Content area
Full Text
News and Views: Billy Graham on Race.
For many black Americans, Billy Graham is seen as a political foe who supports a right-wing and racially repressive agenda. It may come as a surprise that Graham was one of the first Protestant leaders to move against the sins of Jim Crow. Years before Rosa Parks' dramatic protest to integrate the bus system of Montgomery, Alabama, Graham demanded an end to segregated seating at his gospel meetings. In 1957 Graham immediately went to Little Rock when President Eisenhower asked for a show of support for the federal troops dispatched to force the racial integration of Central High School. As early as 1958, he was denounced by the governor of North Carolina as a well-known "integrationist."
In the view of most African Americans, the Christian evangelical movement has been composed of devils dressed in angels' robes. But readers may be surprised to learn that Billy Graham was an early pioneer in the civil rights movement.
William Franklin Graham Jr. was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, on November 7, 1918. A son of the Jim Crow South, Graham was reared within a profoundly racist culture. Graham's dairy-farming father routinely referred to blacks as "niggers." But he also hired a black man as foreman for the farm. The young Billy worked alongside blacks on the farm, ate with blacks at the dinner table, and played with black children.
Billy Graham had always dreamed of attending the University of North Carolina. But his mother believed that the campuses of state universities were fertile grounds for everything evil. His father simply wanted him to stay home and work on the farm. A compromise was reached and in 1936 Billy enrolled at the all-white Bob Jones College, an unaccredited Bible school in Cleveland, Tennessee. Graham quickly became disenchanted with the strict regimen of the fundamentalist college. He soon transferred to the Florida Bible Institute in Tampa, another all-white school. During his three and a half years at Florida Bible Institute, Graham not only studied the Bible but honed his preaching skills. He was elected president of the senior class and...