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“Eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America,” declared civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., in a well-known line he used a number of times. What is not so well known is that the remark was first made by someone else in a 1950s Reader’s Digest article on racism. The article was written by King’s friend, evangelist Billy Graham.

Racism has strained American society since our nation’s birth. And, sadly, the American church carries its share of blame. But today, a surge of racial reconciliation among blacks, whites, and other ethnic groups is sweeping the American church like never before.

Last year black and white Pentecostals came together in a dramatic demonstration of repentance for the sins of racism during what is now called the “Memphis Miracle.” In that historic meeting, black and white leaders shed tears of confession, washed each other’s feet, and most significantly, agreed to dissolve their separate organizations to form a new one, free of color barriers.

Since 1990, the Promise Keepers men’s movement has brought together thousands of Christian men with a call for racial unity as one of its prime tenets.

And recently, African-American leaders such as John Perkins, Anthony Evans, and Raleigh Washington have been stirring evangelical audiences, white and black, to a new awareness of the race issue in the church.

“There is no biblical basis for a black, white, Hispanic, or Asian church,” declared Perkins recently to a predominantly white crowd. “We need some living examples to stand up and be willing to accept the persecution that goes with preaching [the message of reconciliation].”

This relatively new concern has not come out of nowhere. It started in the 1950s most publicly in the ministry of America’s foremost evangelist, Billy Graham.

To better appreciate the uniqueness of Graham’s concern for racial reconciliation, we need to set him in historical context. He comes from a long line of nationally known American evangelists who as public figures had to confront the problem of racism. As might be expected, their record of dealing with it is mixed.

Consider George Whitefield, the father of America’s Great Awakening. In the 1740s, Whitefield won countless souls to Christ—both black and white. Early in his ministry, he questioned the morality of slaveholding. Yet later he approved buying slaves to help work in the fields of his Georgia orphanage. Whitefield justified the move in part because enslaving blacks, he reasoned, had exposed them to Christianity and so made possible their conversion.

Whitefield’s logic was followed by subsequent church leaders, most of whom did not see a connection between believing in Christ and in practicing racial justice. Many Christians were opposed to the oppression of blacks, but they believed the church’s main function was to win souls, and secondarily, to perform acts of mercy—but certainly not to change social structures like slavery.

An exception to the rule was renowned nineteenth-century revivalist Charles Grandison Finney. Finney was both an influential evangelist and an outspoken abolitionist. In 1851 he was elected president of Ohio’s Oberlin College, a leading stronghold of the anti-slavery movement. Eleven years later, through Finney’s efforts, Oberlin student Mary Jane Patterson became the first African-American woman to receive a bachelor’s degree in the United States—an astounding milestone of the era because of Patterson’s race and gender.

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