Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South. Steven P. Miller
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two African Americans, maintenance workers at the crusade stadium. BGEA images from the Columbia crusade, held earlier that year, reveal similar results, despite an official claim that the audience for the final service contained “solid blocks…of Negroes.”61
Jim Crow was thus an expected part of Graham's 1952 crusade in Jackson, Mississippi, capital of a state commonly considered the deepest part of the Deep South. The generally glowing coverage from the city's two daily newspapers—one of which ran a “Billy Graham Boxscore” listing the decision tally from the latest service—captured the routine thrust of his social commentary during that presidential election year. The evangelist lamented President Truman's firing of “star quarterback” Douglas MacArthur (who had just spoken at the Republican National Convention in Chicago) and, in a comment easily interpretable as an endorsement of Dwight Eisenhower for the presidency, urged citizens to vote in the upcoming elections for candidates who possessed moral integrity. “Christians Must Be Devoted to Their Cause to Combat Communists,” alliterated a headline recounting a Graham sermon.62
Then, in the final days of the crusade, a less typical headline appeared in the Jackson Daily News: “Billy Graham Hits State Liquor System, Scores Segregation in Church.” The paper ran an interview Graham had given in Jackson to the United Press news syndicate. “There is no scriptural basis for segregation,” the evangelist declared, even while he admitted to following local racial customs in his services. “The audience may be segregated,” he added, “but there is no segregation at the altar.” Likewise, there should be none “in the church.” Those who come forward during his services, he stressed, “stand as individuals. And it touches my heart when I see white stand shoulder in shoulder with black at the cross.”63 Graham balked at issuing such bold language from the crusade platform, although he did declare in his nightly sermon that God's love was “unlimited racially.” The gesture drew expressions of approval from the black section of his audience.64
Graham's United Press interview represented his first definitive public statement about Jim Crow given in a southern setting. His comments were sandwiched between less surprising condemnations of obscene book sales and Mississippi's tax on illegal liquor sales. The following day, most likely after Graham had received a concerned phone call from Mississippi governor Hugh White, an article in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger emphasized Graham's opposition to legalized liquor before adding the following clarification concerning “another subject”: “I feel that I have been misinterpreted on racial segregation. We follow the existing social customs in whatever part of the country in which we minister. As far as I have been able to find in my study of the Bible, it has nothing to say about segregation or non-segregation.” Graham emphasized that he “came to Jackson to preach only the Bible, and not to enter into local issues,” a statement that rested uncomfortably within an article detailing his prohibitionist pronouncements. (Two days after this retraction, though, Graham passed along an account of his initial critique of segregation to the head of the Detroit Council of Churches.) Neither of the ultrasegregationist Jackson papers further explored the matter of the United Press interview. Following the crusade, the Daily News returned to a more comfortable Cold War theme, arguing that Graham's efforts “might not only prove to be our best, but our only real defense against communism.”65 The Jackson crusade, then, featured only a premature expression of antisegregationist sentiments that had yet to congeal.66
In his 1953 crusade in Chattanooga, Graham took a more forthright stand against segregation in religious settings.67 Before the start of the crusade, he personally removed the ropes separating the black and the white sections of the audience. “Either these ropes stay down,” Graham recalled telling two ushers, “or you can go on and have the revival without me.”68 Chattanooga thus became Graham's first strategically desegregated crusade in an unambiguous Jim Crow environment.69 The seating policy went unreported in Chattanooga's major dailies, which gave more attention to Graham's proficiency on the golf course, although the evangelist later claimed that his action “caused the head usher to resign in anger right on the spot (and raised some other hackles).”70 A photograph attributed to the Chattanooga crusade and later used in a BGEA promotional booklet shows white and black audience members sitting together. Graham made sure to hedge the ramifications of his move. As an Upper South industrial city, Chattanooga was certain to be more tolerant of a policy change than cities in neighboring Deep South states; it housed one of the more liberal newspapers in the region, the Chattanooga Times, owned by the Ochs family of New York Times fame. Besides, Graham predicted to the crusade ushers, blacks in the audience would probably continue to sit together. According to an early biographer, the evangelist was correct; moreover, the black attendance was disappointingly low.71
While Graham had personally come to oppose segregation in his services, he did not formalize that position until after the 1954 Brown decision against public school segregation.72 Less than two months after the Chattanooga crusade, the BGEA reluctantly acquiesced to a Dallas crusade committee's request for segregated seating. An instruction sheet for Dallas ushers described a section to be set aside for black attendees until the start of the service, after which seating would be open to all comers.73 The May 17, 1954, Brown decision broke while Graham was crusading in Great Britain. The author of the unanimous decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren, had led a public gathering of Washington officials who bade Graham farewell before he crossed the Atlantic.74 In the aftermath of Brown, Graham conducted desegregated crusades in Nashville (1954), New Orleans (1954), Richmond (1956), and Louisville (1956), as well as one Deep South city, New Orleans (1954). With the exception of the New Orleans crusade (which had been scheduled before the Brown decision), Graham intentionally avoided the Deep South, turning down most invitations to preach there during the mid- and late 1950s.75
In the immediate aftermath of Brown, the BGEA's policy on desegregation remained in a formative stage. Ten days after the decision, a BGEA associate informed a New Orleans crusade executive committee that Graham “feels very strongly that we must abandon the idea of segregation in our meetings, especially since secular organizations have taken the lead. I hope this will meet with the Committee's approval there in New Orleans.”76 In July of that year, Graham himself wrote to Southern Baptist pastor James M. Gregg of Nashville recommending that “Negroes be allowed to sit anywhere they like…and that nothing be said one way or the other about it.” Graham also advised having a black pastor lead prayer at the crusade once a week. He did not link these requests with Christian morality but rather stressed the increasingly “world-wide” nature of his ministry: “The Nashville crusade will be written up quite extensively in the British press, and of course our work in England would suffer tremendously if they thought we were having a segregated meeting. They have no conception of the problem and would blame me for anything that would happen…. I have been in prayer on this point almost more than any other point concerning our Nashville and New Orleans meetings. So much is at stake. I personally think the less said the better.”77 The evangelist went on to predict that few blacks would attend the Nashville crusade anyway. Gregg recalled that African American attendees tended to sit apart, while another crusade leader remembered more mixed seating.78 During one sermon in Nashville, Graham did offer an uncharacteristically direct denunciation of white racialism, although not segregationism per se: “We have become proud as a race—we have been proud and thought we were better than any other race, any other people. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to stumble into hell because of our pride.” These words represented a theological restatement of Hooton's warning in Up from the Ape against racial presumptuousness. Despite this forceful, if politically ambiguous, declaration, the crusade received glowing coverage in the strongly segregationist pages of the Nashville Banner, which published every sermon delivered during the four weeks of services.79
With the Nashville crusade, as well as the New Orleans crusade held later in 1954, desegregated seating became a requirement for crusade hosts. Graham gradually grew more direct in his description of this policy. “Naturally,” he wrote to Richmond minister James Appleby in 1955, “I am assuming that the meeting in Richmond would be non-segregated.” In Richmond, the Graham team began addressing criticisms that it included black ministers in the crusade planning process only