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A Letter to Billy Graham ...

Dear Billy,

I see that you will close out your final crusade tonight in New York City. Almost fifty years have passed since I marched along side my dad to the opening of your first crusade in Louisville, Kentucky in September 1956. Within three years, my dad would be dead and, now, both you and I are prostate cancer survivors. I suspect that I'll always be in dad's and your debt for telling me on that day that life is a serious business and that it was time for a 16 year old kid in suburban Louisville to begin to grow up. The way I grew up diverged a bit from your paths. Within three years of dad's death, I would be in other marches – in Durham, North Carolina, Albany, Georgia, and Montgomery, Alabama. Sometimes, those marches took me to jail. I've never been quite certain that dad would have approved of all that. He was a pretty conservative man.

You didn't join those marches either. I wish you had. But what you did do was to insist that you would not preach to a segregated audience. I like to remember that you opened your crusade in Louisville in September 1956, when our public school systems opened for the first time on a desegregated basis. I can't prove a cause and effect relationship between these two things, but there was no rioting in the streets. There was, instead, the marching to your crusade. My class would be the last all white class to graduate from my high school and an African American woman was elected to the cheerleading squad in my senior year. That's a small thing, to be sure, but given token desegregation it meant that she had overwhelming support from white students.

Oddly enough, I went back to a racially segregated school when I entered Duke in September 1958. I didn't go there because it was segregated, but I was again the beneficiary of discrimination. I will never forget the corps of African American women who came through our dormitories each morning to sweep our floors, make our beds, dust our furniture, and take out our trash. Dad died at the end of my first year at Duke and I stayed at home with mom to see her through her first year without him, so I missed out on the sit-ins that swept from Greensboro to Durham and many other Southern cities that year. But I returned to Duke in September 1960 and, by January 1961, I was walking the picket lines outside Durham's segregated movie theaters. In those days, it was only a short step from there to the slammer. And they ran me out of town just as soon as my diploma was in hand.

Still, I like to think that my dad would have approved and that you had a hand in my being active in the civil rights movement. Someone had taught me that in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise." It was only many years later that I learned that Martin Luther King had been in communication with you and that in some ways he modeled his own crusades on your example. Some day, a historian will take that seriously and tell the story of the civil rights movement as a major chapter in the history of American revivalism. I like to think that marching by my dad's side to your crusade in September 1956 was a preparation for manhood, a step toward other marches, even if it did mean going through the slammer. So, Billy, hail and farewell. Many thanks.

Your friend in Christ,
Ralph

Posted on Sunday, June 26, 2005 at 1:27 AM | Comments (19) | Return

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