preacher; activist; writer
Personal Information
Born in 1834, near Abbeville, SC; died in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, May 8, 1915; buried in Atlanta, GA; son of Hardy and Sarah (Green) Turner; married four times, in 1856, 1893, 1900, and to fourth wife, Laura Pearl Lemon, in 1907.
Education: African Methodist Episcopal (AME) training in theology, 1858-60.
Politics: Republican during Civil War; later, black nationalist.
Religion: AME.
Memberships: American Colonization Society (elected president, 1876).
Career
Traveling preacher for Methodist Episcopal Church--South, 1851-57; joined African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1858, became deacon, 1860, and elder, 1862; pastor of Union Bethel Church, Washington, DC, 1862-65; appointed first black U.S. Army chaplain by Abraham Lincoln, 1863; worked briefly as an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau following the Union victory to the Civil War; organized AME churches and missions in Georgia, 1865-67; delegate to Georgia constitutional convention, 1867; member of the Georgia state legislature, 1868; church pastor in Savannah, GA, 1870-76; business manager, AME Book Concern, Philadelphia, 1876-80; elected AME bishop, 1880; established Morris Brown College, Atlanta, c. 1890, and served as president for twelve years; traveled to Africa four times, 1891-98; organized national convention of African Americans, Cincinnati, OH, 1893; headed Georgia Equal Rights Association, 1906. Author of The Genius and Theory of Methodist Policy, 1885; founder of Southern Christian Recorder, Voice of Missions, and Voice of the People; author of editorials.
Life's Work
Henry McNeal Turner was for many years the leading advocate of black migration to Africa as the only permanent solution to the problem of race discrimination in the United States. As bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), Turner was a highly vocal and vehement critic of white America's continued oppression of its black citizens, and he became natural heir to nineteenth-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass as chief spokesman for black pride and self-determination. Turner's firsthand experience of white resistance to equality among the races led him to embrace the cause of African migration even before the rise of black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey in the 1920s. His "back to Africa" campaign never won effective support from a majority of African Americans, but Turner remained one of the most powerful black leaders during the difficult years of widespread economic distress and segregation enforced by Jim Crow laws.
Turner was born to a family of free blacks in South Carolina in 1834. Although not slaves, the impoverished Turners found it necessary to put their children to work picking cotton side by side with slaves, and Henry's earliest memories were of hard labor under the hot Carolina sun. Already of a proud and defiant temperament, Turner ran away from home as a young teenager and found work as an office boy with a law firm. He swept floors and washed windows for a few pennies per day, but some of the law clerks noticed Turner's unusually bright and curious mind and offered to teach the young man how to read and write. (In most parts of the South, this was a criminal act.) Turner responded quickly to their help and soon became not only literate, but a powerful speaker as well. While still in his teens, the broad-shouldered, powerfully built Turner was offered a position as an itinerant minister by the Methodist Episcopal Church--South, beginning a career in the church that would continue for the remaining sixty-five years of his life.
Throughout the 1850s Turner traveled widely in the deep South, preaching to slaves and free blacks under the auspices of the white-controlled Methodist Episcopal Church. Though himself a free man, Turner everywhere encountered the humiliations and restraints placed upon people of color in the prewar South, and he was not of a nature to suffer such indignities in silence. In 1858, Turner first heard of a Christian denomination run by and for blacks, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and he immediately joined its mission in Baltimore.
The AME had been founded in Philadelphia in 1794 and was extensively represented in the northern half of the United States, but the threat posed to southern slaveowners by any all-black organization had prohibited its growth in the South. At the church's training mission in Baltimore, Turner studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and theology with professors from nearby Trinity College. He was appointed deacon in 1860 and two years later elevated to the rank of elder.
