Growing up, Danielle Brooks, best known for Orange Is the New Black, sang every week in church and recalls seeing photos of key figures in her Sunday School classroom — icons like Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson and gospel superstar Mahalia Jackson. So she believes it was fated that she eventually would get to play the singer, she told me during the panel for Lifetime’s Robin Roberts Presents: Mahalia at Deadline’s Contenders Television awards-season event.