Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South. Steven P. Miller
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 role as an evangelist and only that, but he could not escape the political implications of his visit. The desegregated nature of the rallies had been well publicized, and questions remained about whether Governor Orval Faubus and the Little Rock police force would provide adequate security for the services. These concerns were pressing because the Little Rock Citizens’ Council had launched its own crusade against the evangelist. According to Citizens’ Council chaplain Wesley Pruden, who was something of a celebrity among the massive resistance set, the group distributed forty thousand flyers attacking the integrationist agenda of both Graham and the ministers who had invited him. In making the case for Graham (and, by implication, the case against Faubus), the liberal Arkansas Gazette emphasized the evangelist's southern identity: “Billy Graham has preached the gospel on every continent and in the isles across the sea, but his heart, as he has said, has remained in his native South.” The editorial reflected what two sociologists called the “exaggerated southerner technique,” a strategy Graham and other moderate or liberal southern ministers (along with their secular counterparts) employed to accentuate their regional credentials.68
Even though Graham downplayed the racial aspect of the Little Rock rallies, he did not avoid commenting on that matter altogether. “I have said many times,” he reiterated in a press conference, “that nobody can cite the Bible as a defense for segregation.” The two services drew a combined crowd of around 50,000 (including a young William Jefferson Clinton) and featured no racial incidents, although fear of violence likely depressed the overall attendance. A glowing report written for the BGEA emphasized that the rally united people “not as integrationists or segregationists, but as Christians.” In one of his sermons, Graham urged the audience to “obey constitutional authority as long as it doesn't interfere with the worship of God.” Addressing the generic sinner, Graham implied that regenerated hearts should lead to renewed social consciences as well: “When a moral issue comes up you don't really stand up for what you know is right. You're spiritually dead.”69
More striking than Graham's occasional comments on race were the ways in which his visit served the interests of city boosters seeking to revive the image of Little Rock. That image had received a further blow only days before the rally, when segregationists dynamited the city school board headquarters. The bombings occurred just as public schools were reopening after a year of forced closure by Governor Faubus.70 In the case of one recognizable Little Rock citizen and Graham supporter, Jimmy Karam, the rallies helped to resuscitate his personal reputation. To label Karam mercurial would be an understatement. A Little Rock clothier, friend of Faubus, and former associate of the Urban League whom bystanders had identified as a supervisor of the 1957 violence at Central High School, Karam was rough-edged and opportunistic, yet desperate to revise his well-earned notoriety as a thug. Only months before his antics at Central High School, a thoroughly nonreligious Karam had attended Graham's 1957 New York crusade, which he claimed had exerted no effect on him. By early 1959, however, Karam had come under the influence of W. O. Vaught, pastor of the most prominent Baptist church in Little Rock, who guided him into the faith. Karam became a leading sponsor of the Graham visit and continued to support the evangelist in subsequent decades. During the Little Rock rallies, the evangelist and the convert visited four of the school board bombing suspects in jail.71 Karam's story made the pages of Time magazine—as did the fact that, although he had recanted his role as a segregationist rabble rouser, he declined to state whether he personally still supported Jim Crow. His critics noted that he definitely still backed Governor Faubus.72
The Little Rock rallies, alas, did not net even an ambiguous racial conversion from Faubus, who had also attended the New York crusade (likely with Karam). During the one Little Rock service the governor attended, he arrived late and momentarily had to sit on the stadium's concrete stairs. A photograph in the strongly anti-Faubus Arkansas Gazette shows him searching for a seat while a young black male, sporting sunglasses, sits comfortably in front of the pacing governor. According to one report, Graham and Karam paid a discreet visit to the