The curiously sloganeering note juxtaposed faith and Cold War nationalism, separating them only by sentences:
Dear Miss Counts,
Democracy demands that you hold fast and carry on. The world of tomorrow is looking for leaders and you have been chosen. Those cowardly whites against you will never prosper because they are un-American and unfit to lead. Be of good faith. God is not dead. He will see you through. This is your one great chance to prove to Russia that democracy still prevails. Billy Graham, D.D.53
Graham's involvement in the social ferment of the South was not completely voluntary, however. He traveled to Charlotte the following year for a crusade. Afterward, he planned to hold a one-day rally on the statehouse lawn in nearby Columbia, South Carolina. The event would be his first desegregated service in a Deep South city since his seating policy had become public knowledge. (Earlier that year, Graham canceled plans to hold several services in western South Carolina. He cited health reasons, although racial tensions were likely a factor as well.)54 The leading newspaper in Columbia connected the lack of segregation at the Charlotte meetings with the low black turnout, estimated at between 1 and 3 percent of the total audience. The scheduled statehouse rally turned controversial following the arrival of a racially mixed attachment of soldiers from the nearby Fort Jackson military base; they apparently had been assigned to set up seats for the service. South Carolina governor George Bell Timmerman, ever willing to play the role of blustering segregationist, seized the moment and argued that to permit the service would be to endorse the evangelist's integrationist position. Timmerman implicitly characterized Graham as a traitor to the region. “As a widely known evangelist and native southerner, his endorsement of racial mixing has done much harm, and his presence here on State House property will be misinterpreted as approval of that endorsement,” declared the governor.55
Timmerman's brashness reflected the reality that newspapers in the Deep South had started reporting on Graham's racial views, especially those he voiced during the 1957 New York City crusade.56 In Charlotte, the evangelist continued this theme, branding the bombing of schools and religious buildings by segregationists as “symptomatic of the type of thing that brought Hitler to power.”57 Timmerman soon moved to block the statehouse rally. Legally, he hung his hat on the separation of church and state, an argument typical of segregationists seeking to counter ministerial critics of Jim Crow. Besides, the governor claimed, Graham had likely chosen the statehouse location for “propaganda purposes.” Timmerman, whose stand garnered national attention, neglected to add that Graham had spoken at the statehouse eight years earlier—or that, at the governor's own invitation, W. A. Criswell had delivered his 1956 harangue against integration there.58
Rather than challenging Timmerman, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) shifted the rally to Fort Jackson, the nearby military base removed from state jurisdiction. The desegregated Sunday gathering drew an estimated crowd of 60,000, and the platform guests included former governor James Byrnes, an avowed segregationist. Graham avoided personally attacking Timmerman, but he alluded at a press conference to people who “have become so unbalanced by this whole issue of segregation and integration that it has become their only gospel.” As if to compensate for even this backhanded form of criticism—which, of course, also took aim at liberal Protestants—Graham praised South Carolina's “warm friendship between the races” in his national radio broadcast that evening. “It is most unfortunate,” he added, “that much of the world judges this part of the country by a small, minute, extremist minority and sometimes forget[s] that some of the finest Christian people in the entire nation live in this state.”59 That extremist minority had, of course, managed to elect Timmerman as governor. In Columbia, Graham clearly cast himself as a voice of evangelical decency rather than as a prophet of racial justice.
Graham's role in the South grew even more visible later that fall. In November, he made racial tensions a theme of addresses at the Alabama State Baptist Convention in Birmingham and Stetson University in Florida.60 More important, he held his first desegregated service in a southern city that had experienced racial violence. In his visits to Clinton, Tennessee, in November and to Little Rock one year later, Graham for the first time directly linked his evangelistic services with the region's racial troubles. These postcrisis visits ultimately numbered four in total, and they sharpened the contrast between his evangelistic priorities and the concerns of civil rights activists. Intervening in the South by way of rallies and crusades allowed Graham still to define himself exclusively as an evangelist. In other words, he could safely fold his racial message into his revival sermons and, when pressed, explicitly prioritize the conversion of souls over the transformation of racial sentiments.
The first such intervention took place in the small East Tennessee city of Clinton, where in October 1958 segregationists had bombed the local high school. The school had already experienced rioting during its integration two years earlier. Along with Little Rock and Mansfield, Texas, Clinton had come to symbolize the violent emergence of grassroots massive resistance to the Brown decision.61 Two months after the bombing, Graham responded to a challenge from nationally syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson and moderate Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, and held a gathering in a gymnasium near the bombed-out high school. The evangelist also worked with an organization created by Pearson to raise funds to rebuild the high school. Graham put Pearson in touch with possible members of the group, although he declined an invitation to chair it.62 The Clinton meeting was simultaneously a community rally and a church service. Before Graham's sermon, Pearson and area leaders recounted the bombing story and outlined their fundraising efforts. Pearson praised the local school board for its “unflinching determination to go ahead and rebuild the school as a symbol of law and order.”63
In his Clinton message, Graham voiced his social ethic in all of its doctrinal straightforwardness and political ambiguity. A racially mixed crowd of 5,000 turned out to hear a sermon drawn from the Good Samaritan story and Christ's commandment to love thy neighbor. Christians, Graham emphasized in a recapitulation of his warning to Timmerman, “must not allow integration or segregation to become our gospel.” Either position “minus God equals chaos.” Reflecting his evangelical focus on the spirit-filled will, Graham argued that “love and understanding cannot be forced by bayonets…. We must respect the law, but keep in mind that it is powerless to change the human heart.” His stress on the conversion moment and his dismissal of purely political solutions hardly represented a rousing call to extend neighborly love beyond the sphere of daily interaction. What truly distinguished the Clinton rally from the many other services Graham held that year, though, were the circumstances behind his appearance in this traumatized southern town. His decision to affirm Clinton in its response to segregationist violence conveyed a sociopolitical message evident in a Knoxville News-Sentinel headline the following morning: “Evangelist Calls for Love, Law and Order” (emphasis mine). While Graham later recalled opposition from the local Citizens’ Council to his visit, he spoke at the time of his desire to demonstrate that most Clinton residents were Christians and good citizens.64 The following year, the evangelist visited Little Rock, well after his initial pledge to travel there if invited by area ministers. Although a small group of pastors had requested Graham's presence the year before, every segregationist minister and most of the pro-desegregation ministers consulted in Little Rock had objected to the idea.65 Moreover, Little Rock congressman and SBC president Brooks Hays, a racial moderate whose political future then hung in the balance, cautioned the evangelist against visiting so soon after the violence at Central High School. (After Hays lost his 1958 reelection bid, Graham addressed a banquet given in his honor.)66 Graham's trip to Little Rock finally occurred in September 1959, when he held two rallies in the city's downtown football stadium. Continued tensions over integration likely contributed to his decision to forgo earlier plans for a multiweek crusade in August. The chair of the rally committee was influential Southern Baptist minister and racial moderate W. O. Vaught, whom Graham had introduced and praised at the Charlotte crusade for his work during the Little Rock crisis.67
As in Clinton, Graham attempted to clarify his
