Combustible / Burn

Combustible/Burn is the inspirational play about young people finding their faith challenged, finding their moral centers broadened, and finding their courage strengthened to defeat hatred at any cost. From 1948 to 1956, a small group of devout students at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, attempted to topple segregation. Energized by a daring, visionary professor, G. McLeod "Mac" Bryan. they stood against fellow students, parents, community, and denomination in their support of desegregation in their school, in their town, and in their community. These remarkable students protested Klan meetings, broke segregation laws on buses and in parks, joined integrated communes and summer camps, invited African Americans into their classrooms and into their homes, and preached integration in black and white churches. For their active compassion, these idealistic Christian students found themselves disciplined, fired, and jailed.

Finally, joined by the courageous West African, Sam Oni, himself a Baptist convert, these students brought a Baptist university face to face with the "Christian ethic" of equality. In America, Sam Oni found himself converting the Baptists who had once converted him. Though his faith was nearly shattered by the struggle, Oni, together with these idealistic students and a generation of brave African Americans, managed to desegregate both the first Baptist church and the first private university in Georgia. Written from hundreds of hours of interviews, almost every word of this documentary play comes directly from the original actors themselves, telling a powerful story of Christian idealism, compassion, adn justice, burning from a small Georgia city to the coast of Africa and back again. Combustible/Burn tells the story of a small group of students who changed the face of Christian education and the Baptist church in Georgia forever.