In and Out of the Churches
The
problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,
--the
relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa,
in
America, and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem
that
caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South
and
North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points of union and
local autonomy as a
shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that
the question of Negro
slavery was the real cause of the conflict. Curious
it was, too, how this deeper
question ever forced itself to the surface
despite effort and
disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched
Southern soil than this old
question, newly guised, sprang from the earth,
--What shall be done with
the Negroes?
--William Edward Burghardt Du Bois,
1903
I still think today as
yesterday that the color line is a great problem of
this
century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the
problem
of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures
and implements it: and that
is the fact that so many civilized persons are
willing to live in comfort
even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance
and disease of the majority
of their fellowmen; that to maintain this
privilege men have waged war
until today war tends to become universal
and continuous, and the
excuse for this war continues largely to be color
and race.
--William Edward Burghardt Du Bois,
1953
And even now, near the end of “this century”
and the beginning of another, the “color
line” remains—in America, in its institutions
public and private, and in those most “American” of Christian communities, the
churches of the so-called “Restoration” or “Stone-Campbell” movement. If we
have come to believe that these churches in some way continue the spirit and
truth of the churches of the New Testament, as their founders surely claimed
that they did, then where does our faith seek understanding of their historic and
present relation to the “color line” in America?
I am asked by the editors of this issue
of Leaven
to compose a “bibliographic essay . . . that would especially interest someone
from the Stone-Campbell heritage who wants to read in this area.” Well then,
dear sisters and brothers, what would that be? I am minded of that marvelous
admonition of Walter Kaufmann, “You cannot tell all the truths you know to all
men you meet.” Nor to all women, either. There are many useful things to read,
about race relations in America and in the churches, more than there is time or
paper to tell, and there is likely not world enough and time for anyone to read
them all. Much of what might specifically be “relevant” to an understanding of
race relations in any of the splinters of “the Stone-Campbell heritage” is to
be found only by turning over pages one at a time in the musty rows of
periodical stacks of academic and seminary libraries. Some of it is to be seen
only under the watchful eyes of its faithful guardians in the “special
collections” of these institutions. I have done some of that, for my beloved
Churches of Christ, but not nearly enough. Some of the fruits of my labor can
be found on the WorldWideWeb as a subsection of the
wonderful “Restoration” site, for which the URL is
http://www.mun.ca/rels/restmov/subs/race.html
Those who seek out this site—“Race and
Churches of Christ”—will find 43 primary documents from 1904 to 1968 and considerable
commentary. There shall be eventually perhaps as many as 40 more, including a
couple of lengthy segregationist tracts from the collection—but not the pen!—of
the indefatigable Terry John Gardner. Some of this material is Gospel; some of
it is truly heroic; much of it is maddening; and more of it is distressing and
disgusting. It ain’t none of it pretty, dear hearts, but all of it is necessary
if we are to understand how we come to be where we are, in this America, in
these churches. Those who have access to the right libraries can and should go
looking for it, if they’re of a mind to do the work. There’s more to be done.
But now where should the “casual reader”—or,
indeed, the nascent serious researcher--of Stone-Campbell pedigree turn to
learn about race relations, in America and in the churches? One might begin with basic reference works,
of which there are distressingly few, of uneven quality, and—already!—out of
date. A Bibliography of the Negro in
Africa and America, edited by Monroe Nathan Work ([New York: H W Wilson,
1928; reprint, New York: Octagon Books, 1965] xxiv + 698 pp) is exhaustive and
truly exhausting—to the date of its original publication. A relatively brief
section on “The Negro Church and Religious Life” begins on p 405. Dwight L
Smith’s Afro-American History: A
Bibliography (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1974) begins in 1954 and is tersely
annotated, but it is not to be compared with Work’s work. The most useful and
accessible general bibliography, now more than a quarter-century old, remains The Negro in America: A Bibliography,
edited by Elizabeth W Miller and Mary L Fisher, 2d ed ([Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970] xxii + 351 pp). Its
6,500 entries are carefully gathered by subjects delineated in the table of
contents; a brief section on “Religious Life and Negro Churches” begins on p 32
and contains 74 entries, many of them helpfully annotated; see also the
extensive section on “The Role of the Churches” in “The Freedom Revolution” (pp
274-282). Dictionary of American Negro Biography, edited by Rayford W
Logan and Michael R Winston ([New York: W W Norton, 1982] viii + 680 pp), is
indispensable, and one will not find a dull page in it—but I have not yet
found, in my all-too-brief acquaintance, any adherent of the “Stone-Campbell
movement.” All of these works should be readily available in any good public or
academic library, and they should not disappoint the earnest inquirer.
