Even as Graham moved away from theological fundamentalism and latent segregationism, then, he maintained close ties with many southern conservatives. They included not only politicians but also religious leaders, such as W. A. Criswell, pastor of the mammoth First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas. Criswell later became known as a leading ministerial proponent of Jim Crow. Before the Brown decision, though, the rising SBC star was a much less controversial figure. His downtown church had mushroomed into the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the world. Graham and Criswell's relationship dated back at least as far as 1948, when Graham held meetings at First Baptist, and the two dined together two years later during a Graham revival in Charlotte. In 1953, in the midst of his Dallas crusade, Graham publicly requested membership at First Baptist. The evangelist explained his decision by postulating that Criswell's church would not place the same demands on his time as would a congregation closer to home. (In reality, Graham could have said the same of his previous church, Curtis Baptist in Augusta, Georgia.) Taking membership at First Baptist represented a savvy move for Graham, who admired the swaggering style of Texans and often wore a cowboy hat during the early 1950s.115 The membership of First Baptist later included oil baron H. L. Hunt, an eccentric multimillionaire and rabid right-wing activist who became a fan of the BGEA, especially team member Grady Wilson. Graham's connections in Texas stretched beyond First Baptist and extended deep into the pockets of, to name a few major supporters, defense and energy magnate Russell Maguire, industrialist and evangelical philanthropist R. G. LeTourneau, and most significantly, Dallas-area oilman Sid Richardson, who introduced the evangelist to two rising politicians, John Connally and Lyndon Johnson. The titles of the BGEA's first two feature films, Mr. Texas and Oiltown, U.S.A., drew from the well of this Lone Star prospecting.116
Graham's growing embrace of desegregation thus stood in tension not only with his white southern roots but also with a substantial portion of his support base. Accordingly, his moderate comments on race often lacked discernible coordinates on the political spectrum. Throughout the mid-1950s, observers assumed that his politics leaned well to the right. His strong support for President Eisenhower, along with the social ethic he increasingly voiced on behalf of racial tolerance, suggested a somewhat more complex dynamic. By the mid-1950s, Graham had moved toward a type of regional leadership.
CHAPTER TWO
Evangelical Universalism in the Post-Brown South
Christ was not so much a reformer as he was a transformer. —Billy Graham, 1963
We must respect the law, but keep in mind that it is powerless to change the human heart. —Billy Graham, 1958
THE BRAND OF REGIONAL leadership Graham adopted required that he convincingly differentiate himself from leading figures on the southern right. One such person was W. A. Criswell, his pastor at First Baptist Church in Dallas. In February 1956, the firebrand Criswell delivered a well-publicized address to a joint session of the South Carolina legislature in which he endorsed segregation in both society and the church. Elsewhere in Columbia, Criswell castigated integrationists as “a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up.” Echoing many of his fundamentalist peers, he blasted the “spurious doctrine” of the “universal Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man.” Graham was soon pressed for a response to this rhetorical gauntlet. He averred that Criswell and he had “never seen eye to eye on the race question. My views have been expressed many times and are well known.”1
In truth, Graham's views were only beginning to enter public consciousness during a time when the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott and the contemporaneous school integration crisis grabbed the headlines. Such developments cast a spotlight on his identity as a southerner. National politicians, such as President Dwight Eisenhower, and national publications, such as Christian Century, looked to the evangelist to exert regional leadership concerning desegregation and race relations, as did a number of persons inside the South. During the latter half of the 1950s, Graham stopped merely responding to the events occurring around him and started carving out his own space and agenda.
As the decade continued, Graham gradually emerged as a regional leader. He published articles about race relations in national publications, consulted with southern church leaders and national politicians on racial matters, and, finally, held rallies in the aftermath of racial crises in Clinton, Tennessee, and Little Rock, Arkansas. In national venues, although less commonly from the crusade pulpit, he criticized legalized Jim Crow, condemned racial violence, and dismissed biblical justifications for segregation. At the same time, he remained publicly skeptical of legislative or judicial solutions to the civil rights crisis, preferring instead to stress the evangelical themes of neighborly love and the transformation of society through individual conversions. His perspective drew from a social ethic rooted in nineteenth-century evangelicalism, but also reflected the predicaments of racial moderation in the postwar United States.
Talking About Race
As Graham formalized his desegregated seating policy in the aftermath of the 1954 Brown decision, which declared de jure segregated public schooling to be unconstitutional, he grew more vocal on the subject of race. Beginning in 1955 and continuing into the early 1960s, he used national media outlets to communicate his views concerning race relations and civil rights. In a March 1955 interview on Meet the Press, Graham questioned whether segregation measured up to the standards of either Christianity or the American nation.2 The timing of the comments, delivered a few days before he departed for a crusade in Scotland, allowed him to avoid direct criticism at home while enhancing his image abroad. Upon his return to the United States, though, Graham made similar remarks during an appearance before the National Press Club.3
When speaking to southerners, Graham remained less strident in tone. At a 1956 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) gathering in Kansas City, he called an earlier resolution in favor of the Brown decision a “courageous stand” and argued that the SBC should lead in the area of race relations (just as the denomination had always led in matters of evangelism). In Oklahoma City, the Black Dispatch ran a brief article touting these remarks in anticipation of a Graham crusade in that Jim Crow city. In Kansas City, though, the evangelist chose not to use the more prophetic language of a draft speech in he which warned that, should his denomination fail on the race issue, “we may eventually find our spiritual power waning and our thrilling statistics only hollow echoes.” He also supported a decision at the convention to table further discussion of racial matters.4
The evangelist's first widely disseminated foray into racial issues came with an October 1956 article in Life magazine, published by Graham supporter Henry Luce.5 Life writer Hugh Moffett prepared the original draft based on interviews with the evangelist, who offered his final revisions two weeks before publication. Graham published the article with some reluctance and apparently passed along a draft for moderate Tennessee governor Frank Clement to peruse. The essay partially fulfilled a promise Graham had made to President Eisenhower to provide leadership in promoting racial tolerance and moderation.6
The Life article most likely did not change the minds of Graham's liberal detractors. The “vast majority of the ministers in the South,” he wrote of both black and white clerics, were “not extremists on either side” of the race issue. They supported desegregation of such services as public transportation, hotels, and restaurants, while remaining skeptical of the current feasibility of school integration in the Deep South. Observing a decline in race relations since the Brown decision, most ministers who had talked with the evangelist “confessed that the church is doing far too little about it.” In the article, Graham announced his policy of holding “nonsegregated” services and systematically dismantled two common Old Testament proof texts for segregation: the Hamitic curse and the commandment that Israelites separate themselves from other peoples. In the Hamitic curse, Noah, not God, had cursed Canaan, offspring of Noah's son, Ham (and Noah had done so after awakening from a drunken slumber). The condemned descendants of Canaan, Graham confidently asserted, were white Canaanites, not black Africans. As for the Israelites’ purity, their social separatism was along religious, not racial, lines. Moreover, Graham added,