The Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner: The Press, the Platform, and the Pulpit

By Andre E. Johnson

Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915) was a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of America’s earliest Black activists and social reformers, and an outspoken proponent of emigration. In The Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner: The Press, the Platform, and the Pulpit, Andre E. Johnson has compiled selected political speeches, sermons, lectures, and religious addresses delivered by Turner in their original form.

Alongside Turner’s oratory, Johnson places the speeches in their historical context and traces his influence on Black social movements in the twentieth century, from W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea of cultural nationalism to Marcus Garvey’s "Back to Africa" movement, the modern-day civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, James Cone’s Black liberation theology, and more. While Turner was widely known as a great orator and published copious articles, essays, and editorials, no single collection of only Turner’s speeches has yet been published, and scholars have largely ignored his legacy. This volume recovers a lost voice within American and African American rhetorical history, expanding the canon of the African American oratorical tradition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Mar 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781496843876

Book preview

Introduction

Henry McNeal Turner initially thought that the idea of civil war was insane and wicked. Writing in his journal on May 13, 1861, he noted his belief that supporters of the war had failed to think about its cost and ramifications. He admonished supporters to remember that there was a hell and a God, and he hoped that God would help the people to think before they are beyond the reach of thought.¹

However, when he arrived at the Israel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in 1861, his position had changed. Turner ultimately became one of the leading supporters of the war effort and one of the strongest advocates for African American participation. His support and advocacy were evident not only in the press but also from the pulpit. Writing for the Atlantic magazine in 1873, Sidney Andrews noted that preach from what text he would, begin where he might, Turner seemed to always find the war within the scope of his theme.²

While many of Turner’s preaching texts have been lost to history, some examples of his preaching ministry remain. Part 1 starts with two sermons—one from 1862 and the other from 1863. I have titled the first one In the Beginning God Created, and in it Turner spoke of Creation not as a thing of the past but as a current phenomenon. Foreshadowing some of the tenets of process theology, Turner maintained that God’s Creation was ongoing. In the second sermon, The Colored Men and the Draft, Turner blamed the country’s turmoil on animosity between white and Black people and challenged his congregation to remove the murder in their hearts and search within to find the will to love their enemies and pray for their persecutors.

When Turner arrived in Augusta, Georgia, in December 1865, organizers of the First Anniversary of Freedom asked him to deliver the January 1, 1866, Emancipation Day Speech, which launched his political career. Turner celebrated the Union victory and argued that both Blacks and whites should let by-gones be by-gones. Turner optimistically suggested that Blacks and whites could work together in the South and help build a better nation. Through mutual respect, prejudice would melt away, replaced by unity and brother- and sisterhood.

But such visions came to a crashing halt two years later. In the wake of Turner’s efforts to build the Republican Party in Georgia and his service on the state constitutional committee in June 1868, the people of Bibb County elected him to the Georgia House of Representatives. Just two months later, however, conservatives introduced a bill to deny African Americans the right to serve in the legislature because the new state constitution did not explicitly give them the right to hold office.

In response, Turner addressed the body on September 3, delivering what many observers call his finest speech. Commonly called I Claim the Rights of a Man, Turner’s On the Eligibility of Colored Members to Seats in the Georgia Legislature is probably one of the finest orations in American history. With his witty sarcasm and bitter invectives, Turner’s use of prophetic disputation (offering another speaker’s words and then addressing them directly) exposed the hypocrisy and anti-Black thought of the conservatives.³ Understanding that the result was a foregone conclusion, Turner closed with an ominous warning: You may expel us, gentlemen, by your votes, today; but, while you do it, remember that there is a just God in heaven, whose All-Seeing Eye beholds alike the acts of the oppressor and the oppressed, and who, despite the machinations of the wicked, never fails to vindicate the cause of Justice, and the sanctity of His own handiwork.

Turner’s political career was not limited to electoral politics. Turner was a prime mover in the Colored Conventions movement.⁴ Starting in 1830, the Colored Conventions gave African Americans space and place to voice their opinions and concerns about the issues and problems many faced daily. Delegates promoted the ideas of equal treatment under the law, suffrage, temperance, education, and moral reform.