Two more specialized reference works produced
by scholars at Howard University are useful if frustrating guides to religious
studies and religious bodies in African America. The Howard University Bibliography of African and Afro-American with
Locations in American Libraries,
edited by Ethel L Williams and Clifton F Brown ([Wilmington DE: Scholarly Resources,
1977] xxii + 523 pp), is a printed typescript, monumental in its overall
proportions and coverage, but often disappointing in its eclectic details.
Materials related to “Disciples of Christ” can be found on pp 132, 272, and
316, and there one may find citations to A Campbell on slavery in the 1845 Millennial Harbinger; Robert Oldham
Fife’s 1960 Indiana dissertation on Alexander
Campbell and the Christian Church in
the Slavery Controversy; Nathaniel Smith Haynes, “The Disciples of Christ
in Illinois and Their Attitude Toward Slavery,” in Papers in Illinois History and Transactions
for the Year 1913 ([Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society, 1914]
52-59); Stephen D Eckstein’s History of
Churches of Christ in Texas (1963); and Robert Frederick West, Preaching on Race (Saint Louis: Bethany
Press, 1962). Directory of African American Religious Bodies: A
Compendium by the Howard University School of Divinity, edited by Wardell
J Payne, 2d ed (Washington DC:
Howard University Press, 1995) is the most recent of these reference works, and
it is a superficially helpful guide through the maze of African American
denominations and sects, but again it often fails in details. The section
headed “Disciples of Christ” offers useful information about the “General
Assembly of Churches of Christ (Disciples of Christ)” and the “National
Convocation of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ),” but under “Church[sic] of Christ” one finds only a single,
didactic paragraph of dubious validity and no utility. Southwestern Christian
College (Terrell, Texas) is not mentioned.
For critical bibliography of the African
American religious experience, Charles H Lippy’s Bibliography of Religion in the South ([Macon GA: Mercer University
Press, 1985] xvi + 498 pp) remains unsurpassed, despite—indeed, perhaps because
of—its regional focus. In his chapter on “The Religious Experience of Southern
Blacks” (pp 81-146) Lippy gathers 731 citations, prefaced with a penetrating
bibliographic essay. In his chapter on “Religion and Society in the South” (pp
441-482) Lippy offers 86 more citations under the heading “Racism,
Discrimination, and the Civil Rights Movement,” again with insightful remarks.
Lippy does not differentiate black adherents of the Stone-Campbell movement in
his account of “Campbellite and Restorationist Traditions in the South” (pp
275-286), but he does cite Julian E Choate’s 1968 “biography” of Marshall
Keeble.
These works make clear the relative wealth of
material about African Americans and their religion in general and the relative poverty of resources about black
Campbellites and their peculiar relations with their white siblings. So where should an “interested reader”
begin? An understanding of the
“American dilemma”—as Gunnar Myrdal called it—is fundamental to any study of
race relations in an American church. Negro
Social and Political Thought
1850-1920: Representative Texts, edited by Howard Brotz ([New York: Basic
Books, 1966] ix + 593 pp) brings together in one volume essential works by
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), Booker
T Washington (1856-1915), William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963), Marcus
Garvey (1887-1940), and several others less well-known but no less able. Here one can see in bold relief the
foundational debate between Du Bois and Washington, a discussion known to most
of us only at second hand, if at all, and usually reduced to inflammatory code
words. One should read these texts with care, and then read Brotz’s perceptive introduction. However one may judge
between Washington and Du Bois, one may learn much from both of them, even as
they clash and jar. From here it is but a step to Du Bois’s classic, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A C
McClurg, 1903), which is generally available in several paperback editions. Du
Bois’s commentary on The Negro Church
(Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1903) at the beginning of “this century”
may also reward the earnest researcher who can find it. The great strength of
Du Bois over against many of his contemporaries and successors is his empathic
intellectual and spiritual understanding of African America that transcends
mere sociology.
