In 1957, when Billy Graham’s New York City crusade launched him into the national spotlight, he took the chance to cross racial lines in an age of segregation. From June 24–26, Graham, now a feeble 86, will hold possibly his final crusade in New York, and aides say his goal is to speak to “the entire world, every ethnic group.”
It has his team scrambling to find volunteers who can deliver “the good news” in nearly two-dozen languages.
“It’s massive. The publicity, the trainings, the arrangements,” said Graham language coordinator John Sowers, whose cubicle is now dwarfed by piles of Graham’s tracts in Urdu and Cantonese. “It’s shocking how diverse this city is.”
Reaching out to the largest possible audience is typical of Graham, known for his lifelong habit of casting a wide net for evangelism. With more than 1,500 churches and 81 denominations helping, technology will augment diversity.
Over three days, 10,000 headsets will translate Graham’s sermons into 20 languages. The event will be broadcast on a local Korean AM radio station all weekend, and coordinators are trying to set up similar services in Spanish and Chinese.
The crusade will be held in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, N.Y., regularly used by families from more than 130 language groups in neighboring communities.
The musical lineup includes Latin Grammy Award winner Marcos Witt, the gospel sounds of the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir and bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs.
Art Bailey, director of the New York crusade, said one of the first priorities for his office was building an event that involves a wide range of communities.
In his 20th year with Graham, “this may be the greatest extent that we’ve done that,” he said. “But it’s always been a part of what we’ve done.”
Graham’s first revival in New York in 1957 lasted 16 sold-out weeks at Madison Square Garden and made him the first coast-to-coast televised evangelist.
During that summer, Graham reached out to Latino and black groups, holding a rally in Harlem, N.Y., and offering Spanish services. He installed the first black member of his staff and asked a young Martin Luther King Jr. to share the pulpit with him at the Garden.
Not that Graham’s big tent policies were always well received.
In 1953, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision on desegregation, Graham became one of the first preachers to hold interracial revivals in the deep South, once personally removing the ropes that divided whites from blacks in a Chattanooga, Tenn., tabernacle.
Pastor Michel Faulkner of Manhattan’s primarily black Central Baptist Church was part of the committee that invited Graham to New York both on his last visit in 1991 and this summer.
He recognized Graham’s efforts as a racial reconciler. “Before it was in vogue, he was doing it, he was preaching in Harlem,” Faulkner said in an interview.
But he acknowledged some ambivalence about Graham’s record in the black community.
“Could he have done more? Well, Dr. Graham himself says he wishes he had done more.” Graham declined, for example, to take part in the 1963 March on Washington.
“Graham has a theological objection to too much engagement in politics,” said Randall Balmer, a scholar of modern evangelical figures and a professor at Barnard College in New York City.
Graham has written that he felt his place during that time was in the pulpit, not on the streets. “He feels that the way to bring about change in society is to change, as he would say, men’s hearts,” Balmer said.
In 2002, the city of Cincinnati was torn by racial riots after a black teen was shot by a white police officer. Local clergy asked Graham to hold his next crusade in their city on the condition that he speak about race.
“The decision to have him come was controversial,” said pastor Damon Lynch Jr., the chief fund-raiser for Graham’s Cincinnati crusade.
“It was a polarized situation, but everything went beautifully,” said Lynch, who is black.
Over the four-day event, Graham was forceful in his words about the evils of racism.
The crusade set attendance records for Cincinnati’s stadium. More important, Lynch said, church communities across the city, of all races, worked closely on making the event happen.
Graham’s legacy includes the connections he has made between blacks and whites in communities and between cultures and people groups throughout the world.
He held services for a crowd of more than 1 million in Seoul, South Korea, and preached in Moscow during the Cold War.
His son, Franklin Graham, now president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, continues to travel extensively.
Officials said Graham sees his trip to New York, the city that bills itself as the world’s second home, as a chance to fit everyone under one big tent.
The Graham crusade is aggressively reaching out to Spanish-speaking churches, reflecting a trend worldwide as Latinos join Protestant and evangelical traditions in larger numbers.
Adolfo Carrion, the local chair for outreach to the Latino community, said the organization has tried to include everyone. “We have people from all over Latin America. It’s like the U.N.,” he said.
The Korean Christian community has been especially active in promoting the event, according to the Graham office. More than a third of the city’s 300 Korean Christian churches are in Flushing, N.Y., where the event will take place, and they are sponsoring the three-day Korean radio broadcast of the event.
New York has changed in the last 50 years, growing more international every year, reflecting a growing diversity of language and culture.
According to religion demographer Vivian Klaff of the University of Delaware in Newark, Del., Graham will find the city far more diverse than 14 years ago, when he last preached here.
While Graham may be reaching out, not all communities are reaching back. Despite the elaborate preparations, Klaff said, “The largest proportion will still be white Protestant.”
On a recent Sunday at the Christian Cultural Center in East Brooklyn, N.Y., members of the largely black congregation expressed ambivalence about whether they themselves would attend, even though their pastor, A.R. Bernard, is chair of this year’s crusade.
As Michael Brown waited for a bus to take him home, he wasn’t sure whether he would make it up to Flushing, N.Y., to hear Graham. Nonetheless he expressed optimism about Graham’s effort to reach the world through New York.
“However the Lord uses people to spread the word as far as possible — that’s the bottom line,” Brown said.
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