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Show Us How You Do It
Marshall Keeble and the Rise of Black Churches of Christ in the United States, 1914â"1968
By Edward J. Robinson The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2008 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5838-9
CHAPTER 1
"I Had Rather Rely on God's Plan Than Man's"
Marshall Keeble and the Missionary Society Controversy
Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men.
— Acts 5:29
The 1870s cast a series of extraordinary challenges before African Americans. While emancipation from slavery and the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments signaled the arrival of better days for newly freed blacks, the physical assaults of the Ku Klux Klan, the Hamburg Massacre in South Carolina on July 4, 1876, and the westward migration of blacks from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee portended the erosion of African Americans' civil rights in the New South. As one former slave testified poignantly before a Senate Committee: "In 1877 we lost all hopes ... we found ourselves in such condition that we looked around and seed [sic] that there was no way on earth, it seemed, that we could better our condition" in southern states. W. E. B. Du Bois assessed Reconstruction more succinctly: "The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; and then turned again toward slavery." The era of Reconstruction, initially replete with joy and promise for ex-slaves, ended abruptly with crushed hopes and aborted dreams. In this dismal and turbulent milieu emerged Marshall Keeble.
Born on December 7, 1878, in Rutherford County, Tennessee, Marshall Keeble Jr. was the son of Robert and Mettie Keeble. Details of Keeble's ancestry remain obscure, but the 1850 national census for free inhabitants of Rutherford County listed Edwin A. Keeble, a lawyer, with a net worth of $800. Attorney Keeble, originally from Virginia, had relocated to Tennessee where he met and married Mary, with whom he fathered five children: James, Lallie (?), Edwin Jr., Thomas, and Walter. Edwin A. Keeble Sr., probably a relative of Horace P. Keeble, also an attorney in Rutherford County, owned real estate valued at $4,000. Horace and his wife, Cassandra, by 1860 had amassed a property value of $27,000 and a personal net worth of $14,000. The family holdings included five male and five female slaves, and likely both Marshall Keeble's grandfather and father numbered among these bondsmen.
After emancipation the Keeble household consisted of Marshall and Mary Keeble, the paternal grandparents of young Marshall. The elder Keeble worked as a farmer while his wife served as a housekeeper in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. In 1870 the Keeble offspring consisted of eight children: D. Marshall (age twenty), Robert (sixteen), Nancy (fourteen), Milton (eleven), James (eight), Eliza (four), George (two), and Mar (one). The four older children hired out as farm laborers and the younger four stayed at home. A decade later, D. Marshall and Robert Keeble had families of their own. Twenty-seven-year-old D. Marshall, the husband of twenty-four-year-old Hattie, fathered two-year-old Lizza, while twenty-three-year-old Robert married twenty-two-year-old Mettie, who gave birth to Marshall Keeble Jr.
The Keeble clan, slave and free, nourished a strong commitment to one of the nineteenth century's most dynamic religious developments, the Restoration Movement. Barton W. Stone, Thomas Campbell, and Alexander Campbell had joined with other reformers in the early nineteenth century to launch this work, variously referred to as Disciples of Christ, Churches of Christ, and Christian Churches. Seeking to return Christianity to its roots, their efforts emerged as one of the largest Protestant bodies of the era, and the Keeble family's connection to this movement predated the Civil War. Marshall Keeble Jr. later noted that his grandfather subscribed to the Gospel Advocate, a prominent journal of the movement, which doubtlessly played a role in leading the younger Keeble into Churches of Christ. The pages of another of the movement's papers, the Christian Standard, show that both his grandfather, Marshall Keeble Sr., and his uncle, D. Marshall Keeble, actively participated in the Christian Church in the early 1880s. Proceedings of a church convention in Rutherford County, Tennessee, listed Marshall Sr. and D. Marshall as elders and delegates of the congregation in Murfreesboro. Even though the younger Marshall Jr.'s spiritual linkage to the Stone-Campbell Movement preceded the Civil War, he also grew up under the influence of a devout Baptist mother.
In the early 1880s Robert Keeble relocated his family to Nashville, Tennessee, where he worked for John B. Ransom and Company, a wholesale lumber and planing mill business. Mrs. Keith N. Slayton, a close friend of the Keeble family, described Robert Keeble as a man of dignity and integrity who left his son Marshall an important legacy of honesty and rectitude. Robert Keeble, wrote Slayton, "left neither silver nor gold when he died, but he left his family a much greater and more lasting heritage — that of quiet dignity and honest self-respect." Mrs. Slayton recalled her own mother's and grandfather's description of Robert Keeble as a man "always neatly dressed, and always wearing a stiff white collar."