At mid-century James Baldwin (1924-1987)
emerges from Harlem via Paris to confound his contemporaries and establish
himself as the spiritual heir to Du Bois, by then an aging Marxist dying in
African exile. Baldwin was already recognized as an important novelist,
playwright, and critic when his ironically titled collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, appeared in 1961, but in that “private logbook” Baldwin
plumbed the depths of his raging perplexity and profoundly religious
sensibility. He followed it with a “Letter from a Region in My Mind” that
consumed almost an entire issue of the New
Yorker in the fall of 1962 and became most of The Fire Next Time (1963)—part memoir, part reportage, part
brilliant manifesto. Where- and however one may come upon them—in a library or
browning in shelves of used paperbacks—these works are worth whatever it takes
to find them, for Baldwin knows some truths that elude mere political analysis.
I
suggest that the role of the Negro in American life
has
something to do with our concept of what God is,
and
from my point of view, this concept is not big
enough.
It has got to be made much bigger than it is
because
God is, after all, not anybody’s toy. To be
with
God is really to be involved with some
enormous,
overwhelming
desire, and joy, and power which you
cannot
control, which controls you. I conceive of my own
life
as a journey toward something I do not understand,
which
in the going toward, makes me better. I conceive
of
God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to
control
others. (“In Search of a Majority” in Nobody Knows
My Name)
Baldwin’s novels—especially Go Tell It on the Mountain (1963)—also
open a window on “what it means to be black in America.” So in its way does
Ralph Ellison’s classic novel The
Invisible Man (1952). Ellison’s collection of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) is, I think, a response to Baldwin’s work,
just as Baldwin responds, in so many ways, overtly and covertly, to the work
and to the very presence of Richard Wright (1909-1960), whose Native Son (1940) is among the first
works of literature to “tell it like it is” in a way that reaches and disturbs
white unconsciousness. In Black Boy
(1945) and American Hunger (1977)
Wright tells his own story of liberation, triumph, and disillusion. Richard Wright Reader, edited by Ellen
Wright and Michael Fabre ([New York: Harper & Row, 1978] xxiv + 886 pp)
collects a cross-section of Wright’s fiction, poetry, essays, criticism, and
autobiography, displaying the versatility, vulnerability, anger, and anguish of
a distinguished and tragic American author.
Claude Brown is not an author, not so
eloquent as Baldwin, Ellison, or Wright, but his autobiographical account of a Manchild in the Promised Land ([New
York: Macmillan, 1965] 415 pp) is a guided tour of the streets of Harlem from
the inside, in a voice matter-of-factly profane and thoroughly authentic. On
his journey from Harlem to Howard University this secular man encounters only a
few “religious” figures, and only one that he can begin to respect, near the
end, as a true benefactor. His critical analysis of the Nation of Islam and its
converts in the 1950s (pp 316-337) is a rare, objective, vivid portrait of the
Black Muslim rank-and-file and the influence of the Nation in Harlem.
Manchild is a necessary counterpoint
to The Autobiography of Malcolm X
(1965), a classic testimony of religious conversion and martyrdom that ranks
with Augustine’s Confessions, not as
theology or as literature, but as a gripping witness to metanoia in a syncretistic parody of Christianity and Islam. The
poverty of thought in the Nation as Malcolm knew it may cause us to wonder at
its power to change his life, but we should not marvel when the true believer
moves beyond his first naivete, becomes—against his will--a heretic, and dies
for his faith.
