We come now to Marshall Keeble. While S. W. Womack (Keeble's father-in-law, the father of his first wife) and G. P. Bowser passed their long and fruitful lives in relative obscurity, and died before the historians who would notice them could notice them, Marshall Keeble suffers from an embarrassment of hagiographers and chroniclers. When Keeble's contemporaries write about him, most of them reveal far more about themselves than about Keeble. That is why their works are historically significant. Yet a critical understanding of Keeble remains to be realized.
Marshall Keeble (1878-1968) is baptized in 1892 and begins preaching in 1897 under the tutelage of Womack. By 1914 he begins to travel as an evangelist, and in 1918, at Oak Grove near Henderson TN, he baptizes 84 persons. That success, in the archdiocese of Brodie Hardeman, brings Keeble to the attention of affluent and influential white people, who see in him, i believe, an opportunity to extend their dominance and influence into the black community. After 1920 Keeble would travel extensively at the expense of Nashville millionaire A. M. Burton, and he would enjoy the patronage of the Nashville establishment, from the Life and Casualty Insurance Company to McQuiddy Printing and the Gospel Advocate. The ambiguities and ironies of this relationship are now, perhaps, more apparent than they would have been in an earlier time. Reporting to the GA in 1925 about his ninth meeting in Henderson, where his work had begun "nine years ago," Keeble is, as always, completely candid; ". . . the white people say the influence of the work is manifest," he writes, "as disorder among the people of my race is of very rare occurence" ("From the Brethren," GA 67 [27 August 1925]: 837).
Keeble is an unlettered, largely self-taught, creative genius, and a master of two things: the plain words of the English Bible, and human psychology. Certainly S. W. Womack is a major contributor to Keeble's intellectual and spiritual formation; the true extent of Womack's role as mentor may never be recovered. Less than a year before his death, Keeble told Forrest Rhoades that "Booker T. Washington done a lot to help me. . . . I got a lot out of how he made his points. . . . Any man who can make things simple is a great teacher." Keeble makes things deceptively simple. He instinctively understands the strategy of Jesus in Mark 4:10-12, preaching in homespun "parables" that communicate to blacks quite differently than to whites. In order to "hear" Keeble, and therefore to understand him, we must needs develop "ears."
It is simplistic merely to say that Keeble tells white folks what they want to hear. Rather--and this is extraordinary--the evidence is that Keeble communicates "good news" both to blacks and to whites. He is the first person in the Churches of Christ who transcends the twentieth-century "color line," and he is very nearly the last. Yet much of what he says is hidden from white racists in his "parables" and epigrams.
Contemporaries and commentators, black and white, eulogize Keeble's "humility," but few of them have understood it for what it is. i recall Robert Craft's remark about the composer Schoenberg (a sentence that applies also to Krister Stendahl and Carl Ketcherside, but more particularly to Keeble). "His humility is fathomless," Craft wrote of Schoenberg, "but it is sheathed all the way down with an hubris of stainless steel." Keeble's humility is genuine, but it is bolstered by the bravado of Brother Rabbit, who in countless slave tales outwits the Fox and the Bear by pitting his weakness against their strength. "My strength is perfected in weakness," says the Lord, and Keeble understands perfectly. Had Keeble done his work in Africa we should perhaps have more readily comprehended his role as trickster and shaman as we observed his uses of humility and psychology. No one in his time and place possesses more formidable weapons or wields them more effectively.
"I have known Bro. M. Keeble since 1922," Brodie Hardeman told B. C. Goodpasture in 1931,
Powerful whites like Burton, Hardeman, and Goodpasture see Keeble as an instrument of social control and a counterpoint to Bowser, whose initiative and independence they view with suspicion, if not outright fear. They use Keeble and make no secret of it. For them, Keeble's "simplicity and humility" mean that he "sticks to the Gospel" and "doesn't get out of line." Keeble observes certain rituals carefully, presenting himself as a vassal to Goodpasture for the annual gift of a suit. Yet Keeble's unique gifts confer certain privileges and an autonomous identity that are, in his time, truly remarkable. Keeble may be the only African American of his time who is known to white members of the Churches of Christ, and to others outside the church, by his last name. In a time when most blacks are known to whites only by their first names or some crude sobriquet, Keeble is never "Marsh" but "Keeble," or, more often, "Brother Keeble."
The next three documents in this series illustrate Keeble's unique gifts and his particular and peculiar influence on race relations in the Churches of Christ during the decades of his greatest fame and accomplishment, from 1931 to 1950. We shall see Keeble and African Americans through the eyes of two influential white contemporaries--who, again quite characteristically, tell us much more about themselves than about Keeble--and then we shall hear at length from Keeble himself.
May God have mercy.
dhaymes, his mark +