Benjamin S. Turner

Benjamin Sterling Turner was born enslaved on the seventeenth of March 1825 in Halifax County, North Carolina, and taken to Selma, Alabama, at about five years old. Tradition holds he took his letters by sitting near the lessons given to the household's white children; by twenty he could read the newspapers he was never meant to hold. Sold in his young manhood to a Selma hotelkeeper, he managed the hotel and livery stable and kept part of the profits — and by the 1860s stood among the wealthiest freedmen in Alabama.

Freedom found him ready. In 1865 he founded a school for the freedpeople of Selma; in 1867 Dallas County made him tax collector; in 1869 he became Selma's first Black city councilman — and refused the salary. In 1870, on the slogan "Universal Suffrage and Universal Amnesty," Alabama's first district sent him to the Forty-second Congress: the first African American to represent Alabama.

His causes in Washington were a builder's causes: amnesty for the ex-Confederates whose hatred he refused to return; repeal and refund of the federal cotton tax that fell hardest on Black field labor; and two hundred thousand dollars for a federal building in Selma. In 1872 an independent Black candidacy split the vote and a Democrat took the seat with a minority share — the arithmetic of division, not rejection.

He returned to the land, buying a three-hundred-acre farm in 1874, lost much in the era's panics, stood delegate at the 1880 Republican convention, and died at Selma on the twenty-first of March 1894, at sixty-nine. A century later, Black and white Selma together raised the monument on his grave at Live Oak. Honored be Benjamin Sterling Turner, who managed another man's hotel until he could build his people's house.