Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South. Steven P. Miller
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 a previously segregated high school in his hometown of Charlotte. 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