Billy Graham's Los Angeles and New York Crusades

The event

Billy Graham, a young Southern Baptist evangelist who had already built a modest reputation through his association with the Youth for Christ organization, held a large evangelistic tent meeting in Los Angeles in the fall of 1949 that was originally planned to run for three weeks but, amid extensive newspaper coverage substantially driven by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst's instruction to his editors to "puff Graham" (the exact motivation behind which remains debated by historians), extended for over eight weeks and drew national attention.

The Los Angeles crusade launched Graham into national prominence, and he went on to conduct hundreds of large-scale evangelistic "crusades" over the following decades across six continents, adapting radio broadcasting and, increasingly, television to reach unprecedented audiences well beyond those who could attend his meetings in person.

His 1957 New York City crusade, held over sixteen weeks at Madison Square Garden and broadcast nationally on television, represented a further milestone, notable also for Graham's decision to insist on racially integrated seating at his meetings — a position he had already adopted earlier in the American South before it was legally required — and for his invitation to Martin Luther King Jr. to offer a public prayer at one of the New York meetings, at a time of significant civil rights tension in the United States.

Graham's organizational and technological approach — combining direct, theologically simple evangelistic preaching with sophisticated media outreach, extensive local church partnership, and systematic follow-up of new converts through the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association — became a widely emulated template for later evangelists and helped define the public face of mainstream American evangelical Protestantism for the remainder of the twentieth century.

Other witnesses

• Billy Graham Evangelistic Association archival materials

Further reading

• Christian History Magazine 111: Billy Graham — free full issue
• Christian History Magazine 92: A New Evangelical Awakening — free full issue