“Never Had I Been So Blind”: W. A. Criswell’s “Change” on Racial Segregation

The most famous member of First Baptist Church of Dallas, Billy Graham, was quick to distance himself from Criswell’s remarks, telling reporters: “My Pastor and I have never seen eye to eye on the race question.” 

The bottom line, Criswell argued, was that forced desegregation was fundamentally undemocratic and unchristian, and he suggested that anyone who claimed to be “altogether desegregated is soft in the head.” He explained that he tried to segregate his daughter “from people that are iniquitous and vile and dirty and low down.” Denominations also segregated as they “mutually agree to worship apart.” The same, he said, obtained to racial segregation in the church. Challenging the integrationist view that African Americans were in favor of desegregation, he countered that black churches wanted to be segregated, and they should be allowed to stick “within their group,” “their social stratum,” “their kind.” Criswell was not against integration in principle, admitting to having witnessed social interaction on the mission field where “desegregated life is just marvelous.” He further added that segregation was not the ultimate will of God: “In heaven we’ll all be together,” he laughed. But forced desegregation this side of glory was wrong. Cloaking the Baptist principles of soul liberty and congregational autonomy in the patriotic language of personal privacy and individual freedom, he ended with a powerful appeal to be left alone: 

Don’t force me by law, by statute, by Supreme Court decision . . . to cross over in those intimate things where I don’t want to go. Let me build my life. Let me have my church. Let me have my school. Let me have my friends. Let me have my home. Let me have my family. And what you give to me, give to every man in America and keep it like our glorious forefathers made it—a land of the free and the home of the brave.

http://jsr.fsu.edu/Volume10/Freeman.pdf