Marshall Keeble (1878–1968), born to former slaves near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, became the most successful evangelist among Churches of Christ — baptizing as many as 30,000 people — and the premier African American preacher in the tradition in the twentieth century.
Financed by white patrons, above all the Nashville businessman A. M. Burton, Keeble was the first evangelist among Churches of Christ to preach regularly across the color line, and very nearly the last. His public accommodationism on race, in deliberate contrast to the open protest of George Philip Bowser, has made his legacy contested ever since. What is not contested is the generation of Black leaders his preaching produced, among them the civil rights attorney Fred D. Gray.
Keeble is also the clearest twentieth-century case of the movement's own logic outrunning its practice. A tradition that confers full standing in baptism and lodges authority in every believer had, in its segregated congregations, built exactly the kind of fence it existed to remove.
Relationships
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Followed and diverged from: Samuel Robert Cassius
Cassius wrote and protested openly on race; Keeble worked within white patronage. Both are load-bearing for the tradition's racial history.