In introducing Eldridge Cleaver’s essays in Soul on Ice ([New York: McGraw-Hill,
1968] xvi + 210 pp), the critic Maxwell Geismar points to the volume’s “true
moral affinity” with The Autobiography of
Malcolm X. In some ways this is right, for Cleaver and Malcolm were both
“educated” in prison, and both had been drawn to violence in response to
injustice. But Cleaver had not experienced a “religious” conversion; in his
view, “no one could save me but myself” and so “I started to write. To save
myself.” Cleaver is a figure far more complex than Malcolm X: a writer of
extraordinary eloquence and intelligence, a speaker of charismatic presence,
and a man of deep moral confusion. First arrested at 12 and incarcerated for
most of the next 19 years, Cleaver by his own account became by turns a
Catholic (“Protestants” in that facility were all white) and then a Black
Muslim. Both of these communities ultimately disappointed him, intellectually
and morally, and he abandoned them. Out of prison in 1966 on the strength of
the essays that became Soul on Ice,
Cleaver hooked up with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and
then became the Minister of Information and primary intellectual force of the
Black Panther Party. Unlike the Muslims, the Panthers were never a mass
movement, but their radical determination, a true call to arms, generated a
murderous response. Cleaver escaped with his life to Cuba in 1968, beginning a
seven-year exile that took him to the Marxist capitals of the Third World and
finally to France. There, if we may believe his account in Soul on Fire ([Waco: Word Books, 1978] 240 pp), Cleaver at last
encountered the Lord Jesus Christ, a discovery that led him to return
voluntarily to the United States and certain imprisonment. Soul on Fire in fact lacks the fire of Soul on Ice; perhaps the raw anger that propelled and sustained
Cleaver’s revolutionary eloquence has at last been extinguished. It is also
possible that Cleaver is in this work hustling the evangelical Christians just
as he once hustled Kim Il Sung, once
more writing to “save” himself and “saving himself” by writing. Yet his
confession—and that is what it is—must have filled those evangelicals with
consternation, for his indictment of white attitudes, the inhumanity of the
California prison system, and the machinations of various agencies of the
United States is perhaps, in this relatively subdued language, even more
blistering and believable. Not everything is here, not all loose ends are
secured, but Soul on Fire is worth
reading. One should bring to it a hermeneutic of suspicion—and read Soul on Ice first.
Over against Malcolm X (1925-1965) and all of his kin one must turn
at last to that American who has, in spite of his widely publicized human
flaws, come in martyrdom to embody sainthood for millions of his
contemporaries: Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-1968). There is no better introduction to all the words that King wrote
and uttered in his brief, meteoric career as preacher and civil rights leader
than Testament of Hope: The Essential
Writings and Speeches of Martin
Luther King, Jr, edited by the late James Melvin Washington (rev ed [San
Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991] xxvii + 702 pp). Washington’s introduction to
this truly monumental work helps us to understand the man, his words, and his
work in brief compass with careful, critical judgment. Biography of King is a
major industry, but few of those who have written about King have understood
him religiously, in his theological development, and so most of them fail to
realize him in all of his complexity. An outstanding exception is Frederick L
Downing’s To See the Promised Land: The
Faith Pilgrimage of Martin Luther
King, Jr ([Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1986] 297 pp), one of the
first attempts to assay a life of King’s magnitude in “faith development”
terms. I should disclose that I edited this work for publication, but I can
also say as a critic that it succeeds both in spite and because of the tools
and methods of its author to become one of the few useful books about King. In Malcolm & Martin & America: A Dream or a Nightmare
([Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 1991] xviii + 358 pp), the black theologian James
H Cone offers a Political Correction rather than a theological assessment of
his subjects, but one who has read both Malcolm and King can come to Cone’s
conclusion with assent: “We need both of them and we need them together.”
