Henry McNeal Turner
Henry McNeal Turner (1834-1915) was a prominent African American minister, politician, and social activist in the 19th century. Born in South Carolina, Turner faced significant racial prejudice despite not being enslaved and worked various labor jobs from a young age. He developed a deep commitment to education and faith, ultimately becoming an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Turner made history as the first African American chaplain in the U.S. military during the Civil War and later served in the Georgia legislature, advocating for African American rights. Despite initial political success, he faced significant setbacks, including being disqualified from office due to racial discrimination.
Turner was influential in the AME Church, promoting its growth in the South, and became a bishop, using his platform to address issues of race and social justice. He increasingly supported emigration to Africa as a solution to racial discrimination, a stance that reflected his evolving views on the future of African Americans. Throughout his life, he wrote extensively and engaged in various editorial roles, shaping African American discourse. Although Turner's contributions have not received as much scholarly focus as some contemporaries, his ideas laid groundwork for future movements such as cultural nationalism and the Civil Rights Movement, making him a significant figure in African American history.
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Subject Terms
Henry McNeal Turner
Religious leader and activist
- Born: February 1, 1834
- Birthplace: Newberry Courthouse, South Carolina
- Died: May 8, 1915
- Place of death: Windsor, Ontario, Canada
As a writer, orator, and religious leader, Turner worked to empower African Americans and combat racism. His frustration with the racial climate in the United States led him to embrace Black Nationalism and advocate for emigration to Africa.
Early Life
Henry McNeal Turner was born on February 1, 1834, in Newberry Courthouse, South Carolina, to Hardy and Sarah Greer Turner. Although he was not a slave, Turner still experienced the harsh reality of prejudice and racism. He worked in cotton fields alongside slaves and in a blacksmith shop under harsh overseers. When Turner was eight or nine years old, he had a dream in which he stood before a large crowd of African Americans and whites who looked to him for instruction. He interpreted the dream as God preparing him to do great things.
At the age of fifteen, Turner found employment at a law office in Abbeville. The lawyers took notice of his quick mind and eagerness to learn and began teaching him other subjects, such as arithmetic, history, law, and theology. While living in Abbeville, Turner joined the Methodist church and soon thereafter began to preach.
After gaining a license to preach in the southern Methodist Church at the age of nineteen, Turner delivered sermons to large, integrated audiences. However, he found it frustrating that the southern Methodist Church would not ordain him and that he had already achieved the highest level an African American could attain in the denomination. This frustration led Turner to join the all-black African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in 1858.
Life’s Work
Turner was ordained an AME minister and, in 1862, he became pastor of Israel AME Church in Washington, D.C. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln commissioned Turner to the office of chaplain in the Union Army, making him the first African American chaplain in any branch of the military. In this capacity, he also became a war correspondent for the AME newspaper, The Christian Recorder. When the Civil War ended, Turner was assigned to the Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgia as an Army chaplain.
After leaving the military, Turner turned his attention to politics. He was elected to the Georgia legislature in 1868 and believed that change had finally come. However, any excitement that Turner or African Americans in general had for ushering in a new day after the Civil War disappeared quickly when white members of the state legislature voted to disqualify African Americans from holding elected office. After his ouster from the legislature, Turner became the first African American United States postmaster in Macon, Georgia. After leaving that position, he turned his attention to building the AME Church in the South by recruiting African Americans away from the primarily white southern Methodist Church.
In 1876, Turner became publications manager for the AME Church, a position that opened the door for him to become a bishop. As bishop, Turner had a national platform for his ideas on race, politics, lynching, and other issues. However, as racism became more of an issue for African Americans, Turner increasingly became a proponent of emigration to Africa.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, after several failed attempts at an emigration plan and with the rise of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois as leaders in the black community, Turner’s influence waned. However, Turner remained active. He edited two newspapers, Voice of Missions (1893-1900) and Voice of the People (1901-1904); served as chairman of the board of Morris Brown College from 1896 to 1908; and kept a busy schedule until the end of his life. In May, 1915, while he was in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, for the General Conference of the AME Church, he suffered a massive stroke. Turner died a few hours later at a Windsor hospital.
Significance
Turner was widely popular during his career and produced many articles, essays, and editorials. He wrote introductions to several books and published pamphlets, speeches, the hymnal for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and a polity manual for the denomination. However, despite this ample body of work, Turner has not received the same scholarly attention paid to some of his contemporaries. While his rhetoric was at times harsh—even crude—it anticipated many of the social movements in African American culture during the twentieth century. Du Bois’s idea of “cultural nationalism,” Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, James H. Cone’s black liberation theology, and even some elements of hip-hop culture owe a debt to Turner’s progressive insights.
Turner also offered an alternative viewpoint in African American rhetorical discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He rejected accommodation and integration—goals pursued by many other black leaders of the time—and instead offered emigration as a possible solution to the problems African Americans faced.
Bibliography
Angell, Stephen Ward. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African American Religion in the South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. A biography that chronicles Turner’s life and rise within the AME Church.
Johnson, Robert, Jr. “Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African American Institutional Support for Repatriation.” In Returning Home: A Century of African American Repatriation. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2005. Examines Turner’s support for emigration in the context of other black nationalist and “Back to Africa” movements.
Ponton, Mungo M. Life and Times of Henry McNeal Turner. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1970. Chronicles Turner’s life, emphasizing his early years, political career, and work as a bishop in the AME Church.
Turner, Henry McNeal. Respect Black: The Writings and Speeches of Henry McNeal Turner. Compiled and edited by Edwin Redkey. New York: Arno Press, 1971. Contains edited speeches and writings of Turner from 1863 through 1913.