Tag: race relations

Two legacies, 50 years later

April 3, 2018

Marshall Keeble and Martin Luther King Jr. fought for ‘different things in different ages.’

By Hamil R. Harris and Bobby Ross Jr. | The Christian Chronicle

Marshall Keeble was calling sinners home at a 1939 gospel meeting in Ridgely, Tenn., when a young white man approached him after the sermon.

The renowned black evangelist reached out his hand, thinking this was one more soul ready for baptism.

Instead, the man struck Keeble in the face with a set of brass knuckles and ran.

The Church of Christ minister recovered his balance and kept encouraging the crowd. The meeting’s organizers wanted to call police, but Keeble told them not to, later remembering, “I had to know how to meet him, or I’d get hurt bad.”

Despite violence and threats from white supremacists, Keeble never wavered in resolve to share the Good News with seekers black and white.

Fifty years ago, the world lost two famous black preachers.

On April 4, 1968, an assassin’s bullet struck Baptist pastor Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. He was 39.

Sixteen days later — on April 20, 1968 — natural causes claimed Keeble, who had brought an estimated 30,000 souls to Jesus in a 71-year ministry career. He was 89.

King was the most visible spokesman of the Civil Rights Movement, while Keeble — who grew up in a time of racially segregated schools and churches — only quietly worked for integration.

Fred Gray, a civil rights attorney and longtime elder of the Tuskegee Church of Christin Alabama, knew both King and Keeble.

“Comparing Keeble to King is to compare two persons doing different things in different ages,” Gray, 87, said in a recent interview with The Christian Chronicle.

Read the full story.

This story appears in the April 2018 edition of The Christian Chronicle.

Related: Marshall Keeble’s ‘boy preachers’ still baptizing and saving souls (reporting from Los Angeles)

Column: ‘Sister Keeble’ stayed strong in mind, faith

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Marshall Keeble’s ‘boy preachers’ still baptizing and saving souls

April 2, 2018

Famous traveling evangelist mentored many of the most influential African-American ministers in Churches of Christ.

By Bobby Ross Jr. | The Christian Chronicle

LOS ANGELES — In 1963, an 11-year-old named Dewayne Winrow preached at Southwestern Christian College’s annual Bible lectureship in Terrell, Texas.

The boy’s message resonated with one notable person in the audience: Marshall Keeble, the famous black evangelist who baptized an estimated 30,000 people before his 1968 death.

“Brother Keeble came to the stage, and he offered me immediately a full-time scholarship to begin attending the Nashville Christian Institute,” Winrow, now 65, recalled at the Reseda Church of Christ, the San Fernando Valley congregation he has served since 1975.

Winrow, the son of a single mother, had been baptized at age 9 at the Bell and Farrall Church of Christ in his hometown of Shawnee, Okla.

The sixth-grader moved to Tennessee and became one of Keeble’s “boy preachers” — students who traveled with Keeble to gospel meetings and delivered short messages before he spoke.

“Brother Keeble’s thing was preaching, and his thing was saving souls and baptizing people,” said Daniel Harrison, another of the former boy preachers.

“Right now, many of us are still carrying on his legacy,” added Harrison, senior minister for the Chatham-Avalon Church of Christ in Chicago for 50 years and director of the national Crusade for Christ since its launch 39 years ago.

Read the full story.

This story appears in the April 2018 edition of The Christian Chronicle.

Related: Two legacies, 50 years later (contrasting Marshall Keeble and Martin Luther King Jr.)

Column: ‘Sister Keeble’ stayed strong in mind, faith

‘Sister Keeble’ stayed strong in mind, faith

April 1, 2018

The widow of famous traveling evangelist Marshall Keeble lived to be 108.

By Bobby Ross Jr. | The Christian Chronicle

I never got to meet Marshall Keeble or hear him preach.

I was a baby when Keeble, the famous traveling evangelist who started hundreds of Churches of Christ, died 50 years ago.