Robert Keeble, more than an unassuming well-dressed black man, however, kept his young family intact during the tumultuous and frightening decades of the 1870s and 1880s, suggesting a life marked by optimism and stability. Unlike numerous disillusioned black Tennesseans who participated in the "Exoduster" movement to the West, Robert Keeble obviously believed that his and his family's future lay in the South. The stirring and melodious songs of the Jubilee Singers, whose fundraising ventures led to the erection of Nashville's Jubilee Hall in 1875, coupled with the presence of Fisk University, Central Tennessee College, and Meharry Medical College — three predominantly black schools founded in Nashville during the Reconstruction era — seemed to presage the coming of better days for African Americans in Middle Tennessee. Robert Keeble infused his son with this hope and optimism; even though Marshall came to preach across the country and eventually throughout the world, he always returned to Nashville where he happily lived and finally died.
By 1896 Marshall Keeble, a Nashville resident, worked as a grocery clerk. Advancing into young adulthood he became a member of the Gay Street Christian Church under the preaching of Preston Taylor, and at age twenty-two married Minnie Womack. The young couple soon had two children, Robert (born in 1897) and Elenora (born in 1900), and although Marshall worked as a "day laborer," they welcomed into their home Samuel, Sallie, and Hattie Womack, Minnie's mother, father, and sister. Keeble's father-in-law, Samuel W. Womack, would play a formative role in shaping Keeble's religious life.
Apart from Womack, however, several others contributed to Keeble's development as a Gospel preacher. His first wife, Minnie, often accompanied her husband on his evangelistic outings, buttressing his efforts with a melodious singing voice. "My wife and children were with me a part of the protracted-meeting season," he reported, "and in singing and teaching the Scriptures privately my wife rendered valuable service." Again, when preaching near Brownville, Tennessee, in 1916 Keeble informed Gospel Advocate readers: "My wife is so much help to me in my work. She leads the song service." That Minnie served in this role in a fellowship which ordinarily held that men must lead the public worship suggests the lack of capable men to lead worship. In the same year, responding to an inquirer who asked whether women could lead prayer in the worship service when men were present, editor George P. Bowser of the Christian Echo answered: "There is no Scripture forbidding her praying in public." Annie C. Tuggle, a black educator in Churches of Christ, reported being called on to read Scripture aloud in a Memphis, Tennessee, church during John T. Ramsey's discourse. "Brother Ramsey had to depend on me to read certain Scriptures that he needed while preaching. There were no men able to help him." Such testimonies as these of Keeble, Bowser, and Tuggle indicate that black Churches of Christ in the first two decades of the twentieth century struggled in a fledgling state, lacking enough literate men to handle all leadership positions.
In an effort to fill this void, Marshall Keeble took up preaching as a fulltime occupation in 1914. The devoted family man sometimes spent three months or more away from home, but he always longed to have his loved ones around him. "I have been away from my family now about three months," he wrote in 1921, "and I yet have one more meeting to hold before I can be blessed with seeing them again." Sadly, Keeble's Minnie died in 1932, but sixteen months later he married Laura Catherine Johnson of Corinth, Mississippi. Death took another of his beloved family in 1936 as the Gospel Advocate reported Keeble's mother's death at the age of seventy-five. "We all hated to see her leave us," lamented Keeble, "but we know that the Lord knew best. So we know it was best for her and us, and because she is asleep in Christ." Keeble survived his first wife as well as their five children, two of whom died in infancy. Clarence died after being electrocuted at age ten, and daughter Beatrice passed away in 1935, followed by Robert in 1964. Keeble's perseverance on the evangelism field amid these family tragedies attests to his moral and spiritual fortitude in the face of such blows.
Marshall Keeble had no formal training to help him work through such difficulties or prepare him to achieve success. His was a completely informal education. White leaders in Churches of Christ certainly influenced Keeble's development as a Gospel preacher. Three white men in Churches of Christ played seminal roles in shaping his ministerial growth, including David Lipscomb, a formative voice in the southern wing of the Stone-Campbell Movement through his editorship of the Gospel Advocate. Keeble gained important moral and theological insights by regularly digesting Lipscomb's paper. Writing in 1918 he commented: "So I am still reading it [the Gospel Advocate]. May God bless and lead those in whose hands the paper is to remain, and may it go forth blessing the world as it did when that great and noble servant, David Lipscomb, lived." A year later Keeble again praised Lipscomb for putting "a coal of fire among the brethren before God took him, which will never die." That "fire" was one of zeal and biblical knowledge, which stirred Keeble himself and which he in turn spread throughout the South.
