the early 1950s, Graham's links with politicians who would soon stoke the political flames of massive resistance were tighter than his relationships with southern moderates. These connections were prominently on display during his 1950 crusade in Columbia, South Carolina, where the Graham team first employed the term “crusade” (rather than “campaign”).108 In addition to staying in Governor Strom Thurmond's mansion, Graham inspired an outbreak of civil religion in the state capital. Thurmond, less than two years removed from his presidential run as a segregationist Dixiecrat and more than a decade away from his trend-setting switch to the Republican Party, officially declared the last day of the crusade “South Carolina Revival Day” and signed a proclamation calling the event the “greatest religious gathering ever held in South Carolina—if not the South.” Thurmond and his bitter political rival, U.S. Senator Olin Johnson, posed around a Bible with Graham. In Columbia, the evangelist addressed the state general assembly and befriended conservative Time magazine publisher Henry Luce, an encounter one scholar has described as “an important event in the marriage of southern fundamentalism and northern anticommunism.” While in South Carolina, Graham found time to spend a weekend at the Spartanburg home of James Byrnes, a former secretary of state under President Truman who soon carried the segregationist banner as Thurmond's gubernatorial succes-sor.109 At a time when Graham rarely spoke about race in public, he evinced little desire to step on the toes of the southern political establishment.
During the year of the Columbia crusade, in fact, Graham received overtures about potentially joining that establishment. Several Democratic Party officials from North Carolina approached him about challenging the state's sitting senator, former University of North Carolina president Frank Porter Graham, a childhood neighbor and friend of the evangelist's father. Byrnes surely had a hand in the offer.110 Even though the evangelist did not seriously consider entering the race, the incident offers insight into his perceived political usefulness. His suitors saw him as an alternative to the sitting senator, a prominent and well-respected southern liberal who held racial and others views purportedly out of step with the region.111 (Senator Graham would go on to lose a primary runoff that featured overt race-baiting.) One year later, in 1951, Louisville lawyer James T. Robertson (who, not coincidentally, represented evangelist Mordecai Ham) wrote to David Lawrence, the conservative editor of U.S. News and World Report, proposing the evangelist's service on behalf of an ideologically parallel cause: an effort to nominate conservative Republican Walter Judd for the presidency, with Byrnes as his running mate.112 Graham did not join that unlikely cause, although either he or an associate was undoubtedly aware of the offer. Later, the right-wing, anti-Semitic magazine American Mercury, published by Graham supporter Russell Maguire, suggested the evangelist as an ideal presidential nominee; the magazine's other recommendations included Strom Thurmond and Mississippi senator James O. Eastland.113 In 1957, an Eisenhower-supporting Democrat from Oklahoma organized a quixotic and short-lived “Graham-for-President club” movement.114
Even as Graham moved away from theological fundamentalism and latent segregationism, then, he maintained close ties with many southern conservatives. They included not only politicians but also religious leaders, such as W. A. Criswell, pastor of the mammoth First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas. Criswell later became known as a leading ministerial proponent of Jim Crow. Before the Brown decision, though, the rising SBC star was a much less controversial figure. His downtown church had mushroomed into the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the world. Graham and Criswell's relationship dated back at least as far as 1948, when Graham held meetings at First Baptist, and the two dined together two years later during a Graham revival in Charlotte. In 1953, in the midst of his Dallas crusade, Graham publicly requested membership at First Baptist. The evangelist explained his decision by postulating that Criswell's church would not place the same demands on his time as would a congregation closer to home. (In reality, Graham could have said the same of his previous church, Curtis Baptist in Augusta, Georgia.) Taking membership at First Baptist represented a savvy move for Graham, who admired the swaggering style of Texans and often wore a cowboy hat during the early 1950s.115 The membership of First Baptist later included oil baron H. L. Hunt, an eccentric multimillionaire and rabid right-wing activist who became a fan of the BGEA, especially team member Grady Wilson. Graham's connections in Texas stretched beyond First Baptist and extended deep into the pockets of, to name a few major supporters, defense and energy magnate Russell Maguire, industrialist and evangelical philanthropist R. G. LeTourneau, and most significantly, Dallas-area oilman Sid Richardson, who introduced the evangelist to two rising politicians, John Connally and Lyndon Johnson. The titles of the BGEA's first two feature films, Mr. Texas and Oiltown, U.S.A., drew from the well of this Lone Star prospecting.116
Graham's growing embrace of desegregation thus stood in tension not only with his white southern roots but also with a substantial portion of his support base. Accordingly, his moderate comments on race often lacked discernible coordinates on the political spectrum. Throughout the mid-1950s, observers assumed that his politics leaned well to the right. His strong support for President Eisenhower, along with the social ethic he increasingly voiced on behalf of racial tolerance, suggested a somewhat more complex dynamic. By the mid-1950s, Graham had moved toward a type of regional leadership.
CHAPTER TWO
Evangelical Universalism in the Post-Brown South
Christ was not so much a reformer as he was a transformer. —Billy Graham, 1963
We must respect the law, but keep in mind that it is powerless to change the human heart. —Billy Graham, 1958
THE BRAND OF REGIONAL leadership Graham adopted required that he convincingly differentiate himself from leading figures on the southern right. One such person was W. A. Criswell, his pastor at First Baptist Church in Dallas. In February 1956, the firebrand Criswell delivered a well-publicized address to a joint session of the South Carolina legislature in which he endorsed segregation in both society and the church. Elsewhere in Columbia, Criswell castigated integrationists as “a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up.” Echoing many of his fundamentalist peers, he blasted the “spurious doctrine” of the “universal Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man.” Graham was soon pressed for a response to this rhetorical gauntlet. He averred that Criswell and he had “never seen eye to eye on the race question. My views have been expressed many times and are well known.”1
In truth, Graham's views were only beginning to enter public consciousness during a time when the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott and the contemporaneous school integration crisis grabbed the headlines. Such developments cast a spotlight on his identity as a southerner. National politicians, such as President Dwight Eisenhower, and national publications, such as Christian Century, looked to the evangelist to exert regional leadership concerning desegregation and race relations, as did a number of persons inside the South. During the latter half of the 1950s, Graham stopped merely responding to the events occurring around him and started carving out his own space and agenda.
As the decade continued, Graham gradually emerged as a regional leader. He published articles about race relations in national publications, consulted with southern church leaders and national politicians on racial matters, and, finally, held rallies in the aftermath of racial crises in Clinton, Tennessee, and Little Rock, Arkansas. In national venues, although less commonly from the crusade pulpit, he criticized legalized Jim Crow, condemned racial violence, and dismissed biblical justifications for segregation. At the same time, he remained publicly skeptical of legislative or judicial solutions to the civil rights crisis, preferring instead to stress the evangelical themes of neighborly love and the transformation of society through individual conversions. His perspective drew from a social ethic rooted in nineteenth-century evangelicalism, but also reflected the predicaments of racial moderation in the postwar United States.
Talking About Race
As Graham formalized his desegregated seating policy