Cone’s first book, Black Theology and Black Power ([New York: Seabury Press, 1969] x +
165 pp) is a landmark in this literature—a valiant attempt to administer
Christian baptism (or, at any rate, a “christening”) to the ideology of Malcolm
and Cleaver. It is also a challenge to white Christians, pricked in their
hearts by the suffering of blacks, who cry out, “What shall we do?” For all too
many, as Cone writes, this question—“What can I do?”—means “What can I do and
still receive the same privileges as other whites and—this is the key—be liked by Negroes?” Cone’s answer—a
deliberate echo of Malcolm X—is
“nothing.” The only whites Cone is ready to receive—and, indeed, the
only blacks—are “radicals,” those “who are prepared to risk life for freedom,”
those who, like the Abolitionist John Brown, “hate evil and refuse to tolerate
it anywhere” (p 28).
Few indeed are the whites who have pursued
John Brown’s radical course to its inevitable end, but more than a few have
tried to tried to take up their crosses and follow Jesus down the road to
racial repentance and reconciliation. In Christianity
and the Race Problem ([New York: Association Press, 1924] xxii + 280 pp),
the eminent missiologist and ecumenist Joseph Houldsworth Oldham (1874-1969)
approaches racial issues from a truly “global” perspective. Oldham’s missionary
consciousness dominates the work, but the peculiar American environment is
never far from his mind. Oldham is a person of his time and place, and as an
advocate of missions he is ready to work with “the powers that be,” but his
work is also an indictment of European colonialism and its cavalier treatment
of the “weaker” peoples. In the United States and South Africa of 1924, apartheid is a fact of life, and the
prevention of “friction and conflict” is important to Oldham as a Christian,
but he knows that segregation must not and cannot be a final solution to the
human problems of race.
There
is, and can be, no escape from the fact that the
different
races have to live in the same world. Whatever
social
arrangements may be necessary as far as the masses
are
concerned, it is indispensable that some means should
be found by which
individuals may surmount the barriers
and enter into friendship
with members of the other race.
Only in this way can real
understanding ever be brought
about. This task of
interpretation is one which it is incumbent
on Christians especially to
undertake. The Christian spirit,
which is essentially
missionary and inclusive, can never
reconcile itself to any
barriers which separate man from
man. (p 175)
A generation later, responding to the crisis
rising from the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Brown v Board of Education (17 May 1954)
the Southern Baptist ethicist Thomas Buford Maston (1898-1988) published Segregation and Desegregation: A Christian Approach ([New York:
Macmillan, 1959] xiv + 178 pp). Maston had been a student of H Richard Niebuhr
at Yale, but he is a thoroughgoing fundamentalist in handling the Bible. That
makes his constructive case, beginning with his chapter on “Biblical Teachings
and Segregation,” even more powerful in its plea to white segregationists, for
they could not successfully taint Maston with the magic epithet “liberal.” His The Bible and Race (Nashville: Broadman
Press, 1959), beamed directly at Southern Baptists of his time, is consequently
less useful generally than it might be, but Maston remains a powerful
interpreter of the ethical teachings of the Bible in the plain words of the
English text.
At the same time Kyle E Haselden (1913-1968),
an American Baptist minister in West Virginia about to become Managing Editor
of The Christian Century, addressed The Racial
Problem in Christian Perspective ([New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959;
2d ed, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964] 222 pp). Haselden intends to correct
the reluctance of the Christian church “to speak directly, courageously, and in
its own language” to the tensions of race. His work is, in his own words about
another’s reflection,
a salutary rebuke to those
Christians who seek the solution
of the racial crisis
everywhere except in the powers of an
applied Christian ethic.
This is a rebuke which falls not only
upon the ordinary Christian
in his racial behavior but also
upon those interpreters of
the Christian ethic who consider
their task done when they
have given the best secular views
of these questions. (pp
12-13)
Haselden expects Christians to speak not only
to the world at large but also to other Christians, and he expects that
Christians will practice what they preach. While his work emerges from its
historic Sitz im Leben, his
indictment and his prescriptions are in no way dated. Those concerned today
with the relation of female and male in the church will find Haselden’s
exegesis of Galatians 3:28 (pp 193-194) extraordinarily pertinent.