Upon completion of his training, Turner was named pastor of the Union Bethel Church in Washington, D.C., the capital's largest black church. Turner was outspoken in his support for President Abraham Lincoln's general emancipation of the slaves in 1863, and equally so in his call for the use of black troops in the Union Army during the Civil War. Once this became federal policy, the first black troops from the Washington area were mustered in the Union Bethel churchyard, and President Lincoln named Turner the first black chaplain in the history of the United States. Turner served his soldiers with great distinction, accompanying them into the field of battle while carrying out his duties as chaplain. The successful completion of the Union victory filled Turner with high hopes for the future of black Americans, and he joined the government's Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia to help blacks make the transition from slavery to freedom.
Turner soon found that racial discrimination was as strong as ever in Georgia, and he resigned from the Freedmen's Bureau after a short tenure to return to the AME. As would be true throughout his life, Turner preferred to work within all-black organizations rather than endure the insults faced by blacks in an integrated setting. As head of the AME's new mission in Georgia, he proved himself a tireless organizer, dispatching AME ministers to the remotest corners of the state, taking on the burdens of administration, and defending the AME and himself from the hostility of whites resentful of this new source of black independence. In the tense atmosphere of the postwar South, Turner's aggressive manner earned him the hatred of many whites, but under his direction the AME flourished as never before.
At the same time Turner was asked to help organize Georgia's blacks under the banner of the Republican Party (the party of Lincoln, and for many years of all African American leaders). He was elected as a Republican to the state constitutional convention in 1867, where he adopted a surprisingly conciliatory position on most questions of race and equal rights. At this point in his career, Turner was still optimistic about the future of race relations in America, and he believed that changes in race relations would evolve inevitably as whites and blacks learned to live together as fellow citizens.
When elected to the state legislature in 1868, however, Turner quickly learned otherwise: Georgia's white legislators passed a bill forbidding blacks from holding elected office, so enraging Turner that he led a delegation of African American representatives in a walkout from the capitol building. Before leaving the legislative chamber, Turner unleashed the full fury of his wrath in a speech that amazed whites and encouraged blacks everywhere. As quoted in a record of the Georgia state legislature, he proclaimed: "I am here to demand my rights and to hurl thunderbolts at the man who would dare to cross the threshold of my manhood.... Never in the history of the world has a man been ... charged with the offense of being of a darker hue than his fellow men."
Turner's disillusionment with the political process was redoubled the following year when he was forced to resign a federal appointment as postmaster of Macon, Georgia, after protests by local whites. His Washington connections did manage to secure Turner a minor job in the customs office of Savannah, Georgia, where he resumed full-time church duties as well; but his frustrations in the political arena had permanently altered his thinking about race relations in the United States. As early as 1862 the young clergyman had been impressed with the idea of African emigration for black Americans, and after his firsthand experience of the depth of white racism in the Reconstruction era, Turner returned to the dream of an African nation for blacks. The idea of African emigration was not new--as early as 1817 the American Colonization Society had begun the settlement of black Americans in Liberia, on the west coast of Africa--but Turner would become its most articulate and passionate nineteenth-century proponent.
Elected bishop in the AME in 1880, Turner used both pulpit and press to argue for the necessity of an African homeland for black Americans. He viewed as hopeless the efforts of blacks to achieve a decent life in the United States; racism was so ingrained in the American character, Turner believed, that people of color would never gain respect while living on American soil. Even if whites were to treat blacks with the best of intentions--which in the post-Reconstruction era they most emphatically did not--blacks would still suffer the psychic damage of living in a society founded, ruled, and defined by white culture. As cited by John Dittmer in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, Turner wrote in 1898: "As long as we remain among the whites, the Negro will believe that the devil is black ... that he [as a black person] is the devil ... and the effect of such sentiment is contemptuous and degrading." It was his insistence on black pride and black nationalism that set apart Turner from earlier proponents of emigration, many of whom were southern whites hoping to purge the country of its black population.
Turner's black nationalism was equally emphatic in the religious arena. "God is a Negro," he often repeated, pointing out that every culture had always imagined God as one of its own. Such statements were infuriating to segments of white society, but Turner's brilliant oratory and message of black pride won him a huge following among the majority of southern blacks, for whom life as "free men" had become nearly unendurable in the face of continued white oppression. As bishop in the AME, Turner traveled constantly throughout the southern states and Indian territories, preaching his doctrine of African migration and openly scorning those many black leaders who thought him too radical for the times. Indeed, Turner was always at the center of controversy, whether for his firebrand proclamations ("Negro, Get Guns" was the title of one of his editorials) or for such irregularities as ordaining a woman deacon in 1888 or marrying for the fourth time at the age of 73.
