, the oldest and most imposing of the Capitol buildings housing senators and staff. Built on a granite base with marble and limestone facing, the Russell’s high-ceilinged, Beaux Arts corridors have the feeling of a Parisian boulevard — broad, grand, powerful.
The building, completed in 1908, was named 50 years ago last month for another Georgian, Democratic Sen. Richard Russell. Whether 1972 is a lifetime ago (the median age in Georgia is 37) or a recent moment that still shapes American politics (more than 1 million current Georgians were adults when the building was named) is a complicated question. That Warnock, a Black man, serves Georgia in the U.S. Senate suggests one kind of answer. That he works in a federal building named in honor of a white supremacist suggests another. That his Republican opponent is at once Black and buffoonish seems to cut both ways, doesn’t it?
Russell was not a racist cartoon character come to life. As his biographer Gilbert C. Fite wrote: “Unlike some of his colleagues, especially Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, Russell did not deliver racist diatribes. His tone was moderate, and he never said anything malicious about blacks.”
