Dear Sisters and Brothers,

This text offers a white response to Marshall Keeble in the year of his greatest triumphs, 1931. In that annus mirabilis Keeble brought 1,071 blacks and an unknown number of whites to decisions that resulted in baptism. He conducted 14 campaigns and founded six new churches. In Bradenton, Florida, Keeble and his helpers baptized 286 converts--115 in one day. In Muskogee, Oklahoma--where four years earlier James S. Killebrew was writing to H. Leo Boles about the Ku Klux Klan--Keeble baptized 204 persons. In the Valdosta, Georgia, campaign reported in this text, 166 were baptized. (See Forrest Neil Rhoades, A Study of the Sources of Marshall Keeble's Effectiveness as a Preacher [Ph.D. dissertation, Southern Illinois University, 1970] 115.)

This text is unsigned, but B. C. Goodpasture authoritatively identifies the author as A. B. Lipscomb, editor of the Christian Leader (Biography and Sermons of Marshall Keeble, 13). Alexander Bagby Lipscomb (1876-1940) is DL's nephew, a son of DL's brother Granville. ABL was part of a consortium that bought the editorial operations of the GA from DL and Elisha Sewell in 1912. By 1931 he was editing the CL with F. L. Rowe.

ABL is eloquent and, for his time, "enlightened." He is a close student of of DL, but he is some distance removed from DL's gritty reality and sense of solidarity with the poor. He loves the colored folks. His is the considered judgment of the "better" class, sympathetic but unbearably patronizing.

To what shall we attribute this remarkable success? How shall we explain results, which, if they had been accomplished under the preaching of some white evangelist, would be heralded far and wide? In what sense is Keeble a "big preacher," if any sense at all? The answer is suggested, I believe, in the caption to this article: "It's Not Keeble, but the Bible is right." If you have heard him preach, then you are quite familiar with the slogan. For not a sermon is preached but what he does not sound it out again and again. The secret of success lies in the fact that Keeble is just big and brave and humble and smart enough to magnify God's word in almost every sentence he utters. It is a simple thought; there is nothing original about it; it is as old as the Bible itself; something proclaimed by Moses and the prophets, featured by Christ and the apostles, revived by the leaders of the Restoration movement--and yet this colored man proclaims it in the vernacular of his own race with all the freshness and impetus of a new slogan, and with truly telling effect. All his listeners are visibly impressed. The older colored sisters, sitting in the same corner of the big tent, shake their heads gravely and repeat after him in reverent monotone: "Dat's true, De Bible is right." Likewise the aged colored men. Scores of white people, standing outside of the tent or sitting in their cars, more decorously nod their approval. Nearly everybody gets the impression that this colored preacher, a self-made man with no literary education to speak of, but with one great Book in his hand, is standing on a solid rock from which all of this world's wiseacres can never make him budge! Thus in his straightforward earnest speech there is not merely the reminder but the conviction of both prophet and apostles: "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand forever." If anybody cherishes the maudlin sentiment that the Twentieth Century demands a new gospel, that the simple conditions of salvation outlined in the New Testament have become too trite and commonplace to be any longer interesting, I recommend that he sit through a Keeble meeting. In the meetings here at Valdosta he quoted Acts 2:38 so frequently and made its meaning so clear that little children, white and black, now have it at their tongues end, and are actually using it to confound some of their elders who did not attend the services.

The work among the colored people here was sponsored and financed by the white disciples. We have never made a better investment for the Lord nor any which brought such quick and happy results. Such preaching has not only created a new religious and moral status for the Negro element but it has brought to this community a new citizenry capable of thinking in terms of the Bible. This means that we now have better farm hands, better porters, better cooks, better housemaids than ever before. Bro. Keeble unhesitatingly says that without the influence and the moral and financial support of the white disciples he could have accomplished little or nothing. We have tried all the way through to keep ourselves in the background, to help where help was needed, to let the colored people conduct their meeting in their own way, in the realization of the fact that Keeble not only knows the Bible but he knows his own race better than we do. This undoubtedly is the wisest course to pursue in planning such meetings, no question of racial differences or of social equality has been raised. There has been no occasion for it. But the duty of Christian brotherhood has been recognized and practiced to the fullest extent. In this matter we have kept Paul's words before us: "There is neither Jew or Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."

What has been done in Valdosta can be done in countless other home fields where the Negroes flourish and need to be taught. Will not the churches who read this article write to Bro. Keeble or some other faithful colored evangelist and start such a work? Is it not fitting that the descendants of the race whom our fathers kept in the bondage of human slavery but to whom civilization brought the gift of emancipation, should now be led by the white children of the present generation out of the darkness and bondage of sin into "the glorious libcity [sic] of the children of God"?

Verily, a harvest of souls is waiting at your door.

Thanks to Tom Olbricht for providing ABL's dates and confirming my outline of his biography.

More to come.

May God have mercy.

dhaymes, his mark +