Billy Graham

Billy Graham grew up on a dairy farm outside Charlotte, North Carolina, and was converted at sixteen at a tent revival. He studied at a Bible institute in Florida and at Wheaton College in Illinois and became a traveling preacher for Youth for Christ. In 1949 a tent crusade in Los Angeles, scheduled for three weeks, ran for eight after the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst reportedly told his editors to promote the young preacher. Graham was suddenly a national figure.

He built the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association into a modern ministry with radio, television, films, and the magazine Christianity Today. His 1957 crusade at Madison Square Garden lasted sixteen weeks. Over his career he preached in person to an estimated two hundred million people in more than 185 countries, more than anyone in history. He gave evangelical Protestantism, which had retreated from public life after the Scopes trial, a respectable and widely trusted face.

Graham ended segregated seating at his crusades in 1953, when he took down the ropes himself in Chattanooga, and he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to pray at the New York crusade in 1957. He was also criticized by civil rights activists for urging patience and for avoiding open confrontation with Southern segregationists. He met every president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama and was especially close to Richard Nixon. When Watergate tapes released in 2002 caught him making antisemitic remarks to Nixon in 1972, he apologized publicly.

In later decades he stayed largely aloof from the religious right that grew up in the 1980s, warning that evangelicals should not be captured by a party, while his son Franklin took a more openly political course. He died at his home in North Carolina in February 2018, at ninety-nine, and his body lay in honor in the Capitol Rotunda, one of very few private citizens accorded that distinction.