Raphael Warnock delivered a stunning victory for Democrats in Tuesdays runoff election, defeating Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and giving Georgia Democrats a Senate seat for the first time in more than a decade.

But his victory goes far deeper.

Warnock makes history as the first Black senator to ever represent the state.

Hes just the 11th Black senator in history.

Hes also the first Black Democratic senator from the South since Reconstruction and only the second overall. (South Carolinas Tim Scott, a Republican, is the other.)

When Warnock was born, in 1969, both of Georgias senators were segregationist Democrats.

Warnock acknowledged his unusual path to the Senate in a speech early Wednesday morning, pointing to his roots growing up in the Kayton Homes housing project of Savannah, Georgia, as one of 12 children and then as a graduate of Morehouse College, the historically Black mens college in Atlanta.

[T]he other day, because this is America, he added, acknowledging his mother, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody elses cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator.