Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South. Steven P. Miller
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Faubus, the sociopolitical meaning of the rallies centered on “law and order,” a term the editorial page of the Arkansas Gazette had readily invoked when arguing for obedience to court desegregation orders. The paper's more conservative counterpart, the Arkansas Democrat, invoked the same slogan in a political cartoon published during the week of the rallies. The cartoon shows three banners flying over downtown Little Rock; one advertises the Graham rallies, another announces a contemporaneous meeting of the Shriners, and the third declares the “Triumph of Law and Order.”74 What ultimately swayed many business and civic leaders to support school desegregation was opposition to segregationist mob violence and its debilitating effects on the image of the city. Their solution was to embrace law and order.75 No less malleable than any other civic virtue, the slogan in Little Rock stood for moderation: obedience to constitutional authority, but not support for any specific reform or protest agenda. This usage of law and order preceded the significantly more familiar—and more consistently conservative—connotations the term assumed beginning in the mid-1960s. Graham tapped into a national, as well as regional, discourse of moderation. Two years earlier, Life magazine had described Arkansas Gazette editor Harry Ashmore as part of a “fifth column of decency” and opened an editorial praising Eisenhower's decision to employ federal troops with the premature declaration, “Law and Order have returned to Little Rock.”76 The Graham rallies offered evidence that Little Rock had finally achieved a degree of law and order, especially since they had occurred without incident. Graham appeared more than aware that his visit buttressed the interests of those moderates in the South who, as he assured an audience elsewhere, would triumph if only other southerners would cease resorting to “flag waving, inflammatory statements and above all, violence.” This politics of decency might also triumph if more people knew of its existence. “The newspapers of America and the world have carried stories of violence and trouble on the front pages about Little Rock,” Graham declared during the altar call of the final service. “I would like to challenge them to carry this story.”77
The Theological Status of Segregationism in Postwar America
As both the Columbia and the Little Rock rallies revealed, Graham's actions and statements in support of improved race relations and desegregation garnered growing criticism from hardline segregationists. Governor Timmerman of South Carolina remained exceptional as an elected official willing to castigate Graham on record, although Frank Boykin privately tried to steer the evangelist away from supporting integration.78 Most of the public reaction against the evangelist came from grassroots racists, including members of the Ku Klux Klan, from whom Graham said he received “incredibly obscene letters.” By 1957, Klan leaders had added Graham to their attention-grubbing list of targets, labeling the evangelist a “nigger lover” and (following a freak injury he suffered after an encounter with an aggressive farm animal) declaring, “God bless the ram that butted him down the hill.” Segregationist agitator John Kasper protested Graham's desegregated 1958 Charlotte crusade and similarly referred to the evangelist as a “negro lover.”79
A smaller amount of opposition came from nominally more respectable white southerners, mostly from the Deep South. Following Graham's statement that he and W. A. Criswell did not always see “eye to eye” on race, the evangelist reportedly received several calls from First Baptist congregants demanding that he relinquish his membership.80 Independent or nonmainline fundamentalist groups in the South, such as the Carolina Baptist Fellowship and supporters of Bob Jones University, represented a more common source of criticism. They chafed at Graham's increasing willingness to cooperate with nonevangelical groups but also objected to his positions on race.81 Following Graham's 1956 article in Life, prominent segregationist minister Carey Daniel announced his break with an evangelist who now embraced “black supremacy.”82 A New Orleans segregationist who had been excommunicated from the Catholic Church for her activism publicly challenged Graham to debate the merits of integration.83 Other critics attacked Graham for “betray[ing]” his “homeland” by entering into “racial politics” at the expense of his spiritual duties. “A lot of the good people of the Deep South have been heading for Heaven for a long time,” editorialized the Selma (Ala.) Times- Journal in 1957, “and they are going to get there whether or not [Graham] likes it.” The title of another hostile editorial that year read, “Billy Lost South When He Jumped to Politics.”84
Yet clearly Graham had not lost the whole of the white South. Even outspoken segregationists remained split in their responses to the evangelist. Criswell blasted Bob Jones, Sr., and his heir at Bob Jones University as “crackpot[s]” for their criticism of Graham.85 While many fundamentalists, in addition to professional segregationists like John Kasper, felt few restraints in dismissing Graham or challenging him to debates, other Jim Crow partisans approached him with relative humility. The evangelist “is personally a fine young man,” wrote a Charlotte resident to Graham's father-in-law, Nelson Bell, despite being “misled on the negro question.” Another North Carolina critic wrote to Graham (in a letter copied to each southern governor) not “in a spirit of antagonism, but in the hope it will be taken as constructive criticism, not to be finding fault with the ministry, but to plead with [desegregationist ministers] before it is too late.” If only Graham knew of Martin Luther King's communist ties, wrote one professed admirer of the evangelist, he would surely denounce the civil rights leader.86 Perhaps these correspondents did not view the evangelist as a race mixer at heart. At the very least, they were nonplussed that a southerner who shared so many of their theological leanings could differ with them on this issue. A South Carolina newspaper branded Graham “one of the strongest advocates for total integration,” while acknowledging his otherwise “wonderful work” as an evangelist.87 Most important, though, such hedged criticisms testified to the social and spiritual clout Graham possessed, even though he remained hesitant to employ this leverage in a forceful manner. Critics of his racial views often felt compelled to pay their respects to this overwhelmingly popular minister of God. Many other segregationists never felt compelled to criticize him at all.
Nelson Bell responded to a number of segregationist critics on behalf of his son-in-law. Some of the charges coming from foes of Graham bordered on the absurd (e.g., the “black supremacy” allegation) and were easily countered. Other correspondents simply requested clarification of his opinions on racial matters. In answering these letters, Bell sometimes exceeded his task of defending Graham, to the point where he misrepresented or exaggerated the evangelist's positions and injected his own. As a racial conservative and a public defender of “voluntary segregation,” Bell possessed many ties with segregationist activists. His biases surfaced in his letters, as when Bell wrote to one Tennessean that blacks “must earn social recognition” and declared himself “dead against” Martin Luther King, Jr., “and the cause for which he stands.” In a 1958 letter, dated well after Graham's piece in Ebony, Bell declared that “Billy does not believe in integration any more than you and I do.” When insisting on Graham's opposition to “forced integration,” Bell never once acknowledged the evangelist's support for moderate anti–Jim Crow legislation and obedience to judicial rulings on civil rights.88
While Graham could not be mistaken for a civil rights activist, he placed much ideological and theological, if not always spatial, distance between himself and his southern segregationist peers during the latter half of the 1950s. He began criticizing segregation in religious settings and attacking the use of Christianity to justify Jim Crow a decade or more before many of his southern peers publicly arrived at such positions. Criswell, for example, did not openly endorse desegregated church services until 1968.89 Like Criswell, Graham commanded appeal among grassroots white southerners (as well as politicians) well removed from the more racially progressive spheres of denominational publishing houses and policy committees. This appeal gave the evangelist tangible influence in the region—or, at the very least, inspired deference to his desegregationist policies.
Graham's shift toward racial moderation challenges how some scholars have viewed the religious status of segregationism during the civil rights era—and suggests that segregationism faced theological defeat well before it faced political demise.90 Graham indicates the fairly early timing of this loss. “When southern ministers of Rev. Graham's