Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South. Steven P. Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ desegregated nature of the rallies had been well publicized, and questions remained about whether Governor Orval Faubus and the Little Rock police force would provide adequate security for the services. These concerns were pressing because the Little Rock Citizens’ Council had launched its own crusade against the evangelist. According to Citizens’ Council chaplain Wesley Pruden, who was something of a celebrity among the massive resistance set, the group distributed forty thousand flyers attacking the integrationist agenda of both Graham and the ministers who had invited him. In making the case for Graham (and, by implication, the case against Faubus), the liberal Arkansas Gazette emphasized the evangelist's southern identity: “Billy Graham has preached the gospel on every continent and in the isles across the sea, but his heart, as he has said, has remained in his native South.” The editorial reflected what two sociologists called the “exaggerated southerner technique,” a strategy Graham and other moderate or liberal southern ministers (along with their secular counterparts) employed to accentuate their regional credentials.⁶⁸

      Even though Graham downplayed the racial aspect of the Little Rock rallies, he did not avoid commenting on that matter altogether. “I have said many times,” he reiterated in a press conference, “that nobody can cite the Bible as a defense for segregation.” The two services drew a combined crowd of around 50,000 (including a young William Jefferson Clinton) and featured no racial incidents, although fear of violence likely depressed the overall attendance. A glowing report written for the BGEA emphasized that the rally united people “not as integrationists or segregationists, but as Christians.” In one of his sermons, Graham urged the audience to “obey constitutional authority as long as it doesn't interfere with the worship of God.” Addressing the generic sinner, Graham implied that regenerated hearts should lead to renewed social consciences as well: “When a moral issue comes up you don't really stand up for what you know is right. You're spiritually dead.”⁶⁹

      More striking than Graham's occasional comments on race were the ways in which his visit served the interests of city boosters seeking to revive the image of Little Rock. That image had received a further blow only days before the rally, when segregationists dynamited the city school board headquarters. The bombings occurred just as public schools were reopening after a year of forced closure by Governor Faubus.⁷⁰ In the case of one recognizable Little Rock citizen and Graham supporter, Jimmy Karam, the rallies helped to resuscitate his personal reputation. To label Karam mercurial would be an understatement. A Little Rock clothier, friend of Faubus, and former associate of the Urban League whom bystanders had identified as a supervisor of the 1957 violence at Central High School, Karam was rough-edged and opportunistic, yet desperate to revise his well-earned notoriety as a thug. Only months before his antics at Central High School, a thoroughly nonreligious Karam had attended Graham's 1957 New York crusade, which he claimed had exerted no effect on him. By early 1959, however, Karam had come under the influence of W. O. Vaught, pastor of the most prominent Baptist church in Little Rock, who guided him into the faith. Karam became a leading sponsor of the Graham visit and continued to support the evangelist in subsequent decades. During the Little Rock rallies, the evangelist and the convert visited four of the school board bombing suspects in jail.⁷¹ Karam's story made the pages of Time magazine—as did the fact that, although he had recanted his role as a segregationist rabble rouser, he declined to state whether he personally still supported Jim Crow. His critics noted that he definitely still backed Governor Faubus.⁷²

      The Little Rock rallies, alas, did not net even an ambiguous racial conversion from Faubus, who had also attended the New York crusade (likely with Karam). During the one Little Rock service the governor attended, he arrived late and momentarily had to sit on the stadium's concrete stairs. A photograph in the strongly anti-Faubus Arkansas Gazette shows him searching for a seat while a young black male, sporting sunglasses, sits comfortably in front of the pacing governor. According to one report, Graham and Karam paid a discreet visit to the gubernatorial mansion that day.⁷³

      To Little Rock boosters, most of whom opposed 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 СКАЧАТЬ