Quin Hillyer:

A courageous man and civil rights hero, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, died yesterday. This was the sort of man who the likes of Jack Kemp would have wanted to be leaders in the Republican Party. When he started working for justice, black people couldn’t sit at the same diner counter as whites. He lived long enough to see a black man in the Oval Office. Never mind that it is not the right man: The changes in the United States that made such a thing possible represent a triumph for Shuttlesworth, whose life was threatened so many times while he tried to make it happen.