Last Wednesday, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were not the only elected leaders to take an oath of office. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the newly elected senators from Georgia, were sworn in by Vice President Harris. Both candidates’ elections were historic in different ways.

Raphael Warnock is the first African American Senator from the state of Georgia, and only the 11th African American to hold a senate seat. Before becoming a senator, Warnock was the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, once led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Inauguration Day was not Senator Warnock’s first visit to the US Capitol. In 2017, he took part in a protest against then President Trump’s proposed federal budget, which would significantly reduce Medicaid funding.

Warnock was arrested during the protest, something he acknowledged in a tweet. “The last time I was here in 2017, Capitol police were escorting me to central booking for leading a non-violent protest of an immoral budget,” Warnock wrote. “This time they just had to show me to my office.”

Jon Ossoff is Georgia’s first Jewish Senator, and the first Jewish senator from the South in more than a century. Senator Ossoff is also the youngest Democrat to join the senate since Joe Biden was elected in 1973. While taking his oath of office, Ossoff held the Hebrew Bible of Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, who was the leader of the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple, Atlanta’s oldest synagogue, as well as a civil rights leader. The Temple was bombed by white supremacists in 1958. As he took his oath of office, Ossoff also carried in his pocket copies of the manifests of the ships that brought his great-grandparents to America. They arrived at Ellis Island around a century ago. In a 2017 interview with Moment Magazine while on the campaign trail for Georgia’s 6th congressional district, Ossoff said, “Most Jews, no matter where they live in the world, share an immigrant story. We have been a people on the move. That heritage informs my commitment to a vision of America that is open and decent, kind and respectful, that lives up to our national character as a place that welcomes strivers from afar and those fleeing violence and persecution.”