Henry McNeal Turner was an African American leader and a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, argued for African American emigration to Africa.
Background
Henry McNeal Turner was born free on February 1, 1834 near Abbeville, South Carolina, to Sarah Greer and Hardy Turner. Turner was never a slave. His paternal grandmother was a white plantation owner. His maternal grandfather, David Greer, arrived in North America aboard a slave ship but, according to family legend, was found to have a tattoo with the Mandingo coat of arms, signifying his royal status. The South Carolinians decided not to sell Greer into slavery and sent him to live with a Quaker family.
Education
Unable to go to school because of state laws, Henry was "apprenticed" in local cotton fields but ran away and found a job as sweeper in a law office. The young clerks surreptitiously taught him to read and write. He also studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and theology with professors from Trinity College while at the church’s training mission in Baltimore.
Career
Turner was converted to Christianity and at age 20 was licensed as a traveling evangelist for the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1855 he moved to Macon, Georgia, where he joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church and became a preacher. He preached to white and black audiences throughout the South until 1858. In 1858 he journeyed north to St. Louis, Missouri, where he was accepted as a preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. For the next five years, he filled pastorate in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1862 he moved to a church in Washington, D. C. His fiery sermons earned him the title "Black Spurgeon" (a reference to a famous English sermonizer of the day). Congressmen attended his preaching, and Turner frequented the Capitol to watch politicians in action. After emancipation of the slaves in 1863, he agitated for putting black troops into the Civil War and was commissioned the first black chaplain in the Union Army.
After the war Turner was assigned to the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia, but he resigned to recruit blacks for his Church and, later, to organize them for the Republican party. He participated in the Georgia constitutional convention of 1868 and later was elected to the legislature. When blacks were refused their seats in the legislature, Turner was appointed postmaster at Macon, Georgia, and then a customs inspector at Savannah. Meanwhile, in 1876, he was elected manager of the AME Book Concern, and in 1880 he was elected one of a dozen bishops in the Church.
Turner was interested in Africa as a potential homeland for African Americans. His experiences in Reconstruction politics disillusioned him with white America, and after 1868 he urged talented young blacks to establish a nation in Africa which would give pride and encouragement to blacks everywhere. His writings and speeches in favor of pan-African nationalism and his scathing attacks on white racism antagonized many middle-class blacks but inspired many black farmers. Turner wrote for Church and publicnewspapers. In Atlanta he founded the Southern Recorder (1888), the Voice of Missions (1892), and the Voice of the People (1901). He also published a catechism, a hymnal, and The Genius and Theory of Methodist Polity (1885). When the U. S. Supreme Court struck down the Reconstruction civil rights laws in 1883, he issued a blistering attack in The Barbarous Decision of the Supreme Court . .. , revised as The Black Man's Doom (1896).
During the 1890s Turner visited Africa four times to supervise Church work and publicize emigration. In 1893 he summoned a national convention of Afro-American leaders to protest lynching and political attacks on blacks and get support for his emigration schemes. However, Turner's appeals were heeded only by poor blacks who could neither afford passage to Africa nor support themselves there. He continued his agitation, attracting nationwide attention in 1906, when he reportedly called the American flag a "dirty rag. " He died in Windsor, Ontario, on May 8, 1915.
Membership
American Colonization Society