Will D Campbell, born in Amite County,
Mississippi, is yet one more Baptist witness to Christian responsibility and
resistance, white and black, to realize the Gospel in racial reconciliation. Of
these three prophets Campbell is perhaps the most significant and certainly the
most pungent. His Race and the Renewal of
the Church ([Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962] vi + 90 pp) is a report
from the trenches, angry, deeply pessimistic, and profoundly hopeful. The Failure and the Hope: Essays of Southern
Churchmen ([Grand Rapids: William B
Eerdmans, 1972] 266 pp), edited by Campbell and James Y Holloway of Berea
College, brings together the testimony of a distinguished and disparate company
of committed Christians, from Fannie Lou Hamer to Thomas Merton. Perhaps the
most challenging of these essays—all of which come from the occasional journal Katallagete: Be Reconciled—is Pete
Young’s penetrating report from the “white ghetto” of the North Carolina Ku
Klux Klan (pp 204-221). Campbell tells his own story of ministry and
misunderstanding on both sides of the racial divide in his most important work,
Brother to a Dragonfly (New York:
Seabury Press, 1977). Those who know
Campbell only in caricature, as the eccentric Reverend Will B Dunn in Doug
Marlette’s comic strip, Kudzu, can
see this often reluctant but always faithful prophet whole as he recounts the
continuing dialogue between his brother and himself.
Campbell is a Baptist of a distinctly
“independent” sort, and he is certainly no “Campbellite.” But in Race and the Renewal of the Church he
finds his prophetic text to challenge the posture of Christians of all stripes
in an editorial on “Race Prejudice” by no less an authority than David
Lipscomb, published in the Gospel
Advocate on 21 February 1878. Those who find this citation surprising have
not met the real David Lipscomb, whose understanding of the Gospel has been,
since his death in 1917, honored more in the breach than in the observance in
Nashville. In Race and Churches of Christ
I have included the extensive correspondence between S E Harris, E A Elam, and
Lipscomb on “The Negro in Worship,” which appeared in the Gospel Advocate in 1907. Lipscomb would not countenance the
separation of Christians in worship on the basis of race, but his faithful teaching
did not survive him in the Advocate
or in the institution that bears his name. Richard T Hughes tells some of the
story of race relations among Churches of Christ in chapter 12 (pp 270-306) of
Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America (Grand
Rapids: William B Eerdmans, 1996), but there is much more of this tale to be
told. It is a story of heroism and shame. In Volume IV of his continuing saga, The Search for the Ancient Order
([Germantown TN: Religious Book Service, 1987] viii + 409 pp), covering the
period from 1919-1950, Earl Irvin West celebrates the missionary
accomplishments of George Philip Bowser, Marshall Keeble, Luke Miller, Richard
Nathaniel Hogan, and some of the whites who helped them (pp 235-256). Only in three sentences ( p 253) addressing
the failure of the Southern Practical Institute in 1920 does West indirectly
touch on the tragic context of the triumphs he recounts.
Annie Clay Tuggle (1890-1976) is an
eyewitness to this event and many others, and the title of her autobiography, Another World Wonder (Perris CA: private
printing, 1974), is an apt description of the book and its subject. In telling
her own story Tuggle tells the story of black Churches of Christ in a
straightforward, unaffected, unliterary voice that does not fail to touch and
rend the heart. She knows the tragedy and the triumph at first hand, and while
her instincts are fully as apologetic as those of Earl West, she knows that the
tragedy must not be ignored. She is circumspect about the “misunderstanding”
that brought down the Southern Practical Institute in 1920, but she does not
conceal her grief.
Those who have the opportunity to turn the
pages of this rare volume—my copy has slipped away into some other
collection—have the honor to commune with a true “witness for the truth.”
Tuggle is not a scholar or an author, but her work is a “living testimony” and
an indispensable primary source.
