To lose George McGovern and Locke-Ober in the same week is tough. The senator’s passing, of course, is much more consequential, but both remind me of threshold moments when I experienced inclusion.

I was on the floor of the ’72 Democratic Convention when McGovern finally accepted the party’s nomination, at 1:45 in the morning. As a young Cuban woman, I was keenly aware that people like me would not have been part of the process but for the reforms McGovern launched after the disastrous 1968 Convention in Chicago.