Journal in 1957, “and they are going to get there whether or not [Graham] likes it.” The title of another hostile editorial that year read, “Billy Lost South When He Jumped to Politics.”84
Yet clearly Graham had not lost the whole of the white South. Even outspoken segregationists remained split in their responses to the evangelist. Criswell blasted Bob Jones, Sr., and his heir at Bob Jones University as “crackpot[s]” for their criticism of Graham.85 While many fundamentalists, in addition to professional segregationists like John Kasper, felt few restraints in dismissing Graham or challenging him to debates, other Jim Crow partisans approached him with relative humility. The evangelist “is personally a fine young man,” wrote a Charlotte resident to Graham's father-in-law, Nelson Bell, despite being “misled on the negro question.” Another North Carolina critic wrote to Graham (in a letter copied to each southern governor) not “in a spirit of antagonism, but in the hope it will be taken as constructive criticism, not to be finding fault with the ministry, but to plead with [desegregationist ministers] before it is too late.” If only Graham knew of Martin Luther King's communist ties, wrote one professed admirer of the evangelist, he would surely denounce the civil rights leader.86 Perhaps these correspondents did not view the evangelist as a race mixer at heart. At the very least, they were nonplussed that a southerner who shared so many of their theological leanings could differ with them on this issue. A South Carolina newspaper branded Graham “one of the strongest advocates for total integration,” while acknowledging his otherwise “wonderful work” as an evangelist.87 Most important, though, such hedged criticisms testified to the social and spiritual clout Graham possessed, even though he remained hesitant to employ this leverage in a forceful manner. Critics of his racial views often felt compelled to pay their respects to this overwhelmingly popular minister of God. Many other segregationists never felt compelled to criticize him at all.
Nelson Bell responded to a number of segregationist critics on behalf of his son-in-law. Some of the charges coming from foes of Graham bordered on the absurd (e.g., the “black supremacy” allegation) and were easily countered. Other correspondents simply requested clarification of his opinions on racial matters. In answering these letters, Bell sometimes exceeded his task of defending Graham, to the point where he misrepresented or exaggerated the evangelist's positions and injected his own. As a racial conservative and a public defender of “voluntary segregation,” Bell possessed many ties with segregationist activists. His biases surfaced in his letters, as when Bell wrote to one Tennessean that blacks “must earn social recognition” and declared himself “dead against” Martin Luther King, Jr., “and the cause for which he stands.” In a 1958 letter, dated well after Graham's piece in Ebony, Bell declared that “Billy does not believe in integration any more than you and I do.” When insisting on Graham's opposition to “forced integration,” Bell never once acknowledged the evangelist's support for moderate anti–Jim Crow legislation and obedience to judicial rulings on civil rights.88
While Graham could not be mistaken for a civil rights activist, he placed much ideological and theological, if not always spatial, distance between himself and his southern segregationist peers during the latter half of the 1950s. He began criticizing segregation in religious settings and attacking the use of Christianity to justify Jim Crow a decade or more before many of his southern peers publicly arrived at such positions. Criswell, for example, did not openly endorse desegregated church services until 1968.89 Like Criswell, Graham commanded appeal among grassroots white southerners (as well as politicians) well removed from the more racially progressive spheres of denominational publishing houses and policy committees. This appeal gave the evangelist tangible influence in the region—or, at the very least, inspired deference to his desegregationist policies.
Graham's shift toward racial moderation challenges how some scholars have viewed the religious status of segregationism during the civil rights era—and suggests that segregationism faced theological defeat well before it faced political demise.90 Graham indicates the fairly early timing of this loss. “When southern ministers of Rev. Graham's influence begin to speak out against the evils of segregation,” predicted a black North Carolina newspaper in 1955, “it[’]s a sure sign that the day of its departure is near at hand.” That forecast, of course, represented wishful thinking about both the end of Jim Crow and the role of white southern ministers in bringing about its closure. By no means did Graham create or drive the argument that segregation lacked a theological defense; generations of black theologians had already tilled that ground.91 Still, his words had attracted obvious notice. His accessible critique of segregation in Christian practice lent the theological defeat of Jim Crow a quality of common sense, even as its exact relationship to political and grassroots efforts for racial change remained ambiguous. “The church should voluntarily be doing what the courts are doing by compulsion,” Graham told a national magazine six months after the Brown decision.92
To be sure, race had not trumped evangelism on Graham's priority list, and it often played third fiddle to politics. Yet race was an issue Graham could scarcely—and increasingly chose not to—avoid. His moderate style and his friendship with numerous southern leaders gave him unusual access to a range of regional actors. Little Rock civic boosters had recognized the good a Graham visit could do to a town's image. His status also made him attractive as a potential consultant, adviser, or mediator for someone such as President Dwight Eisenhower. In this area, Graham functioned as a different type of regional leader.
CHAPTER THREE
The Politics of Decency
Later, [Graham] confided to a friend that he felt like a fellow in the 1860s who put on a blue coat and some grey trousers—and got shot at by both sides. —Journalist Tom McMahan, 1960
You are America's greatest ambassador and I pray for a continuation of your great strength in the good that you are doing. —Senator John Stennis (D-Miss.) to Graham, 1955
BY THE CLOSE OF 1957, Graham had positioned himself in the middle ground between the segregationist right and the integrationist left—that is, somewhere between his nominal pastor, W. A. Criswell, and another Baptist and southerner, Martin Luther King, Jr. This middle ground held more than religious implications. In the context of Little Rock and Clinton, Graham's calls for good citizenship and racial tolerance, which he cast as fruits of the conversion moment, dovetailed with the moderate rallying cry of law and order. On other occasions, his politics of decency played out more explicitly in the realm of governmental power.
In engaging the South, Graham functioned not only in his self-described role as an evangelist but also as a type of politician. He was subject to the tendency of elected political leaders to vacillate between grandstanding and caution amid attempts to balance seemingly contradictory constituencies. Even though his stature in both the South and the nation gave him great leeway to express his views, he typically strove to avoid offending all but the most intransigent defenders of Jim Crow. At the same time, his activities in the South were intimately—at times, inextricably—connected with his service as a supporter of, and adviser to, President Dwight Eisenhower. Their relationship sheds critical light on the origins of the evangelist's seemingly obvious, yet persistently elusive, leanings toward the Republican Party. The enduring bond Graham formed with another rising star on the postwar scene, Richard Nixon, reinforced that tendency. Graham attempted to appear above partisanship even though he routinely made comments that buttressed the policy agenda and political ambitions of Eisenhower and later Nixon. His ability to link his international ministry with Cold War themes suggested his partial success in this area.
Graham's behavior during the latter half of the Eisenhower years shaped the remainder of his engagement with the civil rights movement, as well as the broader political trajectory of the South. His chosen leadership role suggests the complexities of the public and political Graham (which coexisted with the pastoral one). As an evangelist, Graham could stand removed from the fray of both the civil rights era's politics
