Henry McNeal Turner got involved in politics in the years following the war with the Republican Party, whose leaders had spearheaded the war effort and, under Abraham Lincoln, emancipated slaves across the Confederacy. He was a founding member of the Republican Party of Georgia. Henry McNeal Turner was elected to the Georgia Legislature in 1868 after running for office from Macon. Turner and 26 other freshly elected black lawmakers, all Republicans, were denied seats by the Democratic Party, which was still in control of the state at the time. Refer to Original 33. The Democrats permitted Turner and his colleague lawmakers to take their seats during the second session despite protests from the federal administration.
He was considered a political plum when the Republican administration chose him as Macon’s postmaster in 1869. By the late 1870s, the Democrats had taken back control of the state and the whole South, which devastated him. He had witnessed the escalation of violence at the polls, where Democrats had suppressed black voting through fraud and intimidation. The Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited racial discrimination in hotels, trains, and other public places, was declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1883.
Henry McNeal Turner was furious:
The world has never witnessed such barbarous laws entailed upon a free people as have grown out of the decision of the United States Supreme Court, issued October 15, 1883. For that decision alone authorized and now sustains all the unjust discriminations, proscriptions and robberies perpetrated by public carriers upon millions of the nation’s most loyal defenders. It fathers all the ‘Jim-Crow cars’ into which colored people are huddled and compelled to pay as much as the whites, who are given the finest accommodations. It has made the ballot of the black man a parody, his citizenship a nullity and his freedom a burlesque. It has engendered the bitterest feeling between the whites and blacks, and resulted in the deaths of thousands, who would have been living and enjoying life today.
Henry McNeal Turner saw state legislators in Georgia and throughout the South enact laws to deny black people the right to vote in the late nineteenth century, mostly by increasing obstacles to voter registration. He started to advocate for black Americans to emigrate to Africa and became an advocate of black nationalism. He believed that was the only way people could live free and self-sufficient lives. When he visited Africa, he was astounded by the disparities in the mindset of Africans who were self-governing and had never experienced the humiliation of slavery.
With the help of his own publications, The Voice of Missions (where he was editor from 1893 to 1900) and later The Voice of the People (where he was editor from 1901 to 1904), Henry McNeal Turner established the International Migration Society. In 1895 and 1896, he arranged for two ships carrying at least 500 emigrants to sail to Liberia. Before the Civil War, the American Colonization Society founded this as an American colony, and free Black Americans moved there. They created their own culture and tended to believe they were superior to the local indigenous Africans. Some of the migrants returned to the United States because they disliked the widespread tropical diseases, cultural shock, and lack of economic opportunities. Turner did not plan another expedition after that.
Church Leadership
Henry McNeal Turner had written extensively about the Civil War as a correspondent for The Christian Recorder, the AME Church’s weekly publication, when he was chaplain. He later wrote on the state of his parishioners in Georgia after the war.
Since the AME Church was founded in Philadelphia and the mid-Atlantic region earlier in the century, the majority of its members resided in the Northern and border states when Turner joined in 1858. It had 20,000 members overall.[4] His biographer Turner was referred to by Stephen W. Angell as “one of the most skillful denominational builders in American history.” As part of the church’s missionary work in the South following the Civil War, Turner established numerous AME congregations throughout Georgia.
It urged freedmen to become independent of white oversight and start new churches of the nation’s first autonomous black denomination. Over 250,000 new members had joined the AME Church in the South by 1877. It had over 452,000 members nationwide by 1896, most of whom were in the South, where the bulk of black people at the time resided.
Henry McNeal Turner was chosen as the A.M.E. Church’s eleventh bishop in 1880. He vigorously campaigned within the denomination to become the first elected bishop from the South. He was among the last bishops to have overcome poverty and achieved self-sufficiency. He was the first AME Bishop to appoint a female deacon. He ended the contentious practice due to threats and dissatisfaction among the congregations.
He backed the women’s suffrage and prohibition campaigns both during and after the 1880s. He was the chancellor of Morris Brown College, an AME Church-affiliated historically black college in Atlanta, Georgia, for twelve years.
