Bishop Henry McNeal Turner
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The Right Reverend Henry McNeal Turner |
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| Born |
February 1, 1834 Newberry, South Carolina |
| Died | May 8, 1915 (aged 81) Windsor, Ontario |
| Spouse(s) | Eliza Peacher Martha Elizabeth DeWitt Harriet A. Wayman Laura Pearl Lemon |
| Children | 14 |
| Parent(s) | Hardy Turner Sarah Greer |
Henry McNeal Turner (February 1, 1834 – May 8, 1915) was a minister, politician, and the 12th elected and consecrated bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). An African American, he was a pioneer in Georgia at organizing new congregations of the African Americans after the American Civil War. Born free in South Carolina, Turner learned to read and write and became a Methodist preacher. He joined the AME Church in St. Louis, Missouri in 1858, where he became a minister. Later he had pastorates in Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, DC.
In 1863 during the American Civil War, Turner was appointed as the first black chaplain in the United States Colored Troops. Afterward, he was appointed to the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia. He settled in Macon and was elected to the state legislature in 1868 during Reconstruction. He planted many AME churches in Georgia after the war. In 1880 he was elected as the first southern bishop of the AME Church after a fierce battle within the denomination.
Angered by the Democrats' regaining power and instituting Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth century South, Turner began to support black nationalism and emigration of blacks to Africa. He was the chief figure to do so in the late nineteenth century; this emigration movement increased after World War I.
Henry McNeal Turner was born free in Newberry, South Carolina to Sarah Greer and Hardy Turner, both of African and European ancestry. Some sources say he was born in Abbeville, South Carolina. His paternal grandparents were a white woman planter and a black man. According to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem under slave law, her mixed-race children were born free, because she was.
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