For all of these reasons, Reverend Marsh focused his attention and energies, not on fighting the Ku Klux Klan, but on the lack of personal piety and unbelief of some of the civil rights workers. This culminated in his writing a famous sermon, “The Sorrow of Selma,” in which he lambasted the civil rights workers, calling them “unbathed beatniks,” “immoral kooks,” and “sign-carrying degenerates” who were hypocrites for not believing in God.4