Henry McNeal Turner made four trips to Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1890s. Once an American colony, the former had attained independence. The latter remained a colony of Great Britain. In his capacity as bishop, Turner arranged four yearly AME conferences in Africa with the goal of bringing more African Americans to the continent and setting up missions in these two English-speaking regions. Additionally, he arranged a merger with the Ethiopian Church while working to build the AME Church in South Africa. Wilberforce University in Ohio, a historically black college owned and run by the AME church since 1863, attracted black African students from South Africa as a result of his efforts. In the AME Church, his attempts to combine missionary work with promoting emigration to Africa caused division.
However, Henry McNeal Turner developed relationships with African-American communities across denominational boundaries in the US, such as with Black Baptists. They were creating their own state and regional associations in addition to churches.
Henry McNeal Turner had a reputation for being a fiery speaker. At the inaugural Black Baptist Convention in 1898, he famously argued that God was black, shocking some but winning over colleagues when he said:
We have as much right biblically and otherwise to believe that God is a Negroe [sic], as you buckra or white people have to believe that God is a fine looking, symmetrical and ornamented white man. For the bulk of you and all the fool Negroes of the country believe that God is white-skinned, blue eyed, straight-haired, projected nosed, compressed lipped and finely robed white gentleman, sitting upon a throne somewhere in the heavens. Every race of people who have attempted to describe their God by words, or by paintings, or by carvings, or any other form or figure, have conveyed the idea that the God who made them and shaped their destinies was symbolized in themselves, and why should not the Negroe believe that he resembles God.
He passed away in 1915 while on a trip to Windsor, Ontario. He was laid to rest in Atlanta’s South-View Cemetery. This is also where other civil rights luminaries have been laid to rest.
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about him in The Crisis magazine upon his passing:
Turner was the last of his clan, mighty men mentally and physically, men who started at the bottom and hammered their way to the top by sheer brute strength, they were the spiritual progeny of African chieftains, and they built the African church in America.
Selected writings
- “The African as a Tradesman and Mechanic / address of H.M. Turner before the African Congress at the World’s Fair in Chicago, August 15, 1893.” [United States] : [publisher not identified], [1893?] at HathiTrust
- “The Civil and Political status of the State of Georgia and Her Relations to the General Government, reviewed and discussed in a speech delivered in the House of Representatives…” Atlanta, Ga., New Era printing establishment, 1870. at HathiTrust
- “Fifteenth Amendment; a speech on the benefits accruing from the ratification of the fifteenth amendment and its incorporation into the United States constitution, delivered at the celebration held in Macon, Ga., April 19, 1890.” [n.p., 1870.] at HathiTrust
- “The genius and theory of Methodist polity; or, The machinery of Methodism, practically illustrated through a series of questions and answers.” Philadelphia : Publication Dept., A.M.E. Church, [c1885] at HathiTrust
- Introduction to Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising, by Simmons, Cleveland, Ohio, G.M. Rewell & Co., 1887.
- “Only for the bishops’ eyes.” [Atlanta?] : [The Author?], 1907. at HathiTrust
- Respect Black; the writings and speeches of Henry McNeal Turner. Compiled and edited by Edwin S. Redkey. New York, Arno Press, 1971.
- “A speech on the present duties and future destiny of the negro race, delivered Sept. 2, 1872.” [n.p., 1872]. at HathiTrust
Legacy & Honours
- In 1890, men and women who had fled from slavery in the United States constructed Turner Chapel in Oakville, Ontario, which bears his name.
- Turner’s image is displayed in Georgia’s state capitol.
- Turner Memorial A.M.E. Church in Hyattsville, Maryland, and Turner Theological Seminary, a component seminary of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia, both bear his name.
- A post office in Macon, Georgia was named in his honor by the US Congress in 2000.
- Henry McNeal Turner was named one of the 100 Greatest African Americans by academic Molefi Kete Asante in 2002.
- Atlanta, Georgia’s Henry McNeal Turner High School
