Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South. Steven P. Miller
up as a de facto segregationist—in his own words, someone who “had adopted the attitudes of that region without much reflection.” In this and other senses, his southern heritage was impeccable. As the evangelist would proudly note throughout his lifetime, he was descended from Confederate veterans on both sides of the family. In Graham's rural home area of Sharon Township, located just outside Charlotte, his Scotch-Irish, God-fearing, dairy-farming family was of a demographic type. Like the South as a whole, Graham later reflected in his autobiography, his section of the North Carolina Piedmont “had never fully recovered economically from the Civil War and Reconstruction.” A successful dairy enterprise, however, put the Grahams comfortably above the economic mean, even during the Great Depression. The local African Americans whom Graham knew best were thus family employees. Later, he reminisced with unintended condescension about his childhood admiration for Reese Brown, a black foreman who had “a tremendous capacity for working hard” and whose wife made “fabulous buttermilk biscuits in the tenant house that was their home.” Such fond memories reflected an upbringing in which racial moderation translated as benevolent paternalism. (In 1965, during a ceremony in which Graham received an honor for his work on racial issues, Graham praised Brown and presented the aging man with a watch.)7
The Christian faith of Graham's youth did not challenge his racial worldview—nor was there good reason to expect it would. In 1934, as a scrawny, playful teenager, Graham famously responded to the brimstone-laden altar call of Kentucky evangelist Mordecai Ham. The hard-hitting revivalist who drew Graham down the sawdust trail was a militant fundamentalist whom Graham later felt compelled to defend against charges of anti-Semitism and support for the Ku Klux Klan.8 “Even after my conversion,” Graham admitted in 1960, “I felt no guilt in thinking of my dark-skinned brothers in the usual patronizing and paternalistic way.”9 His gradual racial awakening did not commence for another decade and a half, after he had attended such segregated institutions as Bob Jones College, whose tightly regimented environment he endured for a mere semester, and Florida Bible Institute, another unaccredited fundamentalist school, from which he graduated in 1940.
A key component of Graham's racial evolution was his exposure during the early 1940s to a moderate brand of northern Protestant fundamentalism then beginning the protracted but conclusive process of refashioning itself as “evangelicalism.” Graham entered this world by way of Wheaton, Illinois, a town thirty miles west of Chicago that served as an incubator for the neo-evangelical project. His 1940 enrollment at Wheaton College represented one of the few times the budding preacher had crossed the Mason-Dixon line. At Wheaton, Graham remembered, “people looked at me curiously, as if my heavily accented drawl were a foreign language.”10 The racial views of southerners of Graham's generation often evolved in the context of comparatively moderate racial environments.11 While a city like New York or Austin more classically fitted the bill, Chicagoland fundamentalism provided an impetus for Graham's views on race to evolve.
Graham would most likely never have become the leading spokesperson for postwar American evangelicalism had he not passed through Wheaton, then, as now, a leading institution of higher education within conservative, nonmainline Protestant circles. The history of Wheaton paralleled—and, in many respects, influenced—the trajectory of American evangelicalism itself. The college, as Graham occasionally noted later in his career, had deep roots in antebellum evangelical abolitionism. Under the leadership of President Jonathan Blanchard (who took over the newly renamed Wheaton College in 1860), the school presented itself as an abolitionist, coeducational institution in the best tradition of antebellum evangelical reform. The brother of abolitionist martyr Elijah Lovejoy served as a trustee, and early alums included a nephew of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Blanchard made a point of admitting and granting scholarships to black students. Even though Wheaton's commitment to social reform weakened considerably into the twentieth century, the college would have contained a small number of black students during Graham's matriculation there.12
Importantly, Graham majored in anthropology at Wheaton. While he later struggled to explain his decision to study a subject commonly linked with agnosticism, if not outright atheism, he was interested enough in the field momentarily to consider pursuing a master's degree at the University of Chicago. He went so far as to register for classes there; but a hectic ministerial schedule precluded further dalliances in academia.13 By then, though, his studies had given him some awareness of the cultural relativity of race. In 1950, several years before Graham publicly identified himself as a supporter of desegregation, he noted that as a student he had “practically memorized” a textbook titled Up from the Ape and written by the evolutionary anthropologist Earnest Albert Hooton.14 A Harvard professor, Hooton emphasized the highly relative nature of racial categories and categorically dismissed quasi eugenicists, calling them “ethnomaniacs.” Although not denying the significance of racial differences, physical and otherwise, Hooton argued that “a ‘pure race’ is little more than a philosophical abstraction and that the great cultural achievements of humanity have been produced, almost invariably, by racially mixed peoples.” He specifically attacked the simplistic chauvinism of arguments for Negro inferiority. Graham filtered such ideas through the net of his true focus at Wheaton, evangelism. While Hooton wrote from an explicitly secular perspective, his universalistic understanding of humanity reinforced Graham's faith in a Christian gospel open and communicable to all peoples.15
At Wheaton, Graham met his future wife, Ruth Bell, a model of piety whose prayerful coyness attracted the aspiring groom. Their marriage actually bolstered his southern identity. Ruth's father was L. Nelson Bell, a surgeon and longtime missionary in Nationalist China but also a native Virginian, graduate of Washington and Lee University, and an influential lay leader in the conservative wing of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (which was also referred to as the Southern Presbyterian church). Bell, whom Graham ranked behind only his parents and wife as a life influence, heavily mediated the way the evangelist applied his theological views on race to the social context of the South.16 During the latter half of the 1950s, at least, Bell functioned as a conservative brake on the evangelist's opinions concerning racial policy. The well-connected Bell also strengthened the ties between Graham and a host of southern religious leaders. After the Bells moved to the Southern Presbyterian mountain retreat community of Montreat, North Carolina, Billy and Ruth followed them there in 1945.17
Wheaton may have planted seeds for Graham's subsequent doubts about the racial norms of his home region, yet their public sprouting was a while in coming. In his subsequent telling, the climax of his years-long struggle to reconcile a tacit acceptance of Jim Crow with a strident promotion of the gospel message came at the start of a March 1953 crusade service in Chattanooga, Tennessee. There, Graham personally removed the ropes separating the black from the white sections of the audience.18 This was the first time he had not followed the dictates of the local crusade committee regarding segregated seating. The Chattanooga incident served as a key moment in Graham's “racial conversion narrative,” to use a literary scholar's term for self-styled accounts in which “products of and willing participants in a harsh, segregated society…confess racial wrongdoings and are ‘converted,’ in varying degrees, from racism to something approaching racial enlightenment.” Graham himself spoke of his own “racial conversion” on at least one occasion.19
Graham's racial development paralleled his theological and temperamental transition from Protestantism fundamentalism to neo-evangelicalism. During the 1940s, as noted above, an influential group of moderate fundamentalists associated with the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and hailing mostly from Reformed backgrounds began embracing the label “evangelical,” the source of its most common current American usage. While not departing from core fundamentalist doctrines, these “neo-evangelicals” projected an evangelistic optimism not seen since the irrecoverable era before World War I when Protestants of all stripes could speak of “the evangelization of the world in this generation” (the motto of the Dwight Moody– inspired Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions). They sought to revive the influence of a conservative Protestantism that, at least according to popular perceptions, had retreated from public view in the aftermath of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial.” In response to the so-called Second Disestablishment of the 1920s and subsequent decades, fundamentalism (the name given to the sizable minority of Protestants