Martin Luther King Jr. & Billy Graham

Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks on January 13, 2009

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. is often quoted as declaring, “Eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.” While King frequently used the line, he was actually quoting a 1950s Reader’s Digest article on racism written by Billy Graham.

Graham took an early and strong stand for civil rights, insisting on holding integrated crusades in Jackson, Miss., as early as 1952 (two years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case). During a 1953 crusade in Chatanooga, Tenn., Billy Graham himself tore down ropes diving white and black sections.

“My action caused the head usher to resign in anger on the spot,” Billy said in his 1997 autobiography Just As I Am, “But I did not back down.”

In 1950 he explained his integrated Washington, D.C., crusade to reporters by saying, “In church there is no color line,” (in seeming contradiction to his own ‘most segregated hour in American’ line, though it’s perhaps explained as the difference between the way things are and the way they should be).

Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr. were allies and good friends. King even asked Billy to call him “Mike.” King advised Graham and his team on racial issues and Graham’s team gave King’s team advice on organization and fund raising.

In a 1957 letter to Billy Graham, King thanked the evangelist for his stand against segregation and for the opportunity to pray at the New York Crusade and meet with Graham’s team:

“Although we have a long, long way to go in solving the internal problem of race facing our nation, I still have faith in the future. We are gradually emerging from the bleak and desolate midnight of injustice into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice. This remains true because God is forever at work in his universe. I am convinced now more than ever before that God lives. They that stand against him stand in a tragic and an already declared minority; they that stand with him stand in the glow of the world’s bright tomorrows.”

The two pillars of twentieth century Christianity had an understanding. Graham’s domain was the stadium, challenging people with the message of the gospel, and King’s was the streets, demanding the social justice the gospel exemplified. “You stay in the stadiums, Billy, because you will have far more impact on the white establishment there than you would if you marched in the streets,” wrote King.

But that understanding didn’t mean the two didn’t clash over methods:

“Graham had second thoughts about the very idea of civil disobedience: ‘No matter what the law may be—it may be an unjust law—I believe we have a Christian responsibility to obey it. Otherwise you have anarchy.’ To this, King cited Saint Augustine, that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’” (Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham and the White House)

The divide would become even more pronounced as King began to speak out against the Vietnam war and make a case for poverty that many saw as leading to Communism. Some even suggest that Graham completely opposed King along with his methods, such as the book Billy Graham and the Beloved Community by Michael G. Long.

This apparent clash between Graham and King is easier to understand if King is seen in his proper historical context as a radical and not the whitewashed national hero we remember today. Much like Jesus, King is often remembered as kinder, gentler and less controversial than he really was.

Years later Billy Graham would confide in civil rights leaders that he wondered what would have happened if he took to the streets with Martin Luther King Jr. After the violence of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Ala., in 1965 Billy Graham seemed almost ready to do just that: “It’s true I haven’t been to jail yet. I underscore the word yet. Maybe I haven’t done all I could or should do.”

Graham didn’t end up taking to the streets, but he did cancel a planned European tour to hold crusades across Alabama in an attempt to heal the racial divide and quell the violence. The FBI warned him of at least one bomb threat (which was nothing compared to the constant threats to King).

Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr. were allies, if unsteady allies at times, but Graham constantly preached the eternal view on the civil rights issue:

“Jesus was not a white man; he was not a black man. He came from that part of the world that touches Africa and Asia and Europe. Christianity is not a white man’s religion and don’t let anybody ever tell you that it’s white or black. Christ belongs to all people; He belongs to the whole world!”