MLK, Jr. versus Billy Graham
21 01 2008From my latest book, The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire.
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Graham strongly opposed those who pressed for rapid change in racist laws. Six years further on, in April, 1963, the perceived threat of violence in Birmingham triggered a court injunction aimed at ending peaceful demonstrations there. Christian Century magazine editorialized in support of King’s decision to ignore the court order and chastised Billy Graham for advising King “to put the brakes on a little bit”. Graham’s advice had gone out while King was languishing in the Birmingham jail. According to biographer William Martin, Graham said King’s timing was “questionable” and suggested “that blacks and whites alike would benefit from ‘a period of quietness in which moderation prevails.’”
In August, 1963, following Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Graham’s response was, “Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.” Perhaps emblematic of Graham’s opposition to King was his flagship magazine’s thoroughgoing avoidance of the man and his work. Though King had been acknowledged as a leader of national stature in the civil rights movement from the mid-fifties forward, Christianity Today did not even mention King by name until early 1964, when two sentences announced he had been named Time’s “Man of the Year.”
After passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act that year, Graham publicly appealed to King to stop demonstrating while “the people of the North and West have an opportunity to digest the new Civil Rights Act.”And his response to riots across the country was a demand that Congress drop all other work to fashion “new tough laws.”
At the same time, Johnson appealed to Graham to sit on a blue ribbon panel, the Community Relations Service, which he had created to handle fallout from the sweeping legislation. There was serious concern within the administration that the new law could generate a flood of legal challenges and reactionary violence. Graham declined to serve, preferring to focus his efforts on new crusades.
While Graham hid his alleged integrationist candle under a bushel of Biblical excuses, other white religionists laid their beliefs on the line. As far back as 1947, while Graham was launching his national ministry, Rev. Charles Jones had faced down rock-throwing, club wielding white supremacists and murder threats when he permitted mixed-race labor meetings in his Chapel Hill church. The lunch counter sit-ins in North Carolina in 1960 had drawn support from the North Carolina Council on Human Relations and the Unitarian Fellowship for Social Justice. George Schermer, executive director of the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, spoke out in support of rolling boycotts of segregationist businesses organized by the city’s black preachers. In 1961, The Rev. William Sloan Coffin, Jr., was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, during a civil rights protest, and he sustained enthusiastic support for the cause throughout the decade.
In 1963, a group of Conservative rabbis from Greenfield Park, New York, traveled to Birmingham to witness “in a testimony on behalf of the human rights and dignity of Negroes.” Then, in 1965, Unitarian minister James J. Reeb of Boston was murdered while doing civil rights work in Selma. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, leader of the Temple Emanu-El in Englewood, New Jersey, was unswerving in his dedication to racial equality, “telling his Conservative congregation in 1967, ‘A vote for the Republican Party … is a vote for racism, and I forbid it as an immoral act!’”
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Categories : Civil rights, National, WNC
