In late spring of 1934, a group of concerned Christians in Charlotte, N.C., worried about the spiritual condition of their city, organized a day of prayer and fasting. This was the fourth such revival, held on a local family farm south of town. While leading the group in prayer, a man named Vernon Patterson asked God to “raise someone up from Charlotte to preach the gospel around the world.”

That prayer would be answered, though not immediately. At a cattle barn on the same dairy farm, a hired hand pitching hay asked the farmer’s son, “Who are those men in the woods over there?” The teenager, whose own mind was on baseball, replied: “I guess they’re some fanatics that talked Dad into letting him use the place.”

That boy was William Frank Graham Jr., known as “Billy Frank” to his family. The world would come to know him as Billy Graham. When he was 5, his father took him to hear Billy Sunday preach. It left little impression. Although Billy Sunday had walked away from a major league baseball career to become a traveling evangelist, his fire-and-brimstone sermons didn’t ignite the boy’s imagination. He was more impressed seeing Babe Ruth play during a barnstorming tour. Graham began imagining a career in baseball. There was one problem: He couldn’t hit.

The big leagues were not integrated when Billy Graham felt the call of the ministry. Neither were the nation’s churches. In many ways, they still aren’t. In 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. mused aloud on national television about the sad irony that 11 a.m. Sunday mornings was the most segregated hour of the week in the United States. Prodded by King, Graham set about trying to help change that.

Billy Graham’s favorite verse of Scripture, rendered in his rich cadences in the language of the King James Version, is a familiar one: “For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

To many people of other faiths, academic theologians, and even some mainline clergy, that passage -- John 3:16 -- sounds exclusionary. Billy Graham found the opposite to be true. For a man who’d grown up in the segregated South, and whose two grandfathers fought for the Confederacy, the verse showed the way toward redeeming what Martin Luther King called America’s “promissory note” to its citizens of color.

“The word ‘whosoever’ in this verse means the whole world,” Graham explained. “Whatever the color of a person’s skin, whatever language he speaks, God loves him and God is willing to save him. To me that is marvelous.”

To Jews keenly aware that Jesus was born a Jew, preached as a Jew, and was martyred as a Jew, a Biblical verse used by Christian fundamentalists to justify a belief that heaven is closed to them is anything but “marvelous.” This was a cross Graham had to bear, and how he did it would involve two U.S. presidents.

First, Graham confronted the pernicious and un-Christian influence in his own community, namely Jim Crow. In the 1940s, while earning a degree at Wheaton College in Illinois, a famed Christian school that had never been segregated, black students had talked to Graham about the need for the church to address racial injustice. Although Graham would credit these students for opening his eyes, he found proof of what they said in the Bible itself.

Graham and King first met in 1957 at a crusade in New York and immediately bonded. King asked Graham to call him “Mike,” a nickname his father, Martin Sr., used. Graham did not march or protest, but he told me when I interviewed him in 1981 that they had an understanding: “I said, ‘Mike…you go into the streets and I'll stay in the stadiums, but I'll demand total integration in all the committees and everything else.”

Graham’s big break had come at a four-week revival in Los Angeles in 1949. One interested listener was William Randolph Hearst, who responded to Graham’s unfettered anti-communism by telling the editors at his papers to promote the young pastor. But if the Soviet Union was the existential threat from abroad, racism was the cancer eating America from within. Graham started sprinkling his sermons with homilies on race. “Jesus Christ belongs neither to the colored nor the white races,” he’d say. “He belongs to all races . . . and God looks upon the heart.” Then, he began taking more overt steps.

On a hot 1952 day in Houston, Graham insisted that the part of the stadium segregated for blacks be in the shade. In 1953, a year before the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Graham insisted that seating for a Chattanooga revival be integrated. When organizers at a Dallas crusade would not agree to those terms, Graham made a point at the end of the service of asking blacks and whites walking to the altar in answer to “the call” to come up together, which they did.

At a 1958 a crusade in his hometown of Charlotte, some of the whites answering that call were met by black counselors in front of the pulpit. This subversive activity did not go unnoticed by authorities in Columbia, S.C., Graham’s next port of call, and his permit to use the state capitol grounds was rescinded by Gov. George B. Timmerman Jr., who denounced Graham as a “well-known integrationist.”

When the commanding general at Fort Jackson offered Graham the use of that U.S. Army base, 60,000 people showed up, the first integrated mass meeting in South Carolina’s history. This wasn’t necessarily divine intervention. The president at the time was Dwight Eisenhower, who’d met Graham while serving in Europe as a five-star general. The men found that they shared a favorite Protestant hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

The year before, Ike had asked for Graham's support when he dispatched troops to integrate Central High School in Arkansas. Graham went to Arkansas, and again two years later after the city was wracked by bombings. (Little Rock pastor Worley Oscar Vaught Jr., credited Graham with calming racist passions in that city. In 1989, one of Vaught's congregants, Gov. Bill Clinton, took Graham to see Vaught as he lay dying.)

One of the few places he refused to preach was South Africa – until the rules of apartheid were loosened. “Jesus was not a white man, he was not a black man,” Graham preached when he finally did go there in the early 1970s. “He came from that part of the world that touches Africa and Asia and Europe. … Christ belongs to all people. He belongs to the whole world.”

In time, he would earn the nickname “pastor to the presidents.” This was used by Graham’s detractors as well as his admirers. In truth, things didn’t always go well for him in that world. The first president he met was Harry Truman, whom Graham managed to thoroughly irritate by reciting their conversation immediately afterward to the media, including re-creating how they’d knelt in prayer. It’s a story Graham told on himself; it’s the opening scene in his 1997 biography, “Just As I Am.”

In 1982, Graham made Reagan administration officials nervous by preaching in Moscow. A White House aide warned Graham that he’d be used for propaganda purposes, which is what happened after he opined that there was “a measure of religious freedom in the Soviet Union.”

John F. Kennedy had privately seethed over Graham’s tacit support for Richard Nixon in the 1960 campaign. But the pragmatic JFK, knowing Graham could make the “Catholic issue” disappear forever in 1964, invited him to Palm Beach to play golf before his 1961 inauguration. While enjoying a sport that came easier to Graham than baseball, the two men forged an unlikely alliance.

Nixon and his wife, Pat, were personal friends of Billy and Ruth Graham, which helps explain -- but doesn’t completely excuse -- Graham’s backing Nixon long after the point of no return on Watergate. It doesn’t justify other things, either. Graham broke down in tears when the White House tapes revealed Nixon’s profanity and bigotry and anger. But in 2002, when the National Archives released a tape recording of a conversation 30 years earlier in which Graham agrees aloud with Nixon’s Jew-baiting, Graham was mortified all over again.

He apologized profusely in public and in private, and was generally forgiven. In the ensuing years, he’d been called on by Barbara Bush to set her eldest son straight. As governor of Texas, George W. Bush once engaged in banter with a newspaper reporter prior to a trip to Israel about whether Jews “go to hell,” Bush received a peeved call from his mother and a follow-up from Billy Graham, who reminded him that entry to heaven is up to God, not Texas’ governor. Here was a more sophisticated view of John 3:16.

That said, my own view is that Billy is in heaven already, along with Abraham, and Martin, and John. Perhaps Martin still answers to the affectionate nickname “Mike.” I’d also like to think that Babe Ruth made the cut, and that he and Billy Sunday are up there giving Billy Graham baseball pointers. He did almost everything well. R.I.P, brother.