Another white evangelist, Nicholas B. Hardeman, president of Freed-Hardeman College in Henderson, Tennessee, helped mold Keeble's preaching career. Keeble first met Hardeman in 1918 when the former conducted a Gospel meeting, a series of sermons through several consecutive evenings, in Henderson. "On the last night Brother N. B. Hardeman and others came out and made remarks in the meeting. This was my first time to meet Brother Hardeman, and, in my judgment, he is a fine, Christian man." In 1920 Keeble commended Hardeman who "has never failed to do all he could to encourage us in the work." By securing places for Keeble to preach to black southerners, Hardeman proved a great source of support.
The third preacher who particularly influenced Keeble's maturation as a public speaker was the "mail-carrier preacher," Joe McPherson. When McPherson conducted a "protracted meeting" in Nashville in 1914, Keeble attended, absorbing valuable information and inspiration. This citywide evangelistic campaign, which lasted for one month and which McPherson directed, indelibly imprinted Keeble's homiletical evolution. "In this meeting," Keeble recalled, "I copied every lesson Brother McPherson preached; and though he is dead, I am still preaching his sermons, and these lessons are still bringing men to Christ." "Although Brother Joe McPherson has gone from us," Keeble wrote in 1920, "his labors and his influence among us still live." A year later Keeble again praised McPherson, who "did more toward teaching me how to preach than any man I ever heard."
Even though white influences touched Keeble to a significant degree, black preachers and other leaders clearly wielded more decisive affect on his development as an evangelist. Keeble's spiritual development as a preacher derived fundamentally from Samuel W. Womack, his father-in-law; the ardent black evangelist, Alexander Campbell; and George P. Bowser, a black educator and preacher of considerable repute. These three men collaborated at the "mother church," the Jackson Street Church of Christ in Nashville, Tennessee, where Keeble "sat at the feet of such men." Keeble, however, especially marked Womack and Campbell as "the two old heroes who have struggled and fought hard to establish a pure worship in Nashville." By "pure worship" Keeble clearly meant worshiping without musical instruments and evangelizing without missionary societies. Keeble assumed an anti-instrumental and anti-missionary society stance through the influence of Womack.
Born a slave in Lynchburg, Tennessee, young Samuel grew up in the tumultuous decade of the 1850s and gained his freedom with the North's Civil War victory. Womack first heard the Gospel in 1866 and received baptism into the Christian Church at the hands of a white preacher, T. J. Shaw, "the man with the old Book in his head." In the 1870s and 1880s Womack read and contributed to the Christian Standard, exulting that the "STANDARD has found its way to my house, and it is all one could hope for." More than an avid reader of Christian literature, Womack emerged as a leader among black Disciples of Christ. In 1880 he told fellow black believers of his plans to preach in west Tennessee, urging, "I am now preparing to make a few visits through the Western part of the State, preaching, and to see what can be done for a State meeting this year. Therefore, allow me to say to the brethren in Tennessee, wake up, and let us rally together once more." Christian Standard accounts further portray a man who was busily strengthening a fledgling congregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, strategically organizing a consultation meeting for the Christian Church in the same community, and aggressively cultivating interest for a general convention for black Disciples of Christ in Memphis. While working in Memphis, Womack in 1884 expressed his desire to enroll in the recently established LeMoyne College, lamenting: "I regret very much that I cannot make this city my home, in order to attend this school; but Nashville is supplied with fine schools." Womack finally chose to remain in middle Tennessee, even though continuing his itinerant preaching.
By the late 1890s Womack, through the influence of David Lipscomb and the Gospel Advocate, had shifted his focus away from Isaac Errett and the Christian Standard because of differences over interpretation of biblical teachings. Keeble noted that Womack delighted visiting the "Gospel Advocate office, because, he said, he was always made welcome by the whole staff. Whenever he got puzzled over any passage of scripture, he would always have a conference with old Brother David Lipscomb during his life time." While neither man ever commented on the details of their exchanges, it can be properly conjectured that the white editor of the Gospel Advocate turned the black evangelist away from missionary societies and instrumental music in worship, for Womack withdrew from the Disciples of Christ and aligned with Churches of Christ.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Show Us How You Do It by Edward J. Robinson. Copyright © 2008 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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