The Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner: The Press, the Platform, and the Pulpit ed. by Andre E. Johnson (review)

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• The Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner: The Press, the Platform, and the Pulpit ed. by Andre E. Johnson
• Jim Casey

The Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner: The Press, the Platform, and the Pulpit. Edited by Andre E. Johnson. Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023. Pp. x, 201. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4386-9; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4385-2.)

The Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner: The Press, the Platform, and the Pulpit, edited by Andre E. Johnson, is a “long overdue” collection of speeches, sermons, and editorials by one of the late-nineteenth-century United States’ most prolific, influential, and largely forgotten figures (p. 5). Henry McNeal Turner spent much of his life in service of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, but his ministry extended across many different arenas and eras. He was a chaplain in the Union army during the U.S. Civil War, and he was deeply immersed in building the postbellum AME Church across the South. He was a politician and political activist who spent a half century fighting for Black citizenship, civil rights, and emigration. Turner gave thousands of speeches, drafted even more letters, and wrote nonstop for the Black religious press. Such a career almost defies being reconciled into any one profession or historical period.

Johnson has impressively selected for this volume a representative sampling of Turner’s extensive career. The book is organized chronologically. It is effectively an oratorical biography, making it possible to see Turner developing and refining his arguments. This book has two brief introductions and light endnotes. It would be suitable for courses on Black social movements, civil rights, religious history, and intellectual history.

The first half of the book covers the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Turner moved to Georgia, where his Emancipation Day speech on January 1, 1866, helped bring the young minister political notoriety. Though he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1868, he was expelled along with nearly all Black elected officials in Georgia later that year. The expulsion inspired Turner’s “I Claim the Rights of a Man” speech, which Johnson frames as “probably one of the finest orations in American history” (p. 48). The oration offers a cross section of Turner’s speaking powers and techniques, blending history, satire, and prophetic condemnations. God, Turner reminded his audience, “never fails to vindicate the cause of Justice” (p. 48).

The second half of the book focuses on Turner’s many speeches in AME Church conferences and congregations from 1880 to 1913. Some discussed the responsibilities of ministers. Others delved into AME Church organizational policies. The book ends with a particularly poignant meditation on the moon and race by an elderly Turner in 1913. [End Page 446]

One particular strength of the volume is Johnson’s attention to Turner’s speeches in the Colored Conventions movement. This book brings together Turner’s convention speeches from Black state, regional, and national gatherings in 1869, 1875, 1879, and 1893. These convention speeches punctuated Turner’s ideas over the decades, from post–Civil War optimism to calls for collective self-defense in the 1870s, to later pushes for southern Black communities to emigrate to Africa. These speeches gave Turner a chance to debate the need for legal citizenship and the limits of civil rights in the absence of social equality. If “our sham Government is unable to protect its citizens,” he argued, then Black communities in the South should petition the government for adequate reparations—“forty billions of dollars,” in his estimate—and leave the country (pp. 109, 111).

Johnson has performed a great service with this important collection. The Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner will introduce students and scholars alike to the depths of Turner’s oratory and perspectives. By the end of this volume, one is left wondering why Turner is not much more well known for his lifetime spent thinking, speaking, and agitating amid the rise and fall of movements for racial justice and civil rights in the United States. It is, perhaps, a sign of how much work we have left in Black...