What was it that cast out black people’s fear of death and sent them flowing into the streets—defying mob violence? Many reasons certainly, not all of them stemming from Christian faith. Secular activists like Robert Moses, James Forman, and Stokely Carmichael drew inspiration from other sources, like Albert Camus’ The Rebel and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. With Camus, they said, “Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.”[13] But for poor southern blacks, who had little formal education in philosophy or political philosophy, it was religion that offered the only
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