which invoked evangelical faith, combined with law and order, toward moderate ends. The politics of decency straddled and selectively engaged the polarized racial discourse of the period. Here, as with so many areas of Graham's career, the spheres of religion and politics blended almost beyond distinction.
The Parameters of Justice
Graham's initial public criticisms of desegregation raised expectations about his potential as a regional leader. President Eisenhower was not the only one asking the evangelist to play a more active role in the South. In 1956, an Oregon editorial board urged Graham to return from his travels abroad and “try and convert the Negro baiting Alabama legislators.”1 Additional pleas for Graham to speak more forcefully about racial issues or to intervene more actively in the South came from white intellectuals, such as theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and leading southern liberal James McBride Dabbs, as well as African American clergymen and newspaper editorialists. The evangelist, wrote one black newspaper in 1955, “may lose a few of his friends in his own dear Southland because of his stand on segregation but he won't lose his soul.” Two years later, a group of black ministers from the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, area asked Graham to come “back to our state to tear down…every vestige of segregation and discrimination born of our prejudices”—a request he did not take up.2 In correspondence that same year, Martin Luther King, Jr., similarly urged the evangelist to “see your way clear to conduct an evangelistic crusade in one of the hard-core states in the deep south, even if it is not on as large a scale as most of your crusades. The impact of such a crusade would be immeasurably great.”3 The letter arrived soon after King had delivered an invocation at Graham's heavily publicized 1957 New York City crusade.
The early contact between Graham and King revealed both the potential and the limits of the evangelist's social ethic. Around the time of the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott, King and Graham commenced what evolved into a mostly cordial and, at times, consultative relationship. Their common southern background and shared status as Baptist ministers provided them with important bonds. Moreover, at least by 1957, they stood as the national spokespersons for their respective presumed causes: evangelism and civil rights. During a time when King still sought recognition from moderate whites (such as Nixon) and when Graham had promised Eisenhower to consult with southern ministers about the race issue, their paths inevitably inter-sected.4 The evangelist spoke highly of King from an early date, declaring in an April 1957 interview in the New York Times Magazine that the civil rights leader was “setting an example of Christian love” in the area of race relations. King soon accepted an invitation to give an invocation during the New York crusade. With characteristic eloquence, he called for liberation from “the dungeons of hate” and “the paralysis of crippling fear” in order to create a “brotherhood that transcends race or color.”5 While in New York, King also held consultations with the Graham team on race relations. In a gesture Graham would long recall, King asked the evangelist to call him “Mike,” a birth name used mostly by black intimates.6 Afterward, King added Graham to the list of southern white moderates and liberals with whom he corresponded. With intentionally flattering prose, King praised him for applying the message of the Gospel to race, since Graham “above any other preacher in America can open the eyes of many persons on this question.” Graham's southern background, the civil rights leader suggested, gave his message “additional weight.”7
The continuing intimacy of Graham with segregationists eventually tested their relationship, however. One such friend of the evangelist was Texas governor Price Daniel, an outspoken Christian. As a U.S. senator, Daniel had signed the 1956 Southern Manifesto opposing school desegrega-tion.8 Around the time of the Southern Manifesto's release, Graham discussed with Senator Daniel his decision to run for the governorship.9 Following Daniel's 1956 victory, Graham led an inauguration-day prayer breakfast and attended the inauguration ceremony with John Connally.10
King entered the picture in July 1958 during the heart of Governor Daniel's reelection campaign. One day before the Democratic Party primary (then the election of consequence in Texas), Daniel was slated to introduce Graham at a San Antonio evangelistic rally. The suspicious timing drew protests from prominent black ministers in San Antonio. The president of the local Baptist Ministers Union wired an urgent note to King, who soon wrote Graham expressing concern. Either dissociate yourself from Daniel, King told the evangelist, or at least “make crystal clear your position on this burning moral issue.” Supporting a segregationist would severely hamper Graham's influence among blacks, he added.11 In a sharp reply to King, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) associate Grady Wilson disavowed any political motivation on Graham's part. “Even though we do not see eye to eye with [Daniel] on every issue,” Wilson snapped, “we still love him in Christ, and frankly, I think that should be your position not only as a Christian but as a minister of the gospel of our risen Lord.” Wilson added that Graham had gladly invited King to New York City despite the “scores” of critical responses the BGEA had consequentially received.12
For Graham, evangelistic priorities trumped matters of social concern; Daniel's segregationist politics did not by definition undermine his Christian loyalties. The service proceeded as planned in San Antonio, where Graham told a nonsegregated crowd of thirty thousand that God judges individuals by their hearts, not their skin colors. Daniel went on to victory. Interestingly, a primary opponent mocked the governor for bringing in “a certain integrationist evangelist from an outside state” for an “11th hour appearance…. Is Billy being deceived and rushed to the Alamo City to try to save the Governor's [s]oul, or save his fast-sinking campaign?” Daniel, however, may actually have benefited from public complaints about the San Antonio service by African American U.S. representative Adam Clayton Powell, who also contacted Graham.13 The relationship between King and Graham, meanwhile, vacillated between mostly private warmth and occasional public frostiness into the 1960s, when the ideological and theological differences between them widened even further. (Meanwhile, Graham remained close enough to Daniel to stay with him during his final night as governor, in 1963.)14
Graham's encounters with liberal Protestants were likewise generally less tense than they became a decade later. Here, the much-publicized criticism he received from theologian Reinhold Niebuhr served as the exception proving the rule. During the run-up to the 1957 New York City crusade, Niebuhr, a renowned professor at Union Theological Seminary and an influential liberal anticommunist, dismissed Graham's social ethic as “pietistic individualism” and “moralism,” irresponsible atavisms in light of the complexities of the nuclear age. The “evangelical perfectionism” inherent in Graham's style of revivalism (that is, his focus on the conversion moment as a source for personal regeneration) represented a simplistic and potentially escapist response to the challenges of the twentieth century, argued Niebuhr. Thinking exclusively in terms of saving souls ignored the gravity of “collective evil.”15 Graham responded politely to this criticism, yet yielded no theological ground to Niebuhr.16
Niebuhr, however, grew significantly more charitable toward Graham when the topic turned to race, going no further than to urge the evangelist to address the matter more extensively in his sermons. Their views on desegregation at the time were closer than either would likely have wanted to admit. Despite their many theological differences (not to mention their political, cultural, and stylistic ones), they responded with striking similarity to the Brown decision, favoring gradual implementation of desegregation rooted in respect for the rule of law. Niebuhr, who took pride in his realist gravitas, was only slightly less skeptical than Graham about legislative solutions. Their gradualist positions, though, derived from differing emphases on the individual: for Graham, a stress on individual conversions and human relationships over policy prescriptions; for Niebuhr, a profound caution regarding the ability of individuals to avoid social evils larger than themselves. Niebuhr's significantly more incisive pessimism about group and individual behavior ironically led him to a place similar to Graham's often reflexive optimism about human regeneration. They both worried about the adverse effects of legally coerced justice and tended toward caution when confronted with the mobs surrounding Central High School
