structural:summarization
Civil rights movement

Graham's early crusades were segregated, but he began adjusting his approach in the 1950s. During a 1953 rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Graham tore down the ropes that organizers had erected to segregate the audience into racial sections. In his memoirs, he recounted that he told two ushers to leave the barriers down "or you can go on and have the revival without me." During a sermon held at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on August 23, 1954, he warned a white audience, "Three-fifths of the world is not white. They are rising all over the world. We have been proud and thought we were better than any other race, any other people. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to tell you that we are going to stumble into hell because of our pride."

In 1957, Graham's stance towards integration became more publicly shown when he allowed black ministers Thomas Kilgore and Gardner C. Taylor to serve as members of his New York Crusade's executive committee. He also invited Martin Luther King Jr., whom he first met during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, to join him in the pulpit at his 16-week revival in New York City, where 2.3 million gathered at Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, and Times Square to hear them. Graham recalled in his autobiography that during this time, he and King developed a close friendship and that he was eventually one of the few people who referred to King as "Mike", a nickname which King asked only his closest friends to call him. Following King's assassination in 1968, Graham mourned that the US had lost "a social leader and a prophet". In private, Graham advised King and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Despite their friendship, tensions between Graham and King emerged in 1958, when the sponsoring committee of a crusade that took place in San Antonio, Texas, on July 25 arranged for Graham to be introduced by that state's segregationist governor, Price Daniel. On July 23, King sent a letter to Graham and informed him that allowing Daniel to speak at a crusade which occurred the night before the state's Democratic Primary "can well be interpreted as your endorsement of racial segregation and discrimination." Graham's advisor, Grady Wilson, replied to King that "even though we do not see eye to eye with him on every issue, we still love him in Christ." Though Graham's appearance with Daniel dashed King's hopes of holding joint crusades with Graham in the Deep South, the two remained friends; the next year King told a Canadian television audience that Graham had taken a "very strong stance against segregation." Graham and King would also come to differ on the Vietnam War. After King's " Beyond Vietnam " speech denouncing US intervention in Vietnam, Graham castigated him and others for their criticism of US foreign policy.

By the middle of 1960, King and Graham traveled together to the Tenth Baptist World Congress of the Baptist World Alliance. In 1963, Graham posted bail for King to be released from jail during the Birmingham (Alabama) campaign, according to Michael Long, and the King Center acknowledged that Graham had bailed King out of jail during the Albany Movement, although historian Steven Miller told CNN he could not find any proof of the incident. Graham held integrated crusades in Birmingham on Easter of 1964, in the aftermath of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and toured Alabama again in the wake of the violence that accompanied the first Selma to Montgomery march in 1965.

Following Graham's death, former SCLC official and future Atlanta politician Andrew Young (who spoke alongside Coretta Scott King at Graham's 1994 crusade in Atlanta), acknowledged his friendship with Graham and stated that Graham did in fact travel with King to the 1965 European Baptist Convention. Young also claimed that Graham had often invited King to his crusades in the Northern states. Former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader and future United States Congressman John Lewis also credited Graham as a major inspiration for his activism. Lewis described Graham as a "saint" and someone who "taught us how to live and who taught us how to die".

Graham's faith prompted his maturing view of race and segregation. He told a member of the Ku Klux Klan that integration was necessary, primarily for religious reasons. "There is no scriptural basis for segregation," Graham argued. "The ground at the foot of the cross is level, and it touches my heart when I see whites standing shoulder to shoulder with blacks at the cross."