the value of legislative or other procedural routes to social change. Finally, his respect for the rule of law informed his responses to racial violence in Little Rock and elsewhere.
The way Graham applied his social ethic in the South made him a racial moderate. The label “racial moderate” remains a notoriously slippery but historically viable identity subject to a confused array of evaluations—courageous, compromising, reasoned, indecisive. Graham's views resembled those of the South's “middle-of-the-road liberals,” regional leaders like Ralph McGill and Hodding Carter, editor of the Greenville, Mississippi, Delta Democrat-Times, who “advocated an orderly, locally controlled process of racial change keyed to community conditions and economic growth.”40 Some moderates, wrote cultural critic Calvin Trillin in the 1970s, had simply “valued something more than segregation.” Others still hoped to retain white control of the political system. All of them assumed that a sudden, legally enforced shift away from Jim Crow would result in chaos. During the years between the Brown decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racial moderation usually meant gradualism. Post-Brown racial gradualists believed that Jim Crow—for reasons of morality or feasibility, or both—was living on borrowed time. In light of the dramatic social implications of racial mixing, though, the ideal full maturation date for that loan was neither today nor tomorrow, but somewhere in the indefinite future. Meanwhile, however, certain forms of desegregation might cautiously proceed—preferably on a voluntary basis or, if in response to a clear and present court order, according only to the letter of the law. In negotiating the timetable for desegregation, gradualists tended to prioritize “civility” over conflict, paternalistically assuming that their approach was in the best interest of southern whites and blacks alike. Their preferred, even avowed, mode was to work “behind the scenes.”41 As resistance to the Brown decision sharpened during 1956 and 1957, gradualist sentiments gained increasing credibility even among liberals outside the South, resulting in a momentary “vogue of moderation.” Graham's concerns about extremists on both sides of the race issue, expressed in Life and elsewhere, reflected a common dilemma among southern moder-ates.42 Like other moderates in the South, the evangelist asymmetrically equated militant segregationists and strident civil rights activists, while worrying that integrationist legislation or aggressive enforcement of Supreme Court decisions would adversely alter the precarious balance of southern race relations. Like those moderates, Graham spoke much more forthrightly and specifically when criticizing acts of racist violence than when offering constructive proposals for racial progress.
These positions and characteristics also resembled the views of President Dwight Eisenhower, with whom Graham stayed in regular contact throughout the president's two terms.43 The advice Graham offered to Eisenhower on race relations said much about how the evangelist applied his social ethic. Eisenhower was quite aware of Graham's influence in the South. So was Representative Frank Boykin, an Alabama Democrat who wrote to the president in March 1956, while Graham was visiting the capital. Significantly, Boykin saw Graham as a mediator rather than a prophet—an agent of gradualism rather than of reform. The race question, Boykin wrote in his patently folksy manner, was important “because, in my judgment, the Communists are taking advantage of it. I believe our own Billy Graham could do more on this than any other human in this nation; I mean to quiet it down and to go easy and in a Godlike way, instead of trying to cram it down the throats of our people all in one day, which some of our enemies are trying to do. I thought maybe if you and Billy talked, you could talk about this real, real good” (emphasis mine).44 Clearly, the segregationist congressman from southern Alabama viewed Graham as a shaper of inevitable changes, not as a force that would drive them.
Eisenhower met with Graham the day after Boykin sent his letter. Although the evangelist had just returned from a visit to India and East Asia, his fifty-minute conversation with the president centered on what role he might play in the American South. According to White House notes, Graham asserted that the strong reaction against the Brown decision “had set back the cause of integration, but he thinks it is bound to come eventually.” The moral issues at stake were obvious, Graham told Eisenhower, but were complicated by the social traditions of the South. In his upcoming appearances in the region, the evangelist agreed to echo the president's recent call for “moderation” and “decency” regarding the transition toward integra-tion.45 In affirming and possibly even compounding the gradualist leanings of Eisenhower, Graham offered words similar to the advice the president received from moderate-to-liberal southerners, such as Ralph McGill.46
Graham and Eisenhower shared a basic understanding of the race problem. They were gradualists wary of purported extremists and skeptical of efforts to legislate racial morality. While the Eisenhower administration officially accepted the Brown decision, the president tacitly criticized the Supreme Court and refused to enforce implementation of the ruling.47 As the president told Graham in a subsequent letter, he did back the desegregation of southern graduate schools—a position that paralleled the evangelist's support for open admission in Southern Baptist colleges. Moreover, Eisenhower thought white ministers in the South should publicly support greater representation of blacks in local governments and school boards. Graham called these suggestions “excellent.”48 They were in keeping with the kind of adult-centered desegregation that had occurred in the years leading up to Brown. As with the open-seating policy for Graham crusades, these alterations of Jim Crow had not necessarily required legislative or judicial action. Both Graham and Eisenhower publicly endorsed this type of localized gradualism, contrasting it by implication with the “extremism” of enforcing Brown in the Deep South.
Graham's correspondence with Eisenhower following their March 1956 meeting blended moral concerns with racial gradualism. Affirming the belief of the president that “the Church must take a place of spiritual leadership in this crucial matter,” Graham pledged to organize a meeting of southern denominational leaders to discuss Eisenhower's recommendations for enhancing race relations. The evangelist further committed to “do all in my power to urge Southern ministers to call upon the people for moderation, charity, compassion and progress toward compliance with the Supreme Court decision.” Although the proposed gathering never occurred, Graham did meet privately with a range of church leaders, black and white, “encouraging them to take a stronger stand in calling for desegregation and yet demonstrating charity and, above all, patience.” Two moderate southern governors, Luther Hodges of North Carolina and Frank Clement of Tennessee, received similar advice from Graham.49 Later in 1956, the evangelist and Vice President Richard Nixon attended Southern Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist gatherings in western North Carolina. These discussions and meetings increased Graham's optimism but also affirmed his gradualism. “I believe the Lord is helping us,” he wrote to Eisenhower, “and if the Supreme Court will go slowly and the extremists on both sides will quiet down, we can have peaceful social readjustment over the next ten-year period” (emphasis mine).50
The following year, Eisenhower sought advice from Graham during the most pressing racial crisis of his presidency, the attempted desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School in the fall of 1957. Eisenhower consulted Graham about the possible use of federal troops, and Nixon twice contacted the evangelist during the crisis. Graham agreed that Eisenhower had no choice but to employ the troops.51 The evangelist also communicated with Little Rock ministers and offered to hold services in the strife-torn city. As part of his Hour of Decision radio program, he distributed to stations throughout Arkansas a sermon encouraging love across the color line. Oveta Culp Hobby, a Houston newspaper publisher and former member of the Eisenhower cabinet, suggested the gesture. In other statements, Graham called for Christians in Little Rock to “obey the law” and averred that “all thinking southerners” were disturbed by the events there.52
With Little Rock, Graham began to involve himself with specific racial crises in the South. Basic Christian racial decency and obedience to the law emerged as the two distinctive themes of these interventions. In 1957, around the time of the violence in Little Rock, Graham sent a brief card of support to Dorothy Counts, an African American student who had faced severe harassment upon enrolling at
