Henry Mc Neal Turner - Church Leadership

Church Leadership

As a correspondent for The Christian Reporter, the weekly newspaper of the AME Church, he wrote extensively about the Civil War. Later he wrote about the condition of his parishioners in Georgia.

When Turner joined the AME Church in 1858, its members lived mostly in the Northern and border states; total members numbered 20,000. His biographer Stephen W. Angell described Turner as "one of the most skillful denominational builders in American history." After the Civil War, he founded many AME congregations in Georgia as part of a missionary effort by the church in the South. It gained more than 250,000 new adherents throughout the South by 1877, and by 1896 had a total of more than 452,000 members nationally.

In 1880, Turner was elected as the first bishop from the South in the AME Church, after a hard battle within the denomination. Although one of the last bishops to have struggled up from poverty and a self-made man, he was the first AME Bishop to ordain a woman to the order of Deacon. He discontinued the controversial practice because of threats and discontent among the congregations. During and after the 1880s, Turner supported prohibition and women's suffrage movements. He also served for twelve years as chancellor of Morris Brown College (now Morris Brown University), a historically black college affiliated with the AME Church in Atlanta.

During the 1890s, Turner went four times to Liberia and Sierra Leone, United States and British colonies respectively. As bishop, he organized four annual AME conferences in Africa to introduce more American blacks to the continent and organize missions in the colonies. He also worked to establish the AME Church in South Africa, where he negotiated a merger with the Ethiopian Church. Due to his efforts, African students from South Africa began coming to the United States to attend Wilberforce University in Ohio, which the AME church had operated since 1863. His efforts to combine missionary work with encouraging emigration to Africa were divisive in the AME Church.

Turner crossed denominational lines in the United States, building connections with black Baptists, for instance. He was known as a fiery orator. He notably preached that God was black, scandalizing some but appealing to his colleagues at the first Black Baptist Convention when he said:

"We have as much right biblically and otherwise to believe that God is a Negroe, as you buckra or white people have to believe that God is a fine looking, symmetrical and ornamented white man. For the bulk of you and all the fool Negroes of the country believe that God is white-skinned, blue eyed, straight-haired, projected nosed, compressed lipped and finely robed white gentleman, sitting upon a throne somewhere in the heavens. Every race of people who have attempted to describe their God by words, or by paintings, or by carvings, or any other form or figure, have conveyed the idea that the God who made them and shaped their destinies was symbolized in themselves, and why should not the Negroe believe that he resembles God." -- Voice of Missions, February 1898

He died while visiting Windsor, Ontario in 1915. Turner was buried in Atlanta. After his death, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in The Crisis magazine about him:

"Turner was the last of his clan, mighty men mentally and physically, men who started at the bottom and hammered their way to the top by sheer brute strength, they were the spiritual progeny of African chieftains, and they built the African church in America."