Shocking photo created a hero, but not to his family - CNN.com

Shocking photo created a hero, but not to his family - CNN.com: "'The Lord is my light and my salvation, of whom shall I fear?' the Psalm began. But there was another passage at the end that touched Zwerg in a place the other students didn't know about: 'Though my mother and father forsake me, the Lord will receive me.'"

Zwerg later tried to explain to them that what he did as a Freedom Rider was an outgrowth of what they had taught him, but they remained angry. "These are the two people who instilled my Christian beliefs, my ethics," he says, "and now they were saying, this time when I lived my faith to the fullest, they didn't accept it."

The closest he got to some sort of reconciliation was a conversation with his mother. She told him that her concern was for his dad. "She said, 'You'll never know the shock. We knew you were doing something, but we learned what happened to you from seeing your picture on the front page of the Milwaukee Journal. Until you have a child of your own, you'll never understand.' "

Though he became a pastor, Zwerg says his most profound exposure to faith came as a Freedom Rider. "I never felt so alive theologically," he says. "My prayer life was never so meaningful. My whole awareness of the power of love when I heard King say in his last utterance, 'I've been to the mountaintop, and I've seen the Promised Land.' I know those of us who were in the movement can say we were there, too."

But coming down from the mountaintop, after the movement, was deflating, Zwerg says. He couldn't find that bond again. "It's a tremendous downer. You look for it everywhere. I've never experienced it since. The closest thing I've experienced to it is the love of my wife."