“The students sat at the lunch counters alone to eat, and when refused service, to wait and pray. And as they sat there on that Southern Mount of Olives, the Roman soldiers, garbed in the uniforms of Nashville policemen and wielding night sticks, came and led the praying children away. As they walked down the streets, through a red light, and toward Golgotha, the segregationist mob shouted jeers, pushed and shoved them, and spat in their faces, but the suffering students never said a mumbling word. Once the martyr mounts the Cross, wears the crown of thorns, and feels the pierce of the sword in his side there is no turning back. “And there is no turning back for those who follow in the martyr’s steps,” the minister continued. “All we can do is to hold fast to what we believe, suffer what we must suffer if we would forgive them, for they know not what they do.” This new gospel of the American Negro is rooted in the theology of desegregation; its missionaries are several thousand Negro students who--like Paul, Silas, and Peter of the early Christian era--are braving great dangers and employing new techniques to spread the faith. It is not an easy faith, for it names the conservative Negro leadership class as sinners along with the segregationists. Yet this new gospel is being preached by clergymen and laymen alike wherever Negroes gather. Here, then--in the American Negro’s mind and for his loyalty--is being waged one of the several battles gods have fought during the history of man. This particular encounter is between a home-grown Allah who is one with black men the world over, but who has a special yen for the American Negro, and a transmuted Jesus who was born in Judea, crucified on Golgotha’s heights, rose from the dead to ascend into heaven, but submitted to reincarnation as a student sit-in. And so it is that Allah and Jesus fight it out for the spiritual allegiance of the American Negro at a lunch counter in Woolworth’s. This is indeed a long way from the mountains near Olympia and the flats of Greece where the gods once romped and fought for glory. But gods follow man; wherever man is, wherever the great issues of man are being determined, there also one will find the gods. Man and the issue are now centered around the rise and current crisis of Western civilization. The British historian-theologian Arnold Toynbee suggests that the black Westerner may well determine the fate of Atlantic civilization. The gods apparently agree, and they have come to our shores to ply their wares. But Western man, particularly the Negro, is demanding more of his gods than man once did.