Meanwhile, the nation lunged from slavery through Reconstruction into the race riots of the early 1900s. White attitudes hardened, segregation signs sprouted over every bathroom and drinking fountain, in every railroad train and bus, and the white segregationist invoked the name of God to justify his lynchings, police brutality, injustice before the law, as well as the denial of every right the Constitution had given to the Negro. Negro churchmen realized the situation was getting grave. A young theologian, Benjamin E. Mays, now President of Morehouse College, and one of the three American official mourners at the funeral of Pope John XXIII, wrote his doctoral thesis on the Negroes’ God. That was almost forty years ago, and even then Dr. Mays suspected that the Negroes’ religion had better take on more militancy and that this militancy should be rooted in some kind of God concept. At the end of World War II American Negro soldiers--so movingly described in John Oliver Killens’ novel _And Then We Heard the Thunder_--came home determined to do something about their own society. The children of these soldiers are now marching the streets of Birmingham, Jackson, and New York City. They were spawned by the same era that produced Malcolm X and comedian Dick Gregory, both of whom are part and parcel of the same movement. It is not coincidental that the freedom riders and Malcolm X came upon the scene at the same time. They both emerged from a growing Negro consensus that old paths have led nowhere, that they lead the wandering Negro around and around the foot of the mountain but never lead him on toward his goal. _The Peddler of Silks and Scripture_ Nineteen-thirty was the year after the big crash on Wall Street. For the Negro in Detroit the crash had a double meaning. It not only meant that he would be unemployed, that there would be no money, but that the subtle discrimination of the North--the very thing that had caused him to leave the South--would become bold and overt. Into the Negro ghetto of Detroit, late in the summer of 1930, there came a peddler, a man of unknown origin and lineage, who sold silks and satins from door to door. He was a strange-looking man. Because of his pale yellow coloring, some thought he was an Arab, others thought he was a Palestinian, and others felt that he had come from India. He called himself W. D. Fard on most occasions. Other times he was variously known as Mr. Farrad Mohammad, Mr. F. M. Ali, Professor Ford, and Mr. Wali Farrad. One of his Detroit followers quotes him as having said, “My name is W. D. Fard, and I come from the Holy City of Mecca. More about myself I will not tell you yet, for the time is not yet come. I am your brother. You have not yet seen me in my royal robes.”