Billy Graham

William Franklin Graham Jr. was born on November 7, 1918, in a farmhouse near Charlotte, North Carolina, and grew up on his family’s dairy farm. The eldest of four children of Morrow Coffey Graham and William Franklin Graham Sr., he was raised in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church and attended Sharon Grammar School and Sharon High School. As a boy he loved books, especially stories about Tarzan, and was known for imitating Tarzan’s yell from the trees. His early life was rural, strict, and deeply tied to church and family.

Graham became one of the best-known American evangelists of the mid-to-late 20th century. An ordained Southern Baptist minister, he rose to public prominence beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s by preaching live sermons to stadiums and other large venues around the world. His annual evangelistic campaigns, known as “crusades,” ran from 1947 until his retirement in 2005 and were often carried by radio and television. He also hosted the radio program Hour of Decision from 1950 to 1954. According to his website, he spoke to live audiences totaling at least 210 million people in more than 185 countries and territories.

Several experiences shaped Graham’s thinking before he became a public figure. At 15, after Prohibition ended, his father made him and his sister Catherine drink beer until they became sick, an experience that led both siblings to avoid alcohol and drugs for the rest of their lives. At 16, Graham was converted during revival meetings led by evangelist Mordecai Ham in Charlotte in 1934. He attended Bob Jones College briefly, then transferred to the Florida Bible Institute, where he preached his first sermon at Bostwick Baptist Church near Palatka, Florida. In 1939, he was ordained by Southern Baptist clergy at Peniel Baptist Church in Palatka.

Graham later enrolled at Wheaton College in Illinois, where he made a defining decision to accept the Bible as the infallible word of God. Henrietta Mears of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood helped him wrestle with that question, and he settled it at Forest Home Christian Camp in southern California. While at Wheaton, he was invited to preach at the United Gospel Tabernacle church in 1941, then was repeatedly asked back and eventually became its pastor after prayer and advice from Dr. Edman. In June 1943, he graduated from Wheaton College.

Graham’s public ministry extended beyond preaching. He repudiated racial segregation during a period of intense racial strife in the United States, insisting on racial integration at his revivals and crusades as early as 1953. In 1957, he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to preach jointly at a revival in New York City. He was close to several U.S. presidents, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon, and was a lifelong friend of Robert Schuller. Though he had early suspicions toward Catholicism, he later developed amicable ties with many American Catholic figures and encouraged unity between Catholics and Protestants.

Across more than six decades, Graham used stadium preaching, radio, television, publishing, and other media to reach audiences far beyond the churches where he began. His staff said more than 3.2 million people responded to invitations at Billy Graham Crusades to “accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior.” He appeared on Gallup’s list of most admired men and women a record 61 times. His words still matter to readers because they came from a life spent speaking plainly about faith, public conduct, conscience, and the Bible in front of crowds large and small.