Billy Graham and the Stadium Crusades
From the canvas-tent meetings of 1949 Los Angeles to global televised crusades, Billy Graham preached the gospel in person to more than 215 million people across 185 countries.
William Franklin "Billy" Graham (1918–2018) was a North Carolina farm boy who attended Florida Bible Institute and Wheaton College, then took over a small radio programme called Songs in the Night. The 1949 Greater Los Angeles Crusade — an eight-week tent meeting in a parking lot at Washington and Hill — was extended after press baron William Randolph Hearst told his editors to "puff Graham", and made him a national figure overnight.
Over the next half-century Graham held more than 400 crusades, including a record-setting 1973 meeting in Seoul, South Korea, where the final-night crowd at Yoido Plaza was estimated at 1.1 million. He counselled 12 U.S. presidents from Truman to Obama, helped found Christianity Today magazine in 1956, and from the 1960s onward insisted his crusades be racially integrated — personally tearing down the rope dividing Black and White attendees at his 1953 Chattanooga meeting.
His Billy Graham Evangelistic Association estimates that 215 million people in 185 countries heard him preach in person. He died at his home in Montreat, North Carolina in February 2018.