1957 New York City Billy Graham Online Exhibit Opens
The Billy Graham Center Archives of Wheaton College launched a new online exhibit of the historic 1957 Billy Graham crusade in New York City last week, as the date draws near for what many are calling Graham's "last New York Crusade."
The "1957 - New York City - Billy Graham: A Crusade Remembered" tells the story of "one of the most influential and dramatic [crusades] of Graham's ministry," according to Robert D. Shuster of Wheaton College.
The website, located at www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/nyc57.htm, features magazine covers and articles, live television broadcasts of the crusade, sermons by Billy Graham, music by George Beverly Shea and Ethel Waters, and testimonies from the meetings.
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Interviews where participants reminisce about the crusade are also accessible. Many were done by the BGEA's Dr. Lois Ferm, who interviewed hundreds about the crusades.
There are also photos, posters, handbills, letters, cartoons and other documents from 1957 covering everything from the invitation, critics, to the statistics.
In “Billy Graham answers his critics,” a reprint of an interview from the February 7, 1956 issue of Look magazine that was distributed widely, Graham addresses some of the questions that still come up today, such as do your "converts" last, to which he replied that BGEA is "doing all in our power to keep those that fall away at a minimum through an extensive follow-up system."
This and other resources will be a trip down memory lane for some people, and for others, will answer some of their most pressing questions about Graham.
Graham's first revival in New York in 1957 lasted 16 sold-out weeks in Manhattan, New York City. During that summer, Graham reached out to Latino and African-American groups, holding a rally in Harlem and offering Spanish services. This year, he will reach out in nearly two dozen languages to evangelistic groups, including Hispanic and Korean.
