Henry McNeal Turner

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); he was a pioneer in Georgia in organizing new congregations of the independent black denomination 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; the movement grew after World War I.

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 father's parents were a white mother, who was a plantation owner, and a black father; according to partus sequitur ventrem, her children were free, as she was. According to family tradition, his paternal grandfather, renamed David Greer, was imported as a slave to South Carolina from Africa. Traders noticed he had royal Mandingo marks and did not sell him into slavery; Greer worked for a Quaker family and married a free woman of color. Turner grew up with his mother and maternal grandmother.

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