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6 “The White Churches Sponsored All of This Work” Marshall Keeble and Race Relations in Churches of Christ The American Church of Christ is Jim Crowed from top to bottom. No other institution in America is built so thoroughly or more absolutely on the color line. —W. E. B. Du Bois, 1929 In 1931 Marshall Keeble enjoyed perhaps his greatest year as an evangelist , baptizing over one thousand black southerners. His preaching also converted many whites, all of whom went to the white churches and were baptized by white colleagues and subsequently attended white congregations. Keeble quickly attributed his successful preaching tours to the beneficence of white believers also: “The white churches sponsored all of this work.” Keeble’s comment reveals a salient aspect of his evangelistic system, as white Christians made it possible for him to preach throughout the South. This is not to say, however, that blacks in Churches of Christ neglected the support of their own preachers and churches, rather in the racist system of the South blacks remained on the lowest rung of the economy’s ladder, lacking in disposable income. And in the first half of the twentieth century, most black evangelists served fledgling congregations newly born into the Restoration Movement; thus, they understood the necessity of relying on their white counterparts for financial support. Samuel Robert Cassius, a ministerial colleague of Keeble’s, spoke frankly in 1922: “I have not gone to the white churches because I liked to preach to white folks. I went to them to get aid that I might go to my own race.There was nowhere else to go.”1 Marshall Keeble understood this same reality. Keeble’s preaching career reveals three important ramifications of his distinctive circumstances. First, white benefactors in Churches of Christ regularly contributed to African American evangelists and their churches. 74 / chapter 6 Second, Keeble, identifying the “call of the white brethren” with the “call of God,” answered the requests of white Christians who yearned to see their black neighbors saved, and his response led to the emergence of African American Churches of Christ throughout the South. Third, while Keeble preached a theologically exclusive Gospel that denied the legitimacy of other religious groups and a racially inclusive Gospel that embraced racially mixed audiences and won black and white converts, he received the bulk of his financial support from Caucasian Christians. Amid this racial interaction and collaboration, Keeble and his white supporters scrupulously complied with the social customs of the Jim Crow South, as white racism accompanied white benevolence. The legalization of segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the brutal lynching of scores of black men, and the proliferation of poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses virtually stripped African Americans of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment protection and effectively reduced them to what the scholar Rayford W. Logan has called “third-class citizenship.” But long before visible “Whites-only” signs appeared in society at large, they first surfaced invisibly in American Protestant churches. Indeed, most white congregations supported segregation—a brutal and unjust system that oppressed blacks. Marshall Keeble consequently encountered racism and segregation not only in the secular spheres but also in religious contexts when preaching to segregated white and black audiences of Churches of Christ across the South, yet he accommodated the unjust system by refusing to denounce or reject it. Keeble and his white supporters in the South happily complied with segregation—“the not-too-distant cousin of slavery”—to save the souls of black Americans.2 Marshall Keeble among White Saints in Tennessee As he preached throughout states of the old Confederacy, Keeble hewed carefully to the racist norms of time and place. Preaching in Bellbuckle,Tennessee , in 1916, he thanked white Christians, who were anxious to preach to their black neighbors, and who, according to Keeble, exemplified an authentic Christianity. “The white brethren and sisters knew that the three or four colored disciples here were unable to feed us while here, and they would send cabbage, potatoes, milk, canned fruit, butter, meat, chickens, etc., and “the white churches sponsored all of this work” / 75 Sister Mingle sent over baked cakes and homemade light bread.” Keeble offered this as evidence of genuine faith. Such generosity encouraged Keeble, who prayed that such practices might serve to stir similar concerns in others just as they prompted him to “grow stronger and more faithful in discharging my duty and carrying the gospel to my people.”3 The following year Keeble commended Anglo Christians in...

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