Indeed, there's something uniquely heavy, and even cruel, about the persistent theme of loss -- about having to reckon with its inevitability -- in today's political climate of at times presidentially abetted bigotry.

That's partly because of the sheer scale of our civil rights forebears' work.

Lewis' civil rights background is epochal: one of the few remaining members of King's inner circle, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, a key organizer of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches (during one such march, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, a state trooper beat Lewis and fractured his skull).

The Lewis diagnosis followed the death of Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who passed in October of last year at the age of 68.

The son of sharecroppers, Cummings was first elected to political office in 1983, as a member of the Maryland House of Delegates. He then won a congressional seat in a 1996 special election; he served in that role until his death.

In other words, the twin stings of Lewis' grim cancer diagnosis and Cummings' death feel in direct proportion to the figures' remarkable histories of confronting the world and its many betrayals, of defining the political fights of their eras. We're losing legends -- rapidly so.

But the context of loss matters, too.

The country is considering the possibility of four more years of Donald Trump: a President who broadly contorts and distorts black experiences, who has specifically taken aim at the reputations of civil rights giants.

If only the President's racist invective were the end of it. But his rhetoric has been reflected in his administration's policies.

Losing civil rights icons in the Trump era, then, can be thought of as a matter of physics: action and reaction, equal and opposite. One minute they're here -- defying a world that'd prefer that black Americans simply move on, not forward -- and the next they're gone. Meanwhile, Trump remains, seemingly looking to cancel out their work.

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The pain of losing civil rights icons in the Trump era - CNN