Georgia Senate election: Who is Reverend Raphael Warnock?

Rev Raphael Warnock - pastor for 15 years of a church that was at the spiritual heart of the civil rights movement - is no stranger to elections.

The first black senator of the former confederate state of Georgia - one of seven states that fought for slavery in the Civil War - has in just four years run in four different elections to keep his seat.

The 53-year-old Democrat is only the 11th black senator in US history.

He was raised in public housing in Savannah, as the 11th of 12 children born to Jonathan, also a pastor, and Verene. His mother, he said, worked as a cotton-picker when she was younger.

"The other day, because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else's cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator," he said upon defeating Republican wealthy businesswoman Kelly Loeffler in 2021.

That shock victory led to a 50-50 split in the Senate, allowing President Joe Biden's party to take control of the upper chamber of Congress.

Georgia rules require a candidate to receive over 50% of the vote, which meant he had to defeat Loeffler a second time in a runoff election after failing to win a majority in the first round of voting.

As the incumbent in November 2022, he narrowly won more votes than former NFL star Herschel Walker, a longtime friend of Donald Trump, but not by enough to avoid yet another runoff.

His fourth victory in four years allows him to be sworn in in January to start his first full six-year Senate term.

A graduate of the historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta, Rev Warnock worked as a youth pastor in New York City in the 1990s before moving to Baltimore, one of the poorest cities in the US.

There, he worked to educate his congregation about the risks of HIV/Aids, which was running at crisis levels among African Americans. He also supports access to abortion, making him a rarity among faith leaders, and opposes the death penalty.

In 2005, he took up the post at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia - the church where Dr Martin Luther King was baptised and once preached. Rev Warnock became the youngest senior pastor in the history of the church, which has become synonymous with the history of African Americans' fight for civil rights.

Rev Warnock has clashed with authority. He was arrested in 2014 for taking part in a protest against the refusal of Republicans to expand Medicaid healthcare coverage. Three years later, he was arrested again, this time as one of several pastors protesting against moves to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which makes it easier for Americans to get health insurance.

Fair pay and voting rights are other causes he has fought for.

On the campaign trail, President Barack Obama said of the man who gave the benediction at his second inauguration in 2013: "You don't find a lot of people in Washington like Rev Warnock."

Rev Warnock has said his principles are driven by his faith. "I've always tried to leverage the moral truth to create moral good. My whole life has been about service. And that doesn't end at the church door, it starts there."