Buchi ‘Law’ Okeke

Billy Graham was born on November 7, 1918, in a farm house in a North Carolina dairy farm. His parents instilled discipline in him as he grew. In the fall of 1934, at age 15, Graham made a personal commitment to follow Christ at a revival meeting led by the travelling evangelist Rev. Mordecai Ham. At such a young age, Billy Graham was about to experience the transformation of a traditional farm boy into an instrument of God. In this article, I showcase some of the various steps Graham used in confronting racial segregation, apartheid, discrimination, and unfairness all around the world.

Billy Graham helped the fight against racial segregation in the United States of America and around the world. He helped in the transformation of the lives of different people from different backgrounds in finding Jesus. He helped lead them to finding a relationship between the Bible and contemporary secular viewpoints.

At a time when sit-ins and boycotts were stirring racial tensions in the south, Graham invited Martin Luther King, Jr., to discuss the racial situation with him and his colleagues and to lead the congregation in prayer. The implication was unmistakable. Graham was letting both whites and blacks know that he was willing to be identified with the Civil rights movement and its foremost leader, and King was telling blacks that Billy Graham was their ally. Graham also bailed King out of jail in the 1960’s when King was arrested during demonstrations.

During a 1953 rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Graham tore down the ropes that organizers had erected in order to segregate the audience into racial sections. In his memoirs, he recounted that he told two ushers to leave the barriers down or you can go on and have the revival without me. He warned a white audience, We have been proud and thought we were better than any other race, any other people. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to stumble into hell because of our pride.

In 1957, Graham’s stance towards integration became more publicly shown when he allowed black ministers Thomas Kilgore and Gardner Taylor to serve as members of his New York’s Crusade executive committee and invited Rev. King, whom he first met during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, to join him in the pulpit at his 16-week revival in New York City, where 2.3 million gathered at Madison Square Garden, Yankee stadium, and Times Square to hear them. Graham recalled in his autobiography that during this time, he and King developed a close bond and that he was eventually one of the few people who referred to King as Mike”, a nickname which King asked only his closest friends to call him. Following King’s assassination in 1968, Graham mourned that the US had lost a social leader and a prophet.

Evangelist Billy Graham and the late Rev. King

Graham held integrated crusades in Birmingham, Alabama, on Easter 1964 in the aftermath of the bombing of the sixteenth street Baptist Church, and toured Alabama again in the wake of the violence that accompanied the first Selma to Montgomery March in 1965.

Graham’s continuous desire to see a more united world prompted his maturing view of race and segregation; he told a member of the Ku Klux Klan that “integration was necessary primarily for religious reasons. There is no scriptural basis for segregation. Graham further argued, The ground at the foot of the cross is level, and it touches my heart when I see whites standing shoulder to shoulder with blacks at the cross.

Even in the heart of Africa, the first fully integrated public meeting ever held in South Africa was the Billy Graham Crusade in Durban in 1973. Billy Graham openly denounced apartheid, he told the crowd, 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. Mr. Graham also held a crusade in Johannesburg that year, about 20 years after receiving initial invites to preach in South Africa. He wouldn’t accept an invitation unless the crusades were racially integrated. Graham also corresponded with imprisoned South African leader Nelson Mandela during the latter’s 27-year imprisonment.

Billy Graham held South Africa’s first public integrated meetings in Durban and, a few days later, in Johannesburg (pictured) in 1973

Bill Clinton once said about Rev. Graham, I will never forget the first time I saw [Billy Graham], 60 years ago in Little Rock, during the school integration struggle, he filled a football stadium with a fully integrated audience, reminding them that we all come before God as equals, both in our imperfections and our absolute claim to amazing grace.

Evangelist Billy Graham and former US President Bill Clinton

No wonder, more than 3.2 million people have responded to the invitation at Billy Graham crusades to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. As of 2008, Grahams estimated lifetime audience, including radio and television broadcasts topped 2.2 billion. Because of his crusades, Graham preached the gospel to more people in person than anyone in the history of Christianity. Graham was repeatedly on Gallup’s list of most admired men and women. He appeared on the list 60 times since 1995, more than any other individual in the world.

Photo credits: billygraham.org