This story is from NBC News by Janell Ross:

In August 1965, law school student Mitch McConnell was in his 20s and a veteran of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where he heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver the “I Have a Dream” speech.

McConnell dropped by the office of a popular and respected Republican senator from his home state, Kentucky, John Sherman Cooper, to say hello. McConnell had interned there. McConnell followed Cooper toward the Capitol’s Rotunda as Cooper explained that President Lyndon Johnson was about to sign the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

It was, for the young McConnell, a moment so important that he would describe it in the first 40 pages of his 2016 memoir, “Long Game.” But to McConnell’s critics — a group roused to more overt disapproval following the death of Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., last week — the story also highlights the ideological distance McConnell has traveled on voting rights. To his critics, McConnell is the most critical and powerful opponent of protecting American voting rights. As the Senate majority leader, McConnell, 78, has refused to hold hearings or move a Voting Rights Act amendment the House passed in December toward a Senate vote.

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