“He Belonged to All the Races”: The Evolution of Graham’s Race Ethics

Abstract

“Southern-born, I was reared in a community where typically Southern attitudes prevailed. If there were Negroes who chafed in their status as second-class citizens, I was not aware of them.”¹ As a child in North Carolina, young Billy Graham was raised by parents supportive of Jim Crow, attended segregated schools and churches, drank at “whites only” water fountains, shopped in stores that refused service to African Americans, and benefited from the everyday labors of African Americans on the Graham farm. It is little wonder that he adopted the racist attitudes of the rural South “without much reflection.”² Graham’s early racism, however, was more than just a matter of not seeing African Americans chafe under second-class citizenship; young Billy also did his own small part to keep Jim Crow alive and kicking in North Carolina in the 1930s and 1940s. Biographer Marshall Frady, for example, reports that Graham adamantly refused to join his white friends for trips to “colored” barbershops, saying: “‘Long as there’s a white barbershop in Charlotte, I’ll never have my haircut at a nigger barbershop. Never.’”³.