Henry McNeal Turner

Henry McNeal Turner was born free in Newberry, South Carolina, on the first of February 1834. He was largely self-taught — barred by Southern law from formal education — and was ordained an African Methodist Episcopal minister in 1860 at the age of twenty-six.

He served as chaplain of the First U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War — the first African American military chaplain commissioned by the United States Army — and was appointed by Andrew Johnson to the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia after the war.

He was elected to the Georgia State House of Representatives in 1868. The white Georgia legislators voted on the third of September 1868 to expel all twenty-eight Black members of the legislature on the explicit ground that the Georgia constitution did not entitle Black men to hold office. Turner's address to the legislature on the eve of expulsion — "Negroes in the Georgia Legislature, that is to say, men with kinky hair and dark skins, may not hold office in Georgia" — is one of the founding political speeches of post-Civil War Black political thought in the United States.

He was elevated to AME bishop in 1880 and presided over the church's expansion into South Africa, the Caribbean, and West Africa. He led four organized expeditions of African American emigrants to Liberia between 1891 and 1898 and became the most consequential American advocate of the back-to-Africa thesis in the generation before Marcus Garvey.

He died in Windsor, Ontario, on the eighth of May 1915, age eighty-one.

He is honored here as the bishop who organized the first Black back-to-Africa exodus.