“I wish you would have had the chance of meeting him,” Daniel Harrison, minister for the Chatham-Avalon Church of Christ in Chicago, said as we discussed Harrison’s experience as one of Keeble’s “boy preachers.”

I wish that, too.

But I was blessed to interview Keeble’s widow during my time as an Associated Press reporter in Nashville, Tenn.

Laura Keeble was 104 years old — and still strong in mind and faith — when I profiled her for AP in 2003. (Even though I didn’t begin work at The Christian Chronicle until 2005, the tip for the story came from Lynn McMillon, the Chronicle’s president and one of my former Bible professors at Oklahoma Christian University.)

On weekday afternoons, Keeble sat in her nursing home room, content to watch Oprah Winfrey on television. But at 3 p.m. on Sundays, she expected someone to wheel her downstairs for worship.

“I’m going as long as I’m able,” said Keeble, who lived to be 108.

Baptized in a Mississippi creek in 1913, this gentle woman known as “Sister Keeble” boasted a spiritual strength that belied her wrinkles, white hair and wheelchair.

For much of her life, she lived in the shadow of her husband. But Sister Keeble, who also became “Mama” to dozens of young girls, had her own story.

Read the full column.

This column appears in the April 2018 edition of The Christian Chronicle.

Related: Marshall Keeble’s ‘boy preachers’ still baptizing and saving souls (reporting from Los Angeles)

Related: Two legacies, 50 years later

Tears and fears: Church teen killed by Arkansas police

January 18, 2018

Loved ones struggle to understand why 17-year-old opened fire during traffic stop.

By Bobby Ross Jr. | The Christian Chronicle

NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — A thin sheet of snow and ice covered the ground outside the Levy Church of Christ this week as hundreds of mourners filed into the auditorium.

Charles Smith Jr. — “C.J.” to friends and relatives — lay in an open casket adorned with red and white flowers and flanked by a giant memorial banner featuring the 17-year-old high school senior in his blue cap and gown.

Some sported dark suits and fancy dresses. Others wore jeans and T-shirts emblazoned with Smith’s smiling face. Loved ones choked back tears as they approached the coffin and kissed the teen on the way to their pews.

The death of any young person is tragic, be it from cancer or a car wreck.

The circumstances of Smith’s final moments, though, are particularly perplexing to those trying to make sense of the baptized believer’s untimely passage from, as one funeral speaker described it, “earth to glory.”

“Like many of us from time to time, he made bad judgments,” Duncan Martin, minister for the Southside Church of Christ in Little Rock, said in Smith’s eulogy. “But bad judgment does not deserve a death sentence. If that were true, this auditorium would be empty today.”

Read the full story.

First published online, this story appears in the February 2018 print edition of The Christian Chronicle.

 

No more ‘us and them’: At 50th anniversary of Detroit riot, churches model unity

August 16, 2017

Second Place, Best Reporter portfolio, Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists

Third Place, Diversity Reporting, Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists

By Bobby Ross Jr. | The Christian Chronicle

DETROIT — The boys — one black, one white — were 10 years old.

Ive Edwards lived close to where the chaos started. Smoke filled his nostrils as arsonists set his hometown ablaze. Looters ran by his window. Army tanks rolled down the street. The pop-pop-pop of gunfire pierced his ears. Afraid of stray bullets, he dove under his bed.

Greg Guymer witnessed the turmoil from Detroit’s outskirts. Helicopters whipped overhead, soldiers’ legs dangling out like a scene from Vietnam. Fear paralyzed him, but his grandfather admonished him to hide in the basement if the war zone approached.

Fifty years after the 1967 Detroit riot, Edwards and Guymer recounted their experiences as two congregations sought to model Christian unity in a nation that still struggles mightily with race — as illustrated by the fatal clashes between white supremacist groups and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Va.

