Criswell was a magnetic preacher, but like Graham, he had a dim view of the civil rights movement and of activists like Martin Luther King Jr. When officials invited Criswell to preach at an evangelism conference for the South Carolina Baptist Convention in 1956, he railed against government enforced integration. Criswell stated that desegregation is “a denial of all that we believe in.” He went on to say that Brown v Board was “foolishness” and an “idiocy,” and he called anyone who advocated for racial integration “a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck
