avoided the Deep South, turning down most invitations to preach there during the mid- and late 1950s.75
In the immediate aftermath of Brown, the BGEA's policy on desegregation remained in a formative stage. Ten days after the decision, a BGEA associate informed a New Orleans crusade executive committee that Graham “feels very strongly that we must abandon the idea of segregation in our meetings, especially since secular organizations have taken the lead. I hope this will meet with the Committee's approval there in New Orleans.”76 In July of that year, Graham himself wrote to Southern Baptist pastor James M. Gregg of Nashville recommending that “Negroes be allowed to sit anywhere they like…and that nothing be said one way or the other about it.” Graham also advised having a black pastor lead prayer at the crusade once a week. He did not link these requests with Christian morality but rather stressed the increasingly “world-wide” nature of his ministry: “The Nashville crusade will be written up quite extensively in the British press, and of course our work in England would suffer tremendously if they thought we were having a segregated meeting. They have no conception of the problem and would blame me for anything that would happen…. I have been in prayer on this point almost more than any other point concerning our Nashville and New Orleans meetings. So much is at stake. I personally think the less said the better.”77 The evangelist went on to predict that few blacks would attend the Nashville crusade anyway. Gregg recalled that African American attendees tended to sit apart, while another crusade leader remembered more mixed seating.78 During one sermon in Nashville, Graham did offer an uncharacteristically direct denunciation of white racialism, although not segregationism per se: “We have become proud as a race—we have been proud and thought we were better than any other race, any other people. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to stumble into hell because of our pride.” These words represented a theological restatement of Hooton's warning in Up from the Ape against racial presumptuousness. Despite this forceful, if politically ambiguous, declaration, the crusade received glowing coverage in the strongly segregationist pages of the Nashville Banner, which published every sermon delivered during the four weeks of services.79
With the Nashville crusade, as well as the New Orleans crusade held later in 1954, desegregated seating became a requirement for crusade hosts. Graham gradually grew more direct in his description of this policy. “Naturally,” he wrote to Richmond minister James Appleby in 1955, “I am assuming that the meeting in Richmond would be non-segregated.” In Richmond, the Graham team began addressing criticisms that it included black ministers in the crusade planning process only as an “after thought” (as one New Orleans minister saw matters), if at all. Haymaker sought assurances from Appleby that tensions did not exist among the ministers of Richmond, whose integrated Ministers’ Association was led by John M. Ellison, president of the historically black Virginia Union College.80 During the crusade, Graham delivered a well-attended convocation address at Virginia Union, where he said the race problem lay at “the heart of man.” However, he received criticism for not addressing racial matters in his Richmond crusade services. Such gestures, or lack thereof, did not strike the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a moderate segregationist paper, as particularly radical. Without specifically addressing Graham's racial views, a Times-Dispatch columnist favorably contrasted public figures of his stripe with those “ultra-liberals” who promoted such agendas as “compulsory integration.” The even more staunchly segregationist Richmond News Leader offered similarly favorable coverage, noting Graham's intention to visit the Museum of the Confederacy while in town.81 In light of the political sensibilities of the two Richmond newspapers, their editors conceivably may not have chosen to highlight moments during the crusade where the race issue did surface. Many readers of the papers might not have known about the desegregation policy.
The 1956 Louisville crusade offered a better indication of how residents of a Jim Crow city perceived an evangelist who was beginning to be identified with desegregation. The Louisville Courier-Journal, published by Mark Ethridge, stood as one of the leading white liberal voices in the greater South. The Louisville crusade took place just as Graham published an article in Life magazine, titled “Billy Graham Makes Plea for an End to Intolerance,” in which he dismissed biblical arguments supporting racial segregation and hierarchy, and called for the church to speak out in favor of racial tolerance. He also declared that all of his services were desegregated.82 Already Graham had begun to catch flack from hardline segregationists who accused him of selectively quoting scripture on racial equality.83 The Louisville crusade revealed that his comments about race relations did not resonate as clearly as his altar calls. After the Courier-Journal announced that all Graham crusades were desegregated, a member of the local Citizens’ Council requested a meeting with the evangelist. “We think we can convince him to change his views on this integration,” he said. That avowed segregationists thought of Graham as a possible ally was attributable both to the halting, episodic nature of his public statements on race and to the desire of Jim Crow partisans not to “lose” a renowned figure they may have assumed was either in their camp or at least not an enemy. Graham did not accept the offer to meet the council, and his comments on Jim Crow during the crusade did not parallel the confident tone of his Life article. When a caller on a local television show asked him a question about segregation, the evangelist reaffirmed the primacy of the conversion moment. “I believe the heart of the problem of race is in loving our neighbor,” he declared. “But man must love God before he can love his neighbor.” As for the crusade itself, the Courier-Journal’s religion editor expressed surprise that the “completely desegregated” services had attracted so few black attendees. Graham had earlier observed a decline in black attendance contemporaneous with the desegregation policy. In Louisville, this pattern appeared in spite of a thoroughly integrated crusade steering committee.84 Still, low black attendance had been a reality at many Graham crusades even before the change in seating policy.
While Graham's desegregated services during the mid-1950s represented notable accomplishments within the closed (and still closing) societies of the South, they hardly qualify as landmark events in the civil rights struggle. The gatherings straddled an ambiguous line between church services and public meetings. Only the latter was clearly subject to local segregation laws. As historical phenomena, racially separated churches were initially a product of freedmen leaving white-dominated congregations, and thus preceded the formalization of Jim Crow. Attendance expectations at all-white congregations, to be sure, quickly became intertwined with the rules, rituals, and power structures of that system. Technically, though, the pervasive segregation within southern congregations was more customary than official. Biracial worship was not unheard of even during the height of Jim Crow. Graham himself recalled attending a black church service in Florida during his Bible school days in the late 1930s. At the start of the civil rights era, blacks occasionally attended services at white congregations without incident (although black membership was far rarer); not until the mid-1960s did desegregating whites-only church services emerge as a strategy for civil rights activists.85 In holding his first intentionally desegregated crusade in 1953, Graham was slightly ahead of his time in comparison with his fellow white evangelists in the South. By the end of the decade, independent mass revivalists in the region had begun integrating their services; earlier in the decade, their meetings were largely biracial, yet segregated.86
The overall degree or meaning of interracial fellowship at Graham's early desegregated crusade remains difficult to ascertain. Graham crusades did not approach the countercultural environments common to genuine expressions of southern religious “racial interchange,” particularly within the Holiness and Pentecostal traditions.87 Few locations for his early desegregated crusades—with New Orleans being a possible exception (although that demo-graphically distinctive southern city possessed a certain multiracial Catholic tradition)—had a reputation for intractable segregationism akin to a Birmingham or a Jackson.88 A Graham aide marveled at the ease of ensuring desegregated seating for the 1956 crusade in Oklahoma City, a Jim Crow city located on the southern rim.89 Still, while Graham's meetings usually reflected community norms, they could sometimes help to change them. A black newspaper in New Orleans described the opening crusade service there as “the first time in
