gathering, or otherwise…without restrictions.”90 This was unquestionably a notable achievement. According to the evangelist, his desegregation policy extended to the hotel restaurants where he met with local ministers.91 The relatively low black attendance, however, suggested that the Graham team remained most effective in reaching whites. Over the years, Graham and his supporters recounted a number of stories, usually told in an apocryphal manner, of white attendees who experienced racial conversion moments during crusades.92 While these stories did not indicate a change of heart regarding the larger legal structures of Jim Crow, they suggest that some southern whites no longer thought those structures needed to apply to at least one staple of southern society, public revival services.
Graham's early southern crusades are best seen as emblems of the many, largely unnoticed forms of public desegregation that occurred in the period immediately preceding and following Brown. During the early postwar years, as black voter registration grew in some parts of the urban South, a number of southern cities saw modest amounts of desegregation in such areas as police departments, public parks, libraries, and even city councils.93 The years before the Brown decision also saw the nominal desegregation of three SBC seminaries, as well as several other leading seminaries in the region.94 Graham's desegregation policy thus drew from the momentum of existing trends.
Moreover, Graham's general unwillingness to discuss the race issue beyond the levels of individual decency and Christian neighborliness limited the impact of his early desegregated crusades. For Graham, desegregation had appropriately expanded from the altar into the audience; but the proper Christian understanding of its status beyond the revival service remained less certain. The question of legalized Jim Crow stood outside the sphere over which Graham consciously exerted influence—the quasi-congregational environment of the crusade service—and, hence, still remained classifiable as a separate “political” or “social” question. In light of the Brown decision, Graham appears to have viewed his desegregated crusades as violations only of local customs, not of enforceable laws. The BGEA felt uncomfortable using language that might imply an agenda other than evangelism. Haymaker suggested that crusade committees “use the term ‘non-segregated’; we like it much better than using the word ‘integrated.’”95 Graham's simultaneously passive and politic attention to language, combined with a constant reasser-tion of his evangelistic priorities, no doubt allowed him to retain an audience that an established civil rights crusader would long since have lost. “Our concern since God laid the matter [of racial prejudice] on our hearts some years ago,” wrote Graham in 1957, “has not been so much to talk as to act, to set an example which might open new paths and stir the consciences of many.”96 To a prospective crusade host in Charlotte, Graham phrased this logic differently: “We have found that if you say nothing about it and just allow the colored people to sit wherever they like, therewill [sic] be no difficulties and no problems.”97 In the comparatively moderate Upper South during the immediate post-Brown years, though, actions did not necessarily speak louder than words. There, the line separating leadership through unannounced policies from a kind of moral quietism was thin indeed. In those cities, Graham would have exerted greater influence had he declared his position more openly and, by doing so, encouraged a public response from religious and civic leaders.
Politics at the Altar
As Graham grew more active on the race issue, he began to assume authority not just as a renowned evangelist but also as a southerner with particular knowledge about the region's populace, black and white. However, he was not yet the regional leader he would become later in the 1950s and into the following decade. His most significant southern relationships remained largely private in nature and often did not reflect his emerging views on race. What they did often indicate was the periodic disconnect between Graham as racial commentator and Graham as political intimate.
Many times throughout his career Graham admitted a deep interest in, and attraction to, the world of politics. Were it not for his calling to the ministry, he declared in 1950, he might have chosen a career in public ser-vice.98 In practice, the evangelist never kept these vocations as far apart as his membership in the SBC, a denomination long friendly to the Establishment Clause, might have suggested. Graham evinced an almost magnetic attraction to political power. He placed a high value on access to elected officials and was willing to wield his growing ministerial credentials toward that end. Besides the sheer thrill of such access—a far from negligible factor for a product of a modest North Carolina farm and an obscure Florida Bible college—Graham possessed a desire (common to neo-evangelicals) to reestablish the cultural credentials of conservative Protestantism. He also aspired without shame to enhance the profile of his own evangelism. Graham was deeply convinced of the reciprocity between public faith and revivalism—between the piety of elected leaders and the size of crusade crowds. This conviction led him routinely to propose such Christian-friendly policies as national days of prayer. For his preferred politicians, he went a step further and offered strategic advice.
The coolness of President Harry Truman toward Graham is usually remembered as the one exception to the evangelist's close comfort with the White House. Yet their relationship also revealed how, from an early date, the evangelist combined assertiveness with attempts at diplomacy when approaching political leaders. In 1950, Truman consented to a brief meeting with Graham and several evangelistic associates. Immediately afterward, the young ministers proceeded to recount the details to eager White House journalists, going so far as to stage a reenactment of their closing prayer with Truman.99 In doing so, they violated the custom of respecting the confidentiality of White House meetings. The breach perturbed Truman, who declined further communication with Graham during the remainder of his term.100 Seemingly unaware of the flap, Graham followed up the meeting with a letter to the president. Besides urging him to call for a “national day of repentance and prayer,” Graham touted his possible value as a confidant. “I believe I talk to more people face to face than any living man,” wrote the evangelist. “I know something of the mood, thinking, and trends in American thought…. If at any time I can be of service to you personally or to our country, please do not hesitate to call. Also, I follow political trends carefully and would be delighted at any time to advise you on my findings among the people.”101 While Graham's inflated tone revealed his political innocence, his tactlessness did entail an effort, however bungled, to push a politician's button. Graham's self-evaluation was in the process of being fulfilled. After Truman left office, the evangelist no longer needed to pitch his services.
As Graham grew in national stature, he befriended a wide range of political movers and shakers from both parties. His early connections, though, ran deepest among southern Democrats, including Tennessee governor Frank Clement, Mississippi senator John Stennis, South Carolina representative Mendel Rivers, Virginia senator A. Willis Robertson, and Alabama representative Frank Boykin. “I had more friends in the Democratic Party than I did in the Republican Party,” Graham recalled; “being a southerner, I knew most of them.”102 The process leading to Graham's 1950 meeting with Truman began with a request from Representative Joseph Bryson of South Carolina.103 Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, a Texan, permitted Graham to hold the final service of his 1952 Washington, D.C., crusade on the steps of the Capi-tol.104 That crusade strengthened Graham ties with southern politicos, including Boykin, who threw several of his famous House Dining Room lunches for Graham during the 1950s.105
Graham's political friends in the South ran the ideological gamut from pious moderates to staunch segregationists. Stennis clearly fell into the latter camp, as did two other friends, South Carolinians Strom Thurmond and James Byrnes. The benefits of associating with a popular figure like Graham easily overrode the complicating factor of his emerging support for desegrega-tion.106 The evangelist's self-described electoral philosophy actually paralleled that of the many ambivalent southern Democrats who grew increasingly comfortable with the thought of voting for Republican presidential candidates: “Though a registered Democrat (a sort of birthright in the part of the South where I came from), I always voted for the man and not the party.”107
During