Two weeks after his expulsion from the Georgia House, Turner called for an October 1868 state convention for the purpose of taking into consideration our condition and determining upon the best course of action. Turner argued that African Americans’ personal liberty [was] in great danger, along with their civil and political rights, and reasoned that the same power that overrode the constitution in one thing, [would] do it in another.⁵

At the National Colored Convention in Washington, DC, the following year, the convention named Turner its temporary chair. In a brief speech, Turner thanked the attendees and reminded them why they were there. The cause for which we have met is more than noble, Turner proclaimed, our object is divine, and God will crown it with success, sooner or later. Manhood rights [are] all we want, South, North, East and West.

The lobbying efforts by Turner and others seemed to pay off. Congress passed the Georgia Bill, which placed the state under military jurisdiction and required the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment as a condition for readmission to the Union. When the state ratified the amendment under a bill of reorganization, Turner was pleased. In his Speech on the Fifteenth Amendment, Turner celebrated the passage in the high or grand style of nineteenth-century oratory, describing the amendment as the finish of our national fabric; it is the headstone of the world’s asylum; the crowning event of the nineteenth century; the brightest glare of glory that ever hung over land or sea. Hereafter, the oppressed children of all countries can find a temple founded upon gratitude and religious equity, ample enough to accommodate them all. Turner went on to proclaim the amendment an ensign of our citizenship, the prompter of our patriotism, the bandage that is to blind-fold Justice while his sturdy hands holds the scales and weighs out impartial equity to all, regardless of popular favor or censure. It is the ascending ladder for the obscure and ignoble to rise to glory and renown, the well of living water never to run dry, the glaring pillar of fire in the night of public commotion, and the mantling pillar of cloud by day to repel the scorching rays of wicked prejudice.

Just as the optimism of his 1866 Emancipation Day speech soon was replaced by disappointment, his high hopes for the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment gave way to frustration as southern whites nullified the spirit of the amendment meant to give African American men the right to vote. White conservatives reclaimed control of both houses of the state legislature through voter intimidation tactics and outright vote stealing in the 1870 elections. Two years later, white conservatives won by even larger margins, effectively ending Reconstruction efforts in Georgia.

By then, however, Turner had begun to focus his attention on building the AME Church in Georgia, serving as presiding elder for the state. In a speech that I have titled Resignation as Presiding Elder, Turner reminded listeners that in a single year, he had traveled over fifteen thousand miles within Georgia, organizing and planting Churches, and superintending the work, together, as well as speaking over five hundred times. At the same time, he had been organizing the Republican Party and working for its maintenance and perpetuity as no other man in the State has: he had put more men in the field, made more speeches, organized more Union Leagues, political associations, clubs and [had] written more campaign documents that received larger circulation than any other man in the State.

After Turner resigned as presiding elder at the beginning of 1872, the AME Church assigned him to pastor Savannah’s St. Philip AME Church. Serving as a pastor gave Turner time not only to rest and recuperate from his travels but also to write and give lectures. One of the first was On the Present Duties and Future Destiny of the Negro Race, delivered on September 2, 1872, at St. Philip in front of the Savannah Lyceum Association. Turner argued that African Americans needed to seek out a liberal education so that they could become writers of history and orators who could provide guidance along the path to a great and glorious African American future.

On April 8, 1873, at Savannah’s Second Baptist Church, Turner delivered The Negro in All Ages. In this speech, Turner engaged in didactic oratory, designed to transform its audience by way of teaching and by presenting new facts to the audience that would serve as foundations for understanding and learning. Turner navigated the intersections of race and religion, adopting a prophetic persona to refute much of the science of the day that was detrimental to African American identity.⁶

Turner returned to the grand or high style of eloquence in his Eulogy of Charles Sumner, delivered on March 18, 1874, at St. Philip AME Church. Using rhetorical figures such as amplification, anaphora, and figurative language, Turner evoked emotion by celebrating Massachusetts senator’s life and legacy moved the audience to support the civil rights bill that Congress was debating at the time. Turner told the congregation that his good friend Sumner was

