and passionate young blacks in the country. For young blacks in small towns in the South, dreaming of doing something for their own people, did not in those days dream of going to Harvard or Yale or Stanford Law, they dreamt of going into the Baptist ministry. Therefore the talent and the passion and the innate human strength of the students at American Baptist had nothing to do with the seeming simplicity and relative poverty of the school. It was a place filled with political ferment and passion. Its faculty was gifted and its students, many of them diamonds in the rough, were hungry to learn."