he grew more vocal on the subject of race. Beginning in 1955 and continuing into the early 1960s, he used national media outlets to communicate his views concerning race relations and civil rights. In a March 1955 interview on Meet the Press, Graham questioned whether segregation measured up to the standards of either Christianity or the American nation.2 The timing of the comments, delivered a few days before he departed for a crusade in Scotland, allowed him to avoid direct criticism at home while enhancing his image abroad. Upon his return to the United States, though, Graham made similar remarks during an appearance before the National Press Club.3
When speaking to southerners, Graham remained less strident in tone. At a 1956 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) gathering in Kansas City, he called an earlier resolution in favor of the Brown decision a “courageous stand” and argued that the SBC should lead in the area of race relations (just as the denomination had always led in matters of evangelism). In Oklahoma City, the Black Dispatch ran a brief article touting these remarks in anticipation of a Graham crusade in that Jim Crow city. In Kansas City, though, the evangelist chose not to use the more prophetic language of a draft speech in he which warned that, should his denomination fail on the race issue, “we may eventually find our spiritual power waning and our thrilling statistics only hollow echoes.” He also supported a decision at the convention to table further discussion of racial matters.4
The evangelist's first widely disseminated foray into racial issues came with an October 1956 article in Life magazine, published by Graham supporter Henry Luce.5 Life writer Hugh Moffett prepared the original draft based on interviews with the evangelist, who offered his final revisions two weeks before publication. Graham published the article with some reluctance and apparently passed along a draft for moderate Tennessee governor Frank Clement to peruse. The essay partially fulfilled a promise Graham had made to President Eisenhower to provide leadership in promoting racial tolerance and moderation.6
The Life article most likely did not change the minds of Graham's liberal detractors. The “vast majority of the ministers in the South,” he wrote of both black and white clerics, were “not extremists on either side” of the race issue. They supported desegregation of such services as public transportation, hotels, and restaurants, while remaining skeptical of the current feasibility of school integration in the Deep South. Observing a decline in race relations since the Brown decision, most ministers who had talked with the evangelist “confessed that the church is doing far too little about it.” In the article, Graham announced his policy of holding “nonsegregated” services and systematically dismantled two common Old Testament proof texts for segregation: the Hamitic curse and the commandment that Israelites separate themselves from other peoples. In the Hamitic curse, Noah, not God, had cursed Canaan, offspring of Noah's son, Ham (and Noah had done so after awakening from a drunken slumber). The condemned descendants of Canaan, Graham confidently asserted, were white Canaanites, not black Africans. As for the Israelites’ purity, their social separatism was along religious, not racial, lines. Moreover, Graham added, Jesus had specifically countered the racialism of his own people by praising gentiles and moving among the outcast Samaritans. For the present day, Graham's solution for improved race relations involved “more than justice: the principle of the Golden Rule, the spirit of neighbor-love, and the experience of redemptive love and forgive-ness.”7
The backhanded dismissal of mere legal remedies (“more than justice”) reflected the slipperiness of Graham's prescriptions, along with the conservative assumptions underlying them. Draft references to Graham crusades as “fully ‘integrated’” (rather than “nonsegregated”) and to segregation as “both UnAmerican and UnChristian” (terms he had used on at least two previous occasions) did not appear in the printed version, while more politically ambiguous anecdotes survived the final editing.8 For example, after attacking biblical defenses of Jim Crow, Graham noted that black attendance at his desegregated services had not approached that of his segregated 1952 crusade in Jackson, Mississippi. Negroes, he declared, balked at legalized segregation but often preferred to mingle among themselves. Graham also told of an idealistic, integrationist minister who became a racial moderate after moving to the South. While seeming to endorse basic legal remedies to Jim Crow, Graham voiced a modest version of the strongly held position of his father-in-law, Nelson Bell, that some forms of voluntary segregation were permissible. (Bell participated in a roundtable discussion of prominent southern church leaders, the transcript of which appeared alongside Graham's article. The panelists argued against the existence of biblical sanctions for segregation, yet—like Graham—generally avoided discussing specifics in the area of social policy.) The evangelist also defended his native South. “Prejudice is not just a sectional problem,” he wrote, labeling criticism of the South “one of the most popular indoor sports of some northerners these days.” He ended with a story suggesting a distinctly regional model for improved race relations:
Shortly after the close of the Civil War, a Negro entered a fashionable church in Richmond, Va., on Sunday morning while communion was being served. He walked down the aisle and knelt at the altar. A rustle of shock and anger swept through the congregation. Sensing the situation, a distinguished layman immediately stood up, stepped forward to the altar and knelt beside his colored brother. Captured by his spirit, the congregation followed this magnanimous example. The layman who set the example was Robert E. Lee.9
Despite the mixed signals inherent in invoking a Confederate hero on behalf of racial tolerance, Graham clearly called for the church to take a greater role in fostering improved race relations. He did so in explicitly evangelical terms. “The church, if it aims to be the true church,” he wrote, “dares not segregate the message of good racial relations from the message of regeneration, for…man as sinner is prone to desert God and neighbor alike.” The most lasting advances in race relations would thus derive from individual conversions to Christ's message of salvation and love. “Any man who has a genuine conversion experience will find his racial attitudes greatly changed,” the evangelist concluded.10
Graham published three similar national articles—in Ebony, U.S. News and World Report, and Reader's Digest, respectively. The Ebony piece—which appeared in September 1957 with the somewhat exaggerated kicker, “Southern-born evangelist declares war on bigotry”—contained a more strident tone than the Life article. The difference was attributable both to the magazine's primary readership, upwardly mobile blacks, and to the timing of the article, which appeared in the aftermath of a New York City crusade during which the Graham team had made special efforts to appeal to African Americans (including inviting Martin Luther King, Jr., to give the invocation at a service). That crusade had also finalized Graham's rift with leading fundamentalists, who were distraught by his willingness to associate with liberal Protestants (as well as, one can assume, King). The official crusade invitation had come from an affiliate of the National Council of Churches. Perhaps the break momentarily freed Graham to speak more candidly about social issues. In the Ebony article, he promised a revival “to wipe away racial discrimination” and supremacist sentiments. More important, for the first time to a national audience, Graham overtly came out in favor of antisegregation legislation, echoing comments he first made when speaking to a black Baptist congregation in Brooklyn. He did not clarify exactly what such laws would entail, however, and quickly added that, absent Christian love, they would result in “nothing but cold war.”11
In 1960, Graham contributed his thoughts on race relations to Reader's Digest and U.S. News and World Report. His words there reflected the significantly more conservative politics of those venues. He called for Christians to “banish Jim Crow from their midst” and again endorsed basic legal remedies, yet he also warned of excessive “belligerence” among both black and white integrationists. While “convinced that ‘Jim Crow’ must go,” he added that society “cannot make two races love each other and accept each other at the point of bayonets.”12 Although Graham embraced the end of Jim Crow on both moral and political grounds, he endorsed only remedies that he believed would not result in the kind of racial tensions present in Little Rock and other