Even before Charlottesville, the predominantly black Oakland Church of Christ and the predominantly white Rochester Church of Christ — both north of Detroit — saw a need to bridge the divide.

“Love conquers hate because God is love,” said Edward Cribbs, minister for the 300-member Oakland church. “The Oakland and Rochester congregations are endeavoring to bring to the forefront the issue of race and reconciliation. The events in Charlottesville remind us that our efforts are long overdue.”

Read the full story.

Related story: The riot, in retrospect

These stories appear in the September 2017 print edition of The Christian Chronicle.

‘Join in with us to save Southwestern,’ prays new president of historically black Christian college

May 16, 2017
Terrell, Texas, institution works to overcome declining enrollment and beleaguered finances.

By Bobby Ross Jr. | The Christian Chronicle

After nearly half a century with Jack Evans at the helm, Southwestern Christian College — the only historically black higher education institution associated with Churches of Christ — has a new president.

Ervin D. Seamster Jr., senior minister for the 450-member Light of the World Church of Christ in Dallas, assumed the top post at the Terrell, Texas, college in January.

Seamster told The Christian Chronicle this week he’s praying that “all of our brethren across racial and cultural lines would join in with us to save Southwestern.”

In recent years, beleaguered finances and declining enrollment — which the new president said had fallen to just 43 students before he arrived — have threatened the college’s future. Less than a decade ago, enrollment stood at 227.

Seamster is a Southwestern alumnus who for nearly two decades has used an event called the Fab Five Revival to raise funds to support students.
From 1999 to 2002, he served as a special assistant at Abilene Christian University in Texas to the former president, Royce Money.

Besides his Bachelor of Science degree from Southwestern, Seamster holds a Master of Divinity degree from the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and a Doctor of Ministry degree from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.

Originally known as the Southern Bible Institute in Fort Worth, Texas, Southwestern Christian College moved to Terrell — 30 miles east of Dallas — in 1949.

Evans had served as president since 1967, after four years as academic dean. He helped Southwestern obtain its full accreditation as a two-year junior college in 1973. In 1982, the college began awarding four-year bachelor’s degrees in Bible and religious education.

In an interview with the Chronicle this week, Seamster discussed his new role at Southwestern and the opportunities and challenges facing his alma mater. The discussion has been edited for length and clarity.

Read the full interview.

This interview appears in the online edition of The Christian Chronicle.

MLK Day reading: Black, white and Gray

January 16, 2017

Civil rights attorney who once challenged Lipscomb University in court receives the Christian university’s highest honor.

First Place (part of three-story portfolio), Magazine News Religion Reporting, Religion News Association

Second Place, News Story, Associated Church Press

By Bobby Ross Jr. | The Christian Chronicle

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Forty-five years ago, civil rights attorney and preacher Fred Gray filed a lawsuit that exposed deep divides between black and white members of Churches of Christ.

The 1967 lawsuit challenged the transfer of more than $400,000 in assets from the closed Nashville Christian Institute — a school that trained hundreds of future black church leaders — to David Lipscomb College, a higher education institution with a history of racism.

On a recent Friday night, that same Christian college — now known as Lipscomb University — presented Gray with an honorary doctorate of humane letters, the highest award the university bestows on an individual.

“It is not every day that you file a lawsuit against an institution and that institution later sees fit to honor you,” Gray, 81, told a crowd of 500 that witnessed the ceremony in Lipscomb’s Allen Arena.

Who, Gray asked, would have thought such an honor would be possible for an Alabama boy who grew up in a shotgun house with no running water?

For a boy who rode segregated buses and witnessed the frequent mistreatment of black people?

For a boy who, before he became a lawyer determined to “destroy everything segregated” he could find, performed manual labor in the yards of Lipscomb professors?

“If each of us would be really honest … we would say that we never thought this would be possible,” Gray said of the Lipscomb honor.

Read the full story.

This story originally appeared in the August 2012 edition of The Christian Chronicle.