TURNER, HENRY MCNEAL. Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915) was the twelfth bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and the U. S. Army's first African American chaplain. He studied history, theology, law, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and German and received an LL.D from the University of Pennsylvania in 1872. Turner also served as vice president of the African Colonization Society (1877) and was a major spokesperson for the Back-to-Africa movement. The movement was an African American led effort that advocated their emigration to Africa. Most black leaders had been opposed to such schemes since the option was first pursued in 1816 with the formation of the American Colonization Society by whites. However, emigration became a viable option for some blacks in the 1880s, when many black leaders were becoming increasingly disillusioned about the prospects of achieving equal rights in America. Matters became especially bleak in 1883 when the United States Supreme Court outlawed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. This action by the Supreme Court paved the way for state legislatures to enact laws that segregated all aspects of southern society. In 1896 segregation was upheld in the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that set forth the "separate but equal" doctrine. Turner's career was profoundly shaped by these events. Elected to the Georgia legislature during the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, Turner became known as the "Apostle of Foreign Missions" because of his travels to West Africa to found two churches, one in Sierra Leone and the other in Liberia. Turner was also famous for frequently asserting that "God is a Negro."
Turner was converted to Christianity at the age of thirteen while attending a Methodist revival. At the age of fifteen he took a job as a janitor with a law firm in Abbeville, South Carolina. Turner's intelligence so impressed his employers that they provided him with his basic education in law and history. He received his preacher's license in 1853 and traveled as an itinerant evangelist throughout the South as far west as New Orleans. He also traveled to Missouri and then to Baltimore, where he furthered his study of grammar, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and German while overseeing a small mission congregation. Turner was ordained a Methodist deacon in 1860 and an elder in 1862.
Turner married Eliza Peacher, the daughter of a wealthy African American house builder in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1856. The threat of slavery that hung over free blacks in the South before the Civil War caused Turner to move with his family to St. Louis, Missouri. Over the course of the next five years he filled pastorates in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.
Turner became a friend of Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and other influential Republicans in the years before the Civil War. When war broke out in 1861, Turner was commissioned as the first black chaplain in the U.S. Army. After the war Turner helped to establish AME congregations throughout Georgia, but he was frustrated by the lack of trained clergy to continue his work.
With Congress's passage of the Reconstruction Acts in 1867, Turner involved himself more directly in politics by helping to organize Georgia's Republican Party. He was elected to Georgia's House of Representatives from the city of Macon. The white-controlled legislative body, however, ousted the African American representatives in 1868. After Turner protested this injustice, he received threats from the Ku Klux Klan. In 1869 he was appointed postmaster of Macon by President Ulysses S. Grant, but he was forced to resign from this position a week later. He finished his term in the Georgia legislature in 1870, after which he moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he served in local churches (including the prestigious St Philip's AME Church) and served as an inspector for the U.S. Customs Service.
In 1876 Turner assumed the management of the AME Book Concern in Philadelphia and the editorship of the Christian Recorder. In 1880 he became the bishop of the denomination in a hotly contested election.
Turner was extremely effective as bishop. After the Supreme Court circumscribed the civil rights of African Americans in 1883, Turner's critique of mainstream American society became scathing. Equally scathing were Turner's criticisms of black meekness in the face of white oppression. He urged blacks to defend themselves against mob violence and saw his educational and missionary initiatives as vehicles for enhancing black self-worth and freedom. He published a catechism, a hymnal, and such books as The Genius and Theory of Methodist Polity (1885) and The Black Man's Doom (1896). He founded the Southern Christian Recorder in 1889 and the Voice of Missions in 1892, as well as encouraging the organization of the Women's Home and Foreign Missionary Society (1896) and the formation of the Women's Christian Recorder. Turner was also the first AME bishop to ordain a woman to the office of deacon, which he did in 1885. Turner served as the editor of the Theological Institute and as the denomination's historiographer from 1908 to 1912. He died in 1915 while traveling on church business. Turner is numbered with Richard Allen (1760–1831) and Daniel Payne (1811–1893) as one of the greatest bishops in the history of the African Episcopal Methodist Church.
