“The legendary civil rights warrior left us Friday night, sparking tributes that proclaimed him ‘the conscience of Congress.’ To me, that’s an understatement. John Robert Lewis was America’s conscience,” Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker wrote. Yesterday, as I watched the film “Selma” for the second or third time, I was reminded of the courage civil rights protesters like Lewis needed to fight for rights that should have been a given but were withheld from Black Americans. Lewis’ legacy is still being carried on today in both similar and different ways with Black Lives Matter demonstrations in every state. “Lewis was certainly aware of the enormous esteem in which he was held. But he often deflected the praise that came his way — not in a phony, aw-shucks way, but sincerely. … The real heroes, he said, weren’t him or even [Martin Luther] King. They were the people who lived here, who lived the reality of that oppression day in and day out,” Walker wrote.