Henry McNeal Turner

Henry McNeal Turner was born free in Newberry, South Carolina, on the first of February 1834, his liberty inherited through his mother, a free woman of color. Barred by Southern law from schooling, he taught himself to read and write and gained further learning while working for a law firm as a youth. He earned his preacher's license in 1853 and, in 1858, was ordained a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in St. Louis, where he also pursued studies in classical languages and divinity.

When the Civil War opened, Turner became the first African American commissioned as a chaplain in the United States Army, appointed in 1863 to serve the United States Colored Troops. He carried faith and comfort to Black soldiers who fought for a freedom the nation had long denied them, and afterward he labored to organize the AME Church across the South.

In Reconstruction Georgia, Turner was elected to the state House of Representatives, only to be expelled with other Black legislators in 1868. Rising in defiance, he delivered a searing address defending their right to sit. In 1880 he was elected the twelfth bishop of the AME Church, its first Southern-born bishop, and later ordained Sarah Ann Hughes, breaking new ground for women in the church.

Disillusioned by the betrayals of Reconstruction, Turner became the foremost American champion of Black emigration to Africa, founding the International Migration Society and sending ships bearing hundreds of settlers to Liberia in the 1890s. He proclaimed that "God is a Negro," insisting on the divine dignity of his people. He died on the eighth of May 1915 in Windsor, Ontario, and rests at South-View Cemetery in Atlanta. May his defiant faith and his summons to dignity be forever honored.