The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

by Jemar Tisby

Not all Protestant Christians were openly supportive of segregation, of course. Many were racial moderates, seeking to find a middle way between the various positions. One of the best-known and most respected evangelical leaders of the time, the Reverend Billy Graham, was a racial moderate when it came to segregation. To his credit, Graham went much further than many white evangelicals in an effort to desegregate his religious gatherings. At a crusade in California in 1953, Graham personally took down ropes segregating black and white seating in the audience. “Either these ropes stay down, or you can go on and have the revival without me,” he said.12 Yet Graham, like many white evangelicals, held back from actively pushing for black civil rights. After the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board decision, Graham deliberately avoided scheduling crusades in the South for a period to avoid getting embroiled in the more heated conflicts about desegregation. Shortly after Brown, Graham stated, “I believe the heart of the problem of race is in loving our neighbor.”13 While few Christians would object that racism is a failure to love one’s neighbor, Graham did not carry that statement any further into the realm of institutional racism. Like many evangelicals, Graham believed race relations would gradually improve—one conversion and one friendship at a time. He viewed racial conflict as a local issue and a social matter. Furthermore, Graham was quite vocal in his denunciation...