‘There is no excuse ... for bigotry and intolerance and prejudice’

Reverend had history of reaching across racial divide.

When the Rev. Billy Graham brought his large crusade gatherings to the South in the 1950s, he was alarmed at what he saw: Ropes segregating white and black worshipers.

“I was appalled at it and decided I had to speak out on it,” he said in “Taking Down the Ropes of Segregation,” a video posted on the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association website and Facebook page. “I said, ‘No more of this.’ I went to the head usher and asked him if he would remove the ropes.’”

When the usher refused, Graham took down the ropes at the Chattanooga, Tenn., gathering himself. The usher resigned in a huff, but Graham’s stand led to a friendship with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“He practiced what he preached,” the late Cliff Barrows, longtime music and program director for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said in the video.

Atlanta faith and Civil Rights leaders recalled Graham’s dedication to racial equality as he spread the Gospel.

“He always talked about sin and forgiveness and that Christ died for all our sins. It was a very simple message but a message that applied to everybody,” said Young, who noted Graham wanted African-American worhippers to feel welcome in his ministry and crusades. “He always said salvation knows no color line.”

The Rev. Gerald Durley, now pastor emeritus at Providence Missionary Baptist Church, served as a co-chairman at Graham’s 1994 crusade, held at the now-demolished Georgia Dome.

“He was the most humble, transparent and genuine person I ever met in my life,” Durley said. “He did not come in and say ‘I have a panacea for this community. He listened. And, as great of a speaker he was, he was just as great a listener.”

Graham was raised on a dairy farm in Charlotte, N.C. and died in Montreat, outside Asheville. Rev. William Barber, head of the state’s NAACP’s chapter, noted Graham’s efforts to advance racial equality in remarks posted via Medium.

“Billy Graham inherited a faith in the American South that had accommodated itself to white supremacy, but he demonstrated a willingness to change and turn toward the truth,” Barber wrote. “He helped to tear down walls of segregation, not build them up. One biographer noted after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, Graham told fellow evangelicals: ‘We should have been leading the way to racial justice but we failed. Let’s confess it, let’s admit it, and let’s do something about it.’”

Graham was opposed to racial intolerance on not only moral but also spiritual grounds.

“There is no excuse ever for hatred. There is no excuse, ever, for bigotry and intolerance and prejudice,” he said in the video. “We are to love as God loves us.”

The Rev. Bernice King, CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, also was interviewed for the clip.

“Both Dr. Graham and my father were trying to make the world a better place,” she said. “They were different, obviously, in their style and their approach. But I think their heart and their goal was the same.”