African emigration remained the polestar of Bishop Turner's life and thought. African Americans needed "an outlet, a theater of manhood and activity established somewhere for our young men and women," he noted in an 1883 edition of Christian Reporter. "Until we have black men in the seat of power, respected, feared, hated, and reverenced, our young men will never rise." To further his dream of an African homeland, Turner urged the United States government to provide funds for the transportation of "5 or 10,000" blacks to Liberia every year, and he himself made the first of four trips to Africa in 1891.
Believing that the conversion of Africa to Christianity was part of God's plan for black Americans, Turner busily established churches and schools in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and later in South Africa. Everything he saw in Africa reaffirmed his belief in emigration for blacks, and back in the United States Turner organized a national convention for African Americans to meet in Cincinnati in 1893. The convention was attended by more than 800 delegates from around the country, Turner delivering a keynote speech which touched on the subject of emigration; but his plea for Africa as "the only hope of the Negro race" was rejected by the gathering, and Turner was forced to admit that his program was not acceptable to the majority of educated black Americans.
An even more serious blow to Turner's campaign was the bad publicity generated by the sending of two ships of black Americans to Liberia in the mid-1890s. Although reports varied, it appears that most of the colonists did not like or could not survive Liberia's tropical climate and backward economy. Many of the emigrants died of fever or made their way back to the United States, where their stories of hardship were widely publicized by the black press as proof of the folly of Bishop Turner's ideas. Turner reacted to the criticism with his usual scorn, referring, as quoted by Dittmer, to the failed emigrants as "shiftless no-account Negroes ... accustomed to being fed and driven around by white men." The mismanaged expeditions effectively ended any real hope for a large-scale emigration to Africa by black Americans.
In 1895 Booker T. Washington seized black leadership with his speech at the Atlanta Exposition, in which he promised African Americans that if they remained patient and hard-working, they would eventually be accepted as equals by white society. Washington respected Bishop Turner as a powerful leader, especially among lower-class blacks, and the two men did not openly clash; but Washington's philosophy of accommodation had clearly prevailed.
Turner spent the balance of his life as an unapologetic and still virulent critic of America's social injustices. Though yielding to Booker T. Washington the title of national spokesperson for blacks in the United States, Turner remained a man of considerable power in both religious and political affairs. He was not above making alliances with southern white politicians of every variety, since he held all white leaders in similar contempt; and, as elder bishop of the AME for the last twenty years of his life, Turner's was the dominant voice in a church of some quarter million members. His last significant public role was as head of the Georgia Equal Rights Association, formed in 1906 by Turner, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other leading black figures. Turner's dream of African emigration already seemed outdated to younger men like Du Bois, but no one could deny the seventy-two-year-old bishop the courage of his words when he addressed the Georgia Equal Rights Association convention: "I used to love what I thought was the grand old flag, and sing with ecstasy about the stars and stripes," Dittmer quoted him as saying, "but to the Negro in this country the American flag is a dirty and contemptible rag." Turner died nine years later, his funeral attended by 25,000 mourners.
Further Reading
Books
- Angell, Stephen W., Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African-American Religion in the South, University of Tennessee Press, 1992.
- Dittmer, John, essay included in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Leon Litwack and August Meier, University of Illinois Press, 1988.
- Drago, Edmund L., Black Politicians and Reconstruction in Georgia: A Splendid Failure, Louisiana State University Press, 1982.
- Redkey, Edwin S., Respect Black: The Writings and Speeches of Henry McNeal Turner, Ayer Company Publications, 1971.
- Wilmore, Gayraud S., Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of Afro-American People, Orbis Books, 1983.
Periodicals- Christian Reporter, 1883.
- Ebony, February 1993.
— Jonathan Martin
