"Henry McNeal Turner"[February 1,1834-May 9,1915]

Henry was born in Newberry,South Carolina,to Sarah Greer and Hardy Turner.Henry was never a slave.His paternal grand mama was a white plantation owner.His maternal granddaddy,David Greer,arrived in North America aboard a slave ship according,to family legend,was found to have a tattoo with the Mandingo coat of arms,signifying his royal status.The South Carolinians decided not to sell David into slavery and sent him to live with a Quaker family.Henry managed to received an education.An addeville,South Carolina,law firm employed him at age fifteen to do janitorial tasks,and the firms lawyers appreciating his high intelligence,helped provide him a well rounded education.About a year earlier,he had been converted during a Methodist revival and decided he would one day become a preacher.After receiving his preacher's license in 1853,Henry traveled throughout the South as an itinerant evangelist,going as far as New Orleans,Louisiana.Much of his time was spent in Georgia where he preached at revivals in Macon,Athens,and Atlanta.In 1865 he married Eliza Peacher,the daughter of wealthy African American house builder in Columbia,South Carolina.They fourteen children,only four of whom survived into adulthood.In 1858 Henry and his family moved north St.Louis,Missouri,where where he was accepted as a preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.Henry feared southern legislation threatening enslavement of free African Americans.For the next five years,he filled pastorates in Baltimore Maryland,and in Washington,D.C.,and witnessed the outbreak of the Civil War (1861-65).During his time in Washington,he befriended Charles Sumner,Thaddeus Steven,and other republican legislators.In 1863 Henry was instrumental in organizing the First Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops in his own churchyard and was mustered into service as an army chaplain for that regiment.He and his regiment were involved in numerous battles in the Virginia theater.At the war's end,president Andrew Jackson reassigned Henry to an African American regiment in Atlanta,Henry resigned when he realize it already had a chaplain.He spent much of the next three years traveling throughout Georgia,helping to organize the African Methodist Episcopal Church in what was virgin,but not always friendly territory.African Americans flocked to the new denomination,the lack of such essentials as trained pastors and adequate meeting space challenged Henry.In 1867,after Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts,Henry switched his energies to the political sphere.He helped organize Georgia's Republican Party.He served in the state's constitutional convention and then was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives,representing Macon.In 1868,when the vast majority of white legislators decided to expel their African Americans peers on the grounds that office holding was a privilege denied from servile background,Henry delivered an eloquent speech from the floor.Unfortunately,it did little to sway his fellow legislators.Soon afterward Henry received threats from the Ku Klux Klan.In 1869 he was appointed postmaster of Macon by U.S.president Ulysses S.Grant Henry was forced to resign a few weeks later under fire from allegations that he consorted with prostitutes and had passed defective currency.At the behest of the U.S. Congress,he did reclaim his legislative seat in 1870,he was denied reelection in a fraud-filled contest a few months later.Henry moved to Savannah,where he worked at the Custom House and served as a pastor of the prestigious St.Philip's AME Church.In 1876 he was reelected manager of the publishing house of the church.Four years later,in a hard-fought and controversial contest,he won the election as the twelfth bishop of the AME Church.Henry was an extremely vigorous and successful bishop.In 1865 he became the first AME Bishop ordain a woman,Sarah Ann Hughes to the office of deacon.He wrote The Genius and Theory of Methodist Polity (1885),a learned guide to Methodist policies and practices.He twice entered the political ranks in support of prohibition referenda in Atlanta.After Eliza,died in 1889,he eventually married three more times:Martha Elizabeth Dewitt in 1893;Harriet A.Waymon in 1900;and Laura Pearl Lemon in 1907.Between 1891 & 1898,Henry traveled four times to Africa.He was instrumental in promoting the annual conferences in Liberia & Sierra Leone and in attaining a merger with the Ethiopian Church in South Africa.Henry also sought to promote the growth of the AME Church in Latin America,sending missionaries to Cuba and Mexico.With the support of white businessmen,from Alabama,he help organized the International Migration Society to promote the return of African Americans to Africa.To further the emigrationist cause,he established his own newspapers:The Voice of Missions (editor,1893-1900) and later The Voice of the People (editor,1901-04).Two ships with a total of 500 or more emigrants sailed to Liberia in 1895 & 1896 but a number returned,complaing about disease and the country's poor economic prospects.Henry remained an advocate of back-to-Africa programs but was unable to make further headway against the negatives reactions of returned emigrants.In his later years he helt increasingly estranged from the South.Henry died in Windsor,Canada while traveling on church business.He is buried in Atlanta.