“It was as if God had a master plan, bringing so many uncommon people of such rare strength and vision together in one place at one time,” the Rev. C.T. Vivian is quoted as saying in David Halberstam’s book featuring the young people involved in the early civil rights movement in and out of Nashville.

Congressman John Lewis was and always will be one of my heroes. I met him in the late 1960s while I was a student at Tennessee State University. I wrote about him from time to time after I went to work in 1971 at The Tennessean. While heading the Voter Education Project, based in Atlanta,