Annie Tuggle was educated in Silver Point
Christian Institute, founded by the courageous, charismatic, and completely
independent George Philip Bowser (1874-1950). In Undying Dedication: The Story of G P Bowser ([Nashville: Gospel
Advocate, 1985] 105 pp) R Vernon Boyd chronicles the struggles of this
indomitable and intellectual preacher, teacher, printer, and editor. Bowser
founded and attempted to maintain several short-lived schools, working
entirely—except once, in the debacle of 1920—outside the plantation of white
patronage. In 1902, 1903, or 1905—depending on whose account one reads—Bowser
began publishing Christian Echo, a
“gospel paper” for black Churches of Christ, and continued it intermittently as
he was able throughout his life, finally passing the torch to his protégé,
Richard Nathaniel Hogan (1902-1996), in the late 1940s. Only scraps of this most
precious primary source survive in libraries and private hands. Only three
library collections hold any issues of the Echo
before 1950, and these holdings begin only in 1939. This material, with an
issue from 1935 that survives in a private collection, has now been preserved
on microfilm by the American Theological Library Association. Study of this
treasure will be necessary to an understanding of Bowser and his work.
Bowser’s great contemporary, Marshall Keeble,
is far better known among whites, but not better understood. Julian E Choate’s
hagiography, Roll, Jordan, Roll: A
Biography of Marshall Keeble
(Nashville: Gospel Advocate, 1968), must be read with a hermeneutic of
suspicion, but in that light it is often a revealing if unwitting analysis of the
machinations of white power. One of Keeble’s most important white patrons,
Benton Cordell Goodpasture (1895-1977), edited Biography and Sermons of Marshall Keeble, Evangelist ([Nashville:
Gospel Advocate, 1931] 102 pp), which presents a series of sermons transcribed
by professional stenographers in Keeble’s 1931 campaign in Valdosta, Georgia.
This slender volume gives us Keeble’s preaching in—more or less—his own words
at the height of his powers, and it also offers, in Goodpasture’s uncommonly
and unconsciously candid introduction, a portrait of Keeble through the
spectacles of his white patrons. Keeble’s relations with whites are,
inevitably, ambiguous. He became “president” of Nashville Christian Institute,
offsetting and permanently disabling Bowser’s independent efforts, and he was
the nominal “editor” of Christian
Counselor (1939-1950), a journal plainly designed by the Gospel Advocate
Company as a counterpoint to Christian
Echo. In my brief essay, “Brother Keeble: Notes Toward an Understanding,”
which prefaces the Keeble texts I have collected in Race and Churches of Christ,
I have begun to explore this ambiguity and its consequences. Marshall Keeble is
not Uncle Tom; he is not Martin Luther King; he is, not so simply, Marshall
Keeble, an admirer of “Mr Booker T Washington” and a close reader of the
English Bible. Until we can understand him and appreciate him for what he
really is, we shall not reconcile the races to one another in the Churches of
Christ.
One of those who came to school to Marshall Keeble
in the Nashville Christian Institute and traveled with Keeble as a “preacher
boy” was an ambitious 12-year-old from Montgomery, Alabama, named Fred D Gray.
From NCI young Gray went to Alabama State College and from there to Case
Western Reserve University, where he studied law. Gray remained, as his mentor
intended, a preacher in Churches of Christ, but he also became something that
Keeble could not conceive: the attorney who represented Rosa Parks, Martin
Luther King, Jr, the Montgomery Improvement Association, the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, and many other persons and organizations related to the
American movement for civil rights. Fred Gray tells his story in Bus Ride to Justice: Changing the System by the System
([Montgomery AL: Black Belt Press, 1995] xvi + 400 pp). It is the story of a
frank and faithful follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is also the single
person who may have done more than any other individual to destroy de jure
segregation in the United States. In 1974, after he was instrumental in
merging the two congregations in Tuskegee, Alabama, Gray became an elder of the
Tuskegee Church of Christ. For him it was a crowning moment that brought
together his great, consuming passions.
Not
only was I able to destroy segregation in government,
education,
and transportation, but also in the church. My
ministerial
work has been a complement to my legal work,
and
the legal work has been supplemented by my ministerial
work.
They have worked hand-in-hand. (p 260)
Fred Gray, who knew intimately both Marshall
Keeble and Martin Luther King, Jr, and loves and reveres them both, stands and
writes within the framework constructed by all of this literature. One can do
no better than to say, to his readers and successors, go thou and do likewise.