Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South. Steven P. Miller
Chiang Kai-shek.”43 For the most part, to be sure, Graham did not associate with the right's hardest edges. Still, none of the above anticommunists was known for taking moderate positions on either foreign policy or domestic issues—nor was Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover, a Graham supporter who declared in Christianity Today that “an America faithful to God will be an America free and strong.”44
As Graham expanded his international outreach, though, his interpretation of the Cold War shifted in a more moderate direction. His image abroad, as he surely recognized, was keenly intertwined with that of the United States itself. The success of his overseas work, which blossomed after his 1954 London crusade, depended in no small part on the degree to which the rest of the world saw the United States as a goodwill ambassador. Graham resembled the many foreign missionaries within his Southern Baptist denomination whose experiences abroad led them to reconsider the domestic racial status quo.45 His early travel to Europe only reinforced his hawkish Cold War senti-ments.46 By the mid-1950s, though, as he began to travel through the non-white majority of the world, Graham came to see his nation's poor reputation in the area of racial relations as a potential propaganda tool for international communism and his numerous critics alike.
Graham thus suggested how the first two decades of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union simultaneously expanded and limited the national discourse on civil rights. The United States Information Agency and similar governmental outlets sought to advance America's image as the leader of the free world. Such efforts (in the words of one legal historian) made “civil rights reform…in part a product of the Cold War.”47 Southern conservatives, to be sure, eventually launched a “southern red scare” that readily merged rabid domestic anticommunism with opposition to altering the racial status quo.48 Graham, though, increasingly viewed the Cold War through an international lens, even while he remained on friendly terms with many southerners who clearly (or conveniently) viewed civil rights activism as a front for communist subversion. By the latter half of the 1950s, Graham routinely linked anticommunism with a critique of segregation. The nation, he declared in 1957, resided “in a fish bowl with the whole world looking in,” and “our racial tensions are causing some of the people of the world to turn away from us.”49
In keeping with his move toward a more nuanced understanding of the Cold War, Graham gradually cultivated a clear, if adaptable, declaration of racial moderation.50 His status as a religious celebrity who was also a southerner made his decision to address the race issue at some level not entirely surprising. Less predictable was his public position, at a reasonably early date, as a moderate desegregationist. When he occasionally addressed racial matters while speaking in the South during the early years of his ministry, his comments were limited in nature. At a 1950 crusade in Columbia, South Carolina, he flatly declared that “revival will also solve the race question by causing both races to be fair toward each other.”51 Graham team member Grady Wilson explicitly defended the residual nature of this formula. “What's the point of attacking a cause when you're after sinners?” Wilson asked an interviewer that same year. “If a man's a sinner and he's a member of the Ku Klux Klan, we're not going to lose the chance of saving him by attacking the organization he belongs to.”52
Graham began to use somewhat stronger language during his many appearances at ecclesiastical and denominational gatherings throughout the South and the nation. In 1952, he told members of the NAE that the “Church is on the tail end—to our shame!—of progress along racial li[n]es in America today. The Church should be leading instead of following.”53 In an address delivered that same year at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, he advocated opening denominational colleges to academically qualified blacks.54 Some media outlets took notice. For example, the liberal Protestant magazine Christian Century published an editorial titled “Sewanee Says No, Billy Graham Yes,” favorably contrasting his early criticism of segregation (for which “many think he will pay dearly”) with the resistance to desegregation at a leading southern Episcopal seminary.55
By late 1953, Graham had worked out much of the racial reasoning that he would voice in response to countless media questions over the next decade and a half. In October 1953, he wrote a telling letter to Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, who had asked the evangelist to clarify his views on racial segregation after reading an interview Graham had given to the Michigan Chronicle, an African American newspaper. The renowned, future Pulitzer Prize–winning editor was in the midst of his own shift, reflective of the broader swath of southern liberals, from tolerance of separate-but-equal segregation to acceptance of, and eventual support for, its legal demise. As a critic of the role of southern Christianity in abetting racial injustices, McGill surely wrote to Graham with some skepticism. (Within a year, though, the editor would praise Graham in print as an effective evangelist and an asset to anticommunist efforts overseas.) “In my study of the Bible,” Graham replied, “I can find no verses or chapters to support segregation.” He affirmed that “Jesus Christ belongs neither to the colored nor the white races” and repeated a sentiment he had already voiced in Detroit: “In race relations the church has been lagging far behind in certain areas and allowing the sports world and political world to get ahead of it.” Graham's chariot of justice slowed at the Mason-Dixon line, however. The South, he wrote to his fellow southerner McGill,
presents a problem particularly all its own that many times our Northern friends do not understand. It is going to take a long process of education rather than legislation to ultimately bring about better relations between the races. We have extremists in both races who cause 90 percent of the trouble. In many parts of the South it is my observation that the race situation is better than in many parts of the North. For example, the sharp divisions between races, and racial tensions, are very strong here in Detroit. Non-segregation thus cannot be forced or legislated. There must be a process of education and faith in Christ.56
Most of these sentiments—a color-blind Christology, defense of his home region, embrace of the South's relational culture, and denunciation of “extremists”—would stay with the evangelist for at least the next quarter of a century. The remaining view—a moralistic but chronologically noncommittal gradualism regarding the ultimate abolition of Jim Crow—would wane, without vanishing altogether, during the late 1950s and early 1960s as Graham grew more appreciative of the need for civil rights legislation.
In the South
In his crusade services in the South, Graham did not initially fulfill his professed desire for the church to catch up with the secular world in the area of race relations. Still, he had plenty of opportunities to demonstrate the racial views he voiced to McGill and others. The growing urban South provided a strong base for many early Graham rallies and crusades, beginning with Charlotte (1947) and including Shreveport (1951) and Houston (1952). During the 1950s, a significant majority of Graham's domestic crusades, as well as a substantial portion of his guest sermons and one-day rallies, took place in southern cities, where the local media treated often him like a visiting head of state.57 His influence was particularly palpable in the South. Atlanta and Chattanooga were among the few cities to construct special tabernacles in which to hold crusade services.58 His 1950 address to a joint session of the Georgia legislature inspired one house of the state legislature to pass a prohibition law (which the other chamber quickly let die).59
However, Graham hesitated to use his cachet in the South to address racial issues. During his first six years of holding solo revivals, he allowed segregated seating arrangements in his southern crusades. He moved only fitfully toward a policy of desegregated seating, which his organization did not standardize until after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. At the 1951 Greensboro crusade, recalled BGEA staffer Willis Haymaker, blacks sat in “special sections of seats reserved for them as was customary in all Billy Graham crusades [in the South] at that time.”60 The racial separation, presumably, did not extend to the area around the crusade platform where respondents gathered during the invitation. Atlanta city police chief Herbert Jenkins recalled segregated meetings during the 1950 crusade there, with exemptions for a few black ministers whom Graham knew. High-resolution BGEA photographs from the Atlanta crusade (generally, a more trustworthy