The Negro in All Ages

By Henry McNeal Turner

"The Negro in All Ages" is a profound exploration of African American identity and history. Delivered as a lecture in 1873, this work by Bishop Henry McNeal Turner challenges the prevailing scientific and social misconceptions of the time. Turner's eloquent oratory navigates the intersections of race and religion, refuting detr

• Language: English
• Publisher: TrueHistoryReads
• Release date: Jun 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9798330221035

Book preview

THE NEGRO

IN ALL AGES

Henry McNeal Turner

(1834 –1915)

Originally published

1873

Resolution

Whereas, The admirable Lecture delivered this evening by Hon. H. M. Turner L. L. D., entitled The Negro in all Ages has in our opinion, exploded the theory of those enemies of God and the human family who have vainly endeavored to establish the natural inferiority of the colored race, and

Whereas, the people should become more familiar with the incontestable truths therein enunciated, believing they would do much in removing the false impressions which have been indoctrinated into the masses by evil designing individuals, no less vicious than ignorant.

Resolved, That a committee of three be appointed to procure from Dr. Turner a copy of his able address for publication.

The above resolution was offered by John H. Deveaux, Esquire, and was unanimously adopted by one of the most intelligent colored assemblages which ever met in the City of Savannah.

Preface

Hon. Edwin Belshire, Macon, Ga.

My Dear Sir—Having been associated with you for several years in the legislature of our State, in State and county conventions, in political speech making, in devising measures for the education of our race, and in trying to work out a common destiny for the people of our State. And having on several occasions met and discussed with you a large number of moral, religious, scientific and historic questions.

And having among other things given the colored race with them merits and demerits a large share of our consideration.

And I having always found your views intelligent, your conclusions logically arrived at, your scholarships expensive, and your store of knowledge wide. And having found your fidelity to justice and right unquestionable, I have thought it fit and even becoming to dedicate this address with all its defects to you; you will favor me by accepting the good, and rejecting the bad.

I am, &c,

H. M. T.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We live in an age of investigation, scrutiny, and moral and intellectual enlightenment. Every question bred in human imagination with all their natural of assumed phases, are passing through the ordeal of the most searching analysis. This might be justly entitled the Laboratory age; for there is nothing in the infinite realm of man, from the most crude and grotesque material, to the most attenuated film or subtilized monad which connect mind and matter, indeed the most etherealize fancies, as well as the cogitative reverie, are made the themes of criticism, and are reduced to the status of speculative philosophy.

The elementary principles of matter, the most intricate and mazy laws of nature, the fossiliferous inscriptive bearing tablets of the hoary past, which have slept in quiet solitude for countless ages, have of late been aroused by the hand of genius, and whirled into marching lime by the battle gong of thought.

Theology, science, art, and history, have all received an impulse from the estuary state of the mind. The Stygian river with its seven old curls, have been crossed, and the blooming flowers of knowledge are now being plucked. Inquiry seeks a path through the dense forest of an unexplored wilderness, but is foiled in the effort; because the sole of an intellectual foot has never strode this way, but a thousand more enter the arena, with glittering scythes, and level the sward, an highway is thrown up—an avenue extends from the centre to circumference, and the mysteries of ages are brought down to the comprehension of the schoolboy, while they scintillate the grandeur of nature and the glory of nature’s God.

What the wise savants and bards of old, read in the fickle scintillations of their heated imaginations, have been established and incorporated in the principles of philosophical science, and now course investigation, and defies criticism, the theories of the past,