It was the parable of the sower, in which Jesus explains that if a seed falls on fertile ground, it can yield thirty- or sixty- or a hundredfold.
“I thought it spoke to my public service,” Thurmond said Monday in an interview. “I kept thinking about the circumstances. I kept praying about what had happened, and there was this really true belief that good could come out of this horrible tragedy.”
The next morning, with that verse fresh in his mind, the 39-year-old Republican legislator wrote the speech he would deliver the following day on the Senate floor, calling for the Confederate battle flag to be taken down from the state capitol grounds.