The sit-ins raged throughout the spring of 1960 and convinced even more people that direct mass action was the shorter, more effective route to their goal of desegregation. But, from an internal viewpoint, more significant than the stale coffee and soggy hamburgers was the brand of Negro that was emerging. They were no longer afraid; their boldness, at times, was nothing short of alarming. And although few people knew it, a new religion, peculiar to the Negro, was being born. This faith, given incipient articulation by Martin Luther King, was the culmination of a hundred years of folk suffering. Like all faiths, it is peculiar to the people who fashioned it; it was a hodgepodge, as every faith is, of every ethical principle absorbed by my people from other cultures. And so the best of Confucius, Moses, Jesus, Gandhi, and Thoreau was extracted, then mixed with the peculiar experience of the Negro in America. The result was a faith that justified the bus boycott and inspired Negro college students to make a moral crusade out of their right to sit down in a restaurant owned by a white man and eat a hamburger. As Pastor Kelly Miller Smith walked to the lectern to begin his Sunday sermon, on that first Sunday of March, 1960, in Nashville, Tennessee, he knew his parishioners wanted and needed more than just another spiritual message. The congregation--most of them middle-class Americans, many of them university students and faculty members--sat before him waiting, tense; for Nashville, like some thirty-odd other Southern college towns, was taut with racial tension in the wake of widespread student demonstrations against lunch counter discrimination in department stores. Among the worshipers in Pastor Smith’s First Baptist Church were some of the eighty-five students from Fisk and from Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial University who had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to obstruct trade and commerce because they staged protests in several of Nashville’s segregated eating places. Just two days before, Nashville police had invaded Mr. Smith’s church--which also served as headquarters for the demonstrators--and arrested one of their number, James Lawson, Jr., a Negro senior theological student at predominantly white Vanderbilt University, on the same charge. “Father, forgive them,” Mr. Smith began, “for they know not what they do.” And for the next half-hour, the crucifixion of Christ carried this meaning as he spoke: