Rep. James E. Clyburn is the go-to for both reassurance and resolve. That makes sense, since the South Carolina Democrat is a student of history — and has lived it.

He chronicles some of the country’s past, and his own, in his book “The First Eight: A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation,” published late last year. 

It’s instructive to learn about the lives of these eight and the Jim Crow discrimination that thwarted Reconstruction and the political and civil rights progress of African Americans for nearly a century during and after their time. 

But that doesn’t make what they accomplished meaningless. And it’s not as though the hard work stopped in the years between the post-Civil War eight and Clyburn’s election in the 1990s. 

That’s the lesson Americans who fight for justice must never forget, even when the outlook is discouraging. Clyburn is a very real symbol of how risks can turn into rewards shared by those who follow — and as we witness the current retreat from those gains, initiated at the highest levels of government, his perspective couldn’t come at a better moment.

It is a week that has seen the 61st anniversary of........

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