The 1956 Louisville crusade offered a better indication of how residents of a Jim Crow city perceived an evangelist who was beginning to be identified with desegregation. The Louisville Courier-Journal, published by Mark Ethridge, stood as one of the leading white liberal voices in the greater South. The Louisville crusade took place just as Graham published an article in Life magazine, titled “Billy Graham Makes Plea for an End to Intolerance,” in which he dismissed biblical arguments supporting racial segregation and hierarchy, and called for the church to speak out in favor of racial tolerance. He also declared that all of his services were desegregated.82 Already Graham had begun to catch flack from hardline segregationists who accused him of selectively quoting scripture on racial equality.83 The Louisville crusade revealed that his comments about race relations did not resonate as clearly as his altar calls. After the Courier-Journal announced that all Graham crusades were desegregated, a member of the local Citizens’ Council requested a meeting with the evangelist. “We think we can convince him to change his views on this integration,” he said. That avowed segregationists thought of Graham as a possible ally was attributable both to the halting, episodic nature of his public statements on race and to the desire of Jim Crow partisans not to “lose” a renowned figure they may have assumed was either in their camp or at least not an enemy. Graham did not accept the offer to meet the council, and his comments on Jim Crow during the crusade did not parallel the confident tone of his Life article. When a caller on a local television show asked him a question about segregation, the evangelist reaffirmed the primacy of the conversion moment. “I believe the heart of the problem of race is in loving our neighbor,” he declared. “But man must love God before he can love his neighbor.” As for the crusade itself, the Courier-Journal’s religion editor expressed surprise that the “completely desegregated” services had attracted so few black attendees. Graham had earlier observed a decline in black attendance contemporaneous with the desegregation policy. In Louisville, this pattern appeared in spite of a thoroughly integrated crusade steering committee.84 Still, low black attendance had been a reality at many Graham crusades even before the change in seating policy.
While Graham's desegregated services during the mid-1950s represented notable accomplishments within the closed (and still closing) societies of the South, they hardly qualify as landmark events in the civil rights struggle. The gatherings straddled an ambiguous line between church services and public meetings. Only the latter was clearly subject to local segregation laws. As historical phenomena, racially separated churches were initially a product of freedmen leaving white-dominated congregations, and thus preceded the formalization of Jim Crow. Attendance expectations at all-white congregations, to be sure, quickly became intertwined with the rules, rituals, and power structures of that system. Technically, though, the pervasive segregation within southern congregations was more customary than official. Biracial worship was not unheard of even during the height of Jim Crow. Graham himself recalled attending a black church service in Florida during his Bible school days in the late 1930s. At the start of the civil rights era, blacks occasionally attended services at white congregations without incident (although black membership was far rarer); not until the mid-1960s did desegregating whites-only church services emerge as a strategy for civil rights activists.85 In holding his first intentionally desegregated crusade in 1953, Graham was slightly ahead of his time in comparison with his fellow white evangelists in the South. By the end of the decade, independent mass revivalists in the region had begun integrating their services; earlier in the decade, their meetings were largely biracial, yet segregated.86
The overall degree or meaning of interracial fellowship at Graham's early desegregated crusade remains difficult to ascertain. Graham crusades did not approach the countercultural environments common to genuine expressions of southern religious “racial interchange,” particularly within the Holiness and Pentecostal traditions.87 Few locations for his early desegregated crusades—with New Orleans being a possible exception (although that demo-graphically distinctive southern city possessed a certain multiracial Catholic tradition)—had a reputation for intractable segregationism akin to a Birmingham or a Jackson.88 A Graham aide marveled at the ease of ensuring desegregated seating for the 1956 crusade in Oklahoma City, a Jim Crow city located on the southern rim.89 Still, while Graham's meetings usually reflected community norms, they could sometimes help to change them. A black newspaper in New Orleans described the opening crusade service there as “the first time in recent times that Negroes have been permitted to attend a huge public Protestant gathering, or otherwise…without restrictions.”90 This was unquestionably a notable achievement. According to the evangelist, his desegregation policy extended to the hotel restaurants where he met with local ministers.91 The relatively low black attendance, however, suggested that the Graham team remained most effective in reaching whites. Over the years, Graham and his supporters recounted a number of stories, usually told in an apocryphal manner, of white attendees who experienced racial conversion moments during crusades.92 While these stories did not indicate a change of heart regarding the larger legal structures of Jim Crow, they suggest that some southern whites no longer thought those structures needed to apply to at least one staple of southern society, public revival services.
Graham's early southern crusades are best seen as emblems of the many, largely unnoticed forms of public desegregation that occurred in the period immediately preceding and following Brown. During the early postwar years, as black voter registration grew in some parts of the urban South, a number of southern cities saw modest amounts of desegregation in such areas as police departments, public parks, libraries, and even city councils.93 The years before the Brown decision also saw the nominal desegregation of three SBC seminaries, as well as several other leading seminaries in the region.94 Graham's desegregation policy thus drew from the momentum of existing trends.
Moreover, Graham's general unwillingness to discuss the race issue beyond the levels of individual decency and Christian neighborliness limited the impact of his early desegregated crusades. For Graham, desegregation had appropriately expanded from the altar into the audience; but the proper Christian understanding of its status beyond the revival service remained less certain. The question of legalized Jim Crow stood outside the sphere over which Graham consciously exerted influence—the quasi-congregational environment of the crusade service—and, hence, still remained classifiable as a separate “political” or “social” question. In light of the Brown decision, Graham appears to have viewed his desegregated crusades as violations only of local customs, not of enforceable laws. The BGEA felt uncomfortable using language that might imply an agenda other than evangelism. Haymaker suggested that crusade committees “use the term ‘non-segregated’; we like it much better than using the word ‘integrated.’”95 Graham's simultaneously passive and politic attention to language, combined with a constant reasser-tion of his evangelistic priorities, no doubt allowed him to retain an audience that an established civil rights crusader would long since have lost. “Our concern since God laid the matter [of racial prejudice] on our hearts some years ago,” wrote Graham in 1957, “has not been so much to talk as to act, to set an example which might open new paths and stir the consciences of many.”96