Billy Graham and the Beloved Community: America's Evangelist and the Dream of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Abstract

There on the golf course I had all the journalists and the others gathered around, and we bowed in prayer for Dr. King's family, for the United States, and for the healing of the racial divisions of our world." It must have been a jolting feeling for Billy Graham as he bowed his head after finishing a relaxing round of golf in Brisbane, Australia, where he was holding yet another successful crusade. Graham had just received news that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated, shot while checking the weather from the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The civil rights leader had gone to Memphis at the invitation of his good friend, James Lawson, to help the city's sanitation workers, the lepers of the American workforce, in their battle for economic justice against a belligerent, racist mayor. "I was almost in a state of shock," Graham recalled. "Not only was I losing a friend through a vicious and senseless killing, but America was losing a social leader and a prophet, and I felt his death would be one of the greatest tragedies in our history.