William Franklin Graham Jr. was born on November 7, 1918, on a dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina, to a Presbyterian farming family. He was a restless teenager, more interested in baseball than in religion.
Days before turning 16, on November 1, 1934, he was converted during a series of meetings led by evangelist Mordecai Ham in Charlotte. The decision set the course of his life: to devote himself entirely to preaching the gospel.
He graduated in anthropology from Wheaton College in 1943 and, that same year, married Ruth Bell, daughter of Presbyterian missionaries in China. Ruth would be his ministry companion for 64 years.
In 1949, a three-week crusade under a tent in Los Angeles stretched to eight weeks after local celebrities announced their conversions. Dubbed the “canvas cathedral,” it launched Graham onto the national stage.
He founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in 1950 and went on to preach in packed stadiums in dozens of countries, on radio through the program Hour of Decision, and later on television. He also founded the magazine Christianity Today in 1956.
In the 1950s, amid racial segregation in the American South, he personally removed the ropes separating white and Black audiences at his crusades, starting in Chattanooga in 1953. Even so, he publicly asked Martin Luther King Jr. to “put on the brakes” during the Birmingham campaign in 1963, and criticized the civil disobedience of the Selma march in 1965. Decades later, in 2005, he acknowledged the mistake, saying he regretted not having marched alongside King in Selma.
In 1974, he convened the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, gathering nearly 2,700 leaders and guests from more than 150 countries and giving rise to the Lausanne Covenant, one of the most influential documents in evangelical missionary cooperation. He himself considered this the most significant legacy of his life.
His closeness to power also left shadows: recordings released in 2002 revealed antisemitic comments made in a private conversation with President Nixon in 1972. Graham publicly acknowledged the mistake and asked for forgiveness. He died on February 21, 2018, in Montreat, at age 99.
