Does Billy Graham deserve a statue in Washington D.C.?
Let’s review the life of an evangelist
Published in
7 min readMay 13, 2024
A spot for a new statue in Washington D.C. came available after a white supremacist was removed. On Thursday, May 16, 2024, a new statue of Billy Graham will be unveiled.
It’s actually just replacing one white supremacist with another. Let’s think back on Billy Graham, the world-famous evangelist who died in 2018.
The story isn’t as ‘divine’ as you might think.
Billy Graham was born in 1918 and grew up, in North Carolina, in the segregated South.
He had no problem with it. In a 1960 interview he recalled:
“Segregation was taken for granted. If there were Negroes who chafed in their status as second-class citizens, I was not aware of them.”
He thought of Black people, he said, “in the usual patronizing and paternalistic way.” As Graham’s biographer Grant Wacker notes, Graham “never outgrew that outlook.”
In 1936, Graham went to attend Bob Jones College for a semester, then went on to the Florida Bible Institute. Both schools were ‘white only’.
