Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the Rhetoric of African Emigration

Last updated on: May 27, 2014 at 1:23 pm by Guest Contributor

Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the Rhetoric of African Emigration 2014-05-27T13:23:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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by Andre E. Johnson

R3 Editor

*Below is an edited version of a paper that our editor submitted for presentation at the Rhetoric Society of America Conference in San Antonio, Texas. Due to scheduling conflicts, he was not able to share it at the conference.

Introduction

Nineteenth century African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (1834-1915) was one of the finest orators of his generation. Turner’s powerful rhetoric led him to preach integrated revivals, command audiences with Senators, congressional leaders and presidents, and to become a popular correspondent for the Christian Recorder newspaper. His rhetoric helped him become the first African American chaplain in the Armed Forces, an agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau, State Constitutional delegate, and a State Representative.

Moreover, while doing all of this, Turner found time to start three newspapers—Southern Recorder (1887-1889), Voice of Missions (1893-1900) and the Voice of the People (1901-1904) serving as editor of all three. He took four trips to Africa himself, established the AME church there, wrote numerous articles and essays for various newspapers, wrote many introductions to books, preached all over the country, carried out his Episcopal duties, married four times and had two children.

In short, Turner lived a very active life and produced a plethora of documents that still survive today. However, history has not been kind to Turner. To date there has been only two biographies of his life and only three treatments of his rhetoric. While there may be several reasons for Turner’s omission from the annuals of history, one reason could be his unpopular position and consistent rhetoric of African emigration.

In this essay, I offer a rhetorical trajectory of Turner’s emigrationist rhetoric. I argue that while emigration never develop into a wholesale program as Turner hoped, the ideas espoused during this period created a vision and rhetorical thought process for African American orators that continues today.

Turner on Emigration

In celebrating the life of Turner after his death, AME Review editor, Reverdy Ransom, remarked that Turner was a “remarkable man, whose like does not appear more than once in a century, the like of whom we shall not see again” (45). Further Ransom wrote

Bishop Turner was a staunch defender of his race. His scathing denunciations of lynching and mob violence, his severe arraignments of the courts for unjust decisions and his oppositions to all forms of Jim Crow legislation made him one of the foremost defenders of his race. He stood for the manhood and equality of his race and sought to arouse and stimulate this sentiment among his people. His flaming wrath against traitors, trimmers, sycophants, and cowards among his people revealed the intensity of the fire of his earnestness (46).

Other contemporaries praised Turner as well. Bishop Evans Tyree in a eulogy of him remarked, “Bishop Turner was a powerful man…He loved his race, his church, and his God from the depths of his soul” while R.R. Wright Jr. then editor of the Christian Recorder simply wrote, “Henry McNeal Turner was the most remarkable Negro of this generation.” However, W.E.B. Dubois tempered his praise for Turner by reminding his readers of Turner’s shortcomings

[Turner] was a man of tremendous force and indomitable courage. As army chaplain, pastor and bishop, he has always been a man of strength. He lacked, however, the education and the stern moral balance of Bishop [Daniel A.] Payne. In a sense, Turner was the last of his clan: mighty men, physically and mentally, men who started at the bottom and hammered their way to the top by sheer brute strength; they were the spiritual progeny of ancient African chieftains and they built the African church in America (Qtd. in Redkey, Respect vii-ix).

Turner’s lack of a formal education and his perceived moral shortcomings provided fodder for his critics. Turner always regretted that he did not have a formal education and according to his first biographer, M. M. Ponton, his lack of education made many to question his leadership. Also in some circles, Turner could never live down rumors that he had an affair with a known prostitute, and tried to pass counterfeit money. Many of Turner contemporaries also attacked him for his association with the American Colonization Society; a group, which many African Americans believed, did not have the best interest of their race at heart.

However, what Turner opponents criticized him most for was his position on emigration. One of his biggest critics was the editor of the Christian Recorder and future AME bishop, Benjamin Tanner. In a series of articles aimed at refuting Turner, Tanner wrote that the

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