continue. The U.S. Supreme Court then issued a ruling that for-
bid “evasive schemes for segregation.” The schools were forced to
accept black students. But the protests weren’t over.
Just two weeks before the event, two unidentified women
threw two tear-gas bombs inside the front door of the school
administration building while the board was meeting on the sec-
ond floor. The next week, dynamite blasts destroyed a city-owned
station wagon and an office in the school administration build-
ing. Members of the community requested that Billy hold segre-
gated meetings to avoid inflaming the situation further.
This had to be a difficult moment. No one would have blamed
him, considering the violence, for backing off his stance of inte-
grating his meetings. After all, this was 1959!
Billy refused, however. To come under those conditions, he
explained, would violate the gospel that he stood for. He insisted
on integrated meetings, and the meetings were conducted that
way—open to people of any race. On September 13, with Gov-
ernor Orval Faubus and 30,000 others in attendance, Billy Gra-
ham preached in War Memorial Stadium. He referred to the
desegregation crisis stating “only Christ can heal these scars and
wounds.” When he offered an invitation to accept Jesus, six hun-
dred people came forward. Billy then asked the news media to
“carry this story of hundreds of people of both races standing at
the foot of the cross to receive Christ.”
The stand “really touched me,” said former president Bill Clin-
ton, because his grandparents were among the few white people
he knew who supported integration. “And at the most intense
time in the modern history of my state, everybody caved,” Clin-
ton remembers. “And blacks and whites together poured into the
football stadium. And when the invitation was given, they poured
down together, down the aisles, and they forgot that they were
supposed to be mad at each other, that one was supposed to con-
sider the other somehow less equal.
“And he never preached a word about integrating the
schools,” Clinton said. “He preached the Word of God. And he
lived it by the power of his example.”
The Leadership Secrets of Billy Graham