Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South. Steven P. Miller
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 of rage and its politics of protest. Instead, he endorsed and advocated a politics of decency, 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