One of the few times I’ve ever gotten a little misty in a professional setting, I was sitting 3 feet away from John Lewis.

The civil rights legend and longtime Atlanta congressman was retelling the famous story of the day his skull got fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965, during an aborted march for voting rights. Lewis was attacked by Alabama state troopers and knocked unconscious. He paused as he neared the end of the story.

“They came toward us, beating us with nightsticks, trampling us with horses, firing tear gas,’’ Lewis said softly. “I thought I saw death. I thought I was going to die.’’

To this day, 50 years later, “I don’t recall how I made it back across that bridge to the little church we had left from,’’ he said.

We were speaking, before a live audience, at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute on Columbia Point in 2015. Our topic was the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and the march was part of that story. Lewis and Kennedy had been great friends and co-conspirators on civil rights legislation.

Lewis was in the news this weekend, thanks to a dust-up with President-elect Donald Trump. After Lewis declared that Trump’s alleged ties to Russia would keep him from being a “legitimate’’ president, Trump took to Twitter to declare that Lewis was “all talk’’ and should focus on his “crime-infested’’ district.

Aside from the notably poor timing of attacking a civil rights icon during the Martin Luther King weekend, Trump seems to know very little about Lewis.

Lewis was beaten, harassed, and repeatedly arrested during the 1960s, as a key aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. His career has exemplified moral and physical courage. He’s served in Congress since 1987, and is often cited as an inspiration by his Capitol Hill colleagues.

The springboard of his career was his relationship with King. He wrote King a fan letter in 1957. They met in Atlanta, and forged a lasting bond. He speaks of his mentor with lingering awe, recalling engaging aspects of King’s personality that videos of his speeches don’t capture.

“He loved young people,’’ Lewis said. “He was so proud and happy when young people began sitting in at lunch counters, because he knew his message of direct action was resonating.’’

King also had a sense of humor. “He thought his jokes were so funny,’’ Lewis said with a chuckle. “He would laugh at his own jokes.’’

The march from Selma to Montgomery is now remembered as the centerpiece of one of the great mass political movements in American history. “Bloody Sunday’’ — March 7, 1965 — kicked off two weeks of legal and political maneuvering during which President Lyndon B. Johnson declared his support for the Voting Rights Act. When the march actually took place a little more than two weeks after the initial attempt to cross the bridge, the initial group of a few hundred marchers had swelled to 25,000 protesters.

Lewis downplays his role in the movement, often deflecting credit to the people in communities such as Selma who sacrificed so much, at huge personal risk, to fight for basic rights.

“People lived in fear,’’ Lewis said. “They thought their homes would be bombed. Their churches would be bombed.’’ Both those things sometimes happened. They weren’t just idle concerns.

Lewis has remained a fearless activist, and a few late-night tweets aren’t likely to make him go away. He’s faced much worse. Lewis was arrested 40 times in the 1960s, but he proudly points out that he has been arrested five times since he became a member of Congress. His point: that he remained an activist throughout.

His challenge to Trump was reminiscent of a comment he made to me about getting arrested during protests. “Sometimes you have to find a way to dramatize an issue, to make it real,’’ he said. “To make it plain.’’

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at adrian.walker@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @Adrian_Walker.