[t]oo noble to do wrong, too great to be mean, too wise to make a blunder, too high to countenance a low act, too solid to be a trickster, too pure to be a politician, too just to be partial, too brave to cower before men or devils, too spotless to be slandered in the most calumnious age the world ever witnessed, armed with the helmet of right, and panoplied with a code of principles, as irreversible as the flowing current of the Mississippi river, he stood out as grand and as majestic before the world as thundering Sinai did, when the shuddering hosts of Israel trembled at its base. A vital amazement, an intellectual prodigy, a human creature with superhuman traits, such was Sumner, the man of destiny, molded out of the matrix of heaven by the command of God, to front the reformatory measures born in the middle of the nineteenth century, and well did he do the work assigned. What staggered Hale and disheartened Chase, only fired the soul of the great Sumner.

The following year, Turner joined other African Americans in Augusta at the Georgia Convention of Colored Men, which had been called in response to white violence against the Black community. Prior to the massacre, there had been rumors that African Americans planned an insurrection in central Georgia. In response to the unfounded allegations, white mobs shot, whipped, clubbed, and stabbed Black people. On October 8, 1875, Turner delivered the Report of the Committee on Resolutions, not only denying the charge but also calling the malicious rumor an attempt to enable white people to expend their diabolical hate in murderous assaults upon the colored race. If nothing was going to be done about this atrocity, they advised Black people to leave their counties and necessary the state.

Six weeks later, on November 28, Turner delivered a sermon at St. James’ Tabernacle in Savannah, Georgia that I have titled Thou God Seest Me. Drawing from the story of Hagar (Genesis 16:13), Turner centers his sermon on the phrase, God seest me, telling his listeners that that since God saw Hagar in the wilderness, God would see them too.

On January 2, 1876, Turner delivered another sermon, This Year Thou Shalt Die, at St. James’ Tabernacle. Drawing from Jeremiah 28:16, Turner reminded congregants that despite the jubilant feelings and expectations that the new year brings, some of them might not live to see the end of the year. The sermon is a call to recognize that death comes and sometimes comes quickly.

Later in the year, Turner served as a delegate to the 1876 Republican National Convention, hoping to reignite the spirit of the earlier radicalism of the party. Appreciating his work in Georgia, convention planners offered Turner the opportunity to second the presidential nomination of James G. Blaine, a US senator and former House Speaker from Maine. In his Nomination Speech for James G. Blaine, Turner extolled the candidate’s virtues, arguing that Blaine stood as the champion of Republican principles. Blaine had originated the spirit of the fourteenth amendment and had stood by Lincoln during the great struggle this country was passing through for freedom and justice and equality to all mankind. Turner closed by reminding his audience that after the Democrats had won the previous election, Blaine shook aloft the banner of the Republican party, united the party, and defied the Democracy of this nation, and breathed again the spirit of activity and hope into this prostrate Republican party.

With the Compromise of 1877 effectively ending Reconstruction, many Black people at the grassroots level began to reconsider the possibility of emigration. In 1878, one company that attempted to address this opportunity, the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company, purchased the Azor to take emigrants from Charleston, South Carolina, to Monrovia, Liberia. Turner was among those who welcomed the ship to Charleston, offering blessings and support. In his "Consecration Speech of the Azor, Turner argued to rousing applause that the vessel stands as a monument to the genius, manhood, and love of race of the Negro, and silences his calumniators who said that he could do nothing."

While Turner supported emigration, many members of his church did not. With grassroots support for emigration growing and a desire to refute church leaders’ arguments against it, Turner developed his own theory of emigration and prepared to explain it in an address to the 1879 National Conference of Colored Men of the United States, which was held in Nashville, Tennessee. When church duties prevented Turner from attending, he sent three hundred copies of his Emigration of the Colored People of the United States. Although his words were not included in the convention minutes, I include the speech here because he probably would have been allowed to deliver it had he attended and because it was in high demand: Turner had a pamphlet version printed and sold one thousand copies for ten cents