Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the Politics of Reconstruction-Part 2

Last updated on: June 30, 2014 at 7:00 am by Guest Contributor

Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the Politics of Reconstruction-Part 2 2014-06-30T07:00:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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by Andre E. Johnson
R3 Editor

*Read part 1 here. Get your copy of the Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition American Prophetic Tradition in paperback

One issue that had Turner’s full attention during the period of Reconstruction was the passage of the 1875 Civil Rights bill. The bill explicitly banned discrimination from public places and was one of the last major reforms of the Congress during Reconstruction. Drawing on his relationships with Senators and members of Congress fostered during his time in Washington DC, Turner lobbied, argued, and help promote its passage. He devoted one of his letters to the passage of the bill when President Grant, an early supporter of the bill, began to waver.

I am not only surprised, but astonished. I cannot believe it is true, yet I fear it savors of too much truth to be pshawed at. That Gen. Grant at one time desired the passage of the Civil Rights Bill, I think admits of no doubt, but that he has lost some of his ardor, and grown somewhat indifferent in regard to this all important measure, appears too evident for the colored people to pass the fact by with absolute indifference. And if it is a fact as I apprehensively fear, neither those of us who hold positions under him, nor those who have the simple good of the party at stake, should be silent. With me, there is no party, when my rights are in jeopardy. I think every man should measure his party allegiance, as that party measures out his manhood (91).

Turner argued that the Civil Rights bill unified all African Americans. “Its failure is our failure. Its success is our success. Indeed, it holds in its grasp our destiny as a race. We stand or fall in that Bill.” He continued:

Should it fail, I shall regard it as the indignant proclamation of heaven, saying arise and depart, for this is not your home. This is a White Man’s Government. But if it succeeds, then it may be interpreted as the voice of God; saying to the negro, “Awake from your lethargy, and build schools, churches, houses, and prepare to run the race of life where you are (92).

For Turner, the matter was simple. He concluded, “Every man in the country who is opposed to the Civil Rights Bill, is opposed to the colored race, and if President Grant is opposed to its passage, then he is our enemy, yes, the deadly enemy of the colored race” (93).

Despite optimism and high hopes for a radical change during Reconstruction, the 1876 elections told a different story. Though the Constitution franchised Black men with the vote, Turner noted that Southern conservative whites began to regain power through intimation, violence and murder. In criticizing the government for not providing protection under the law for African Americans, Turner lamented:

And as the guardian of the Negro, the nation was bound by every consideration to secure them protection of life and person; not to hurl them into the vortex of a new revolution, which would have taxed the skill and energies of the most enlightened people on earth to have measured arms with, and then desert them in the dark hour peril, for the enfranchisement of the colored men of the South, was actually reopening he war. Both congress and the President knew that the enfranchisement of the Southern negro, was as distasteful to the Southern Whites as his primal emancipation; or as above said, it was the inauguration of a new war, a war of rights to grant. But still it was unquestionably another war. Now for the nation to set the south to fighting, and for the part in power to desert its own partisan, was ingratitude, treachery and downright meanness (110).

By liking the abandonment of African Americans in the south to refusing to offer General Grant supplies while fighting in Petersburg or Richmond, Turner wrote:

The meanness of this nation towards the negro, will never be known until it is read in the glare of eternity; but for fear I may discontinue this subject, as it is inexhaustible; permit me to say, by way of reducing the whole subject into a nutshell, that if some of these Northern fault finders…knew half the charges that the Southern Negros has against them they would never part their lips again to find fault with them. When they say, we have done everything we could for the colored people of the South” they utter a thousand falsehoods in one breath; and there is not a negro whose blood has been shed, that does not crimson the garments of every white man in the North. The best that can be said for this country is that it is a nation of murderers. The North has been killing Southern negroes as virtually as the Ku-klux and White Leagues have, and every white statesman, orator, minister of the Gospel, merchant, doctor, and private citizen in this whole nation, who has not fought these massacres (for holding your mouth is no excuse) and the injustice perpetrated the blacks, the nation’s wards are guilty before God. And if they ever get to heaven at all, they will have to swim there through the blood of forty-six thousand negroes, which it is reported in Washington have been killed since January 1866 (110-111).

He closed his letter by writing:

These words may startle somebody. I have already been denounced for my other two letters, but denunciations from such s

ources, I regard as compliments. I would laugh to scorn the denunciation of an angel from heaven were he to approve the crimes of this nation; ungodly, diabolical, and accursed as they are. My pen trembles with indignation as it traces lines of this paper, and I am only one out of ten hundred thousands of colored men whose hearts are galled and whose ire is inflamed….It requires no renown sage to see that God is now lashing this nation upon its back and in my imagination I can hear it as literally crying; “Oh pray massa!” as ever I heard the slave men of the South. May God slash this nation; may it writhe; may it groan and sigh; and may I bleed and die, or else learn wisdom; learn humanity black or white, brown or red (111-112)

For Turner, God’s judgment on the nation would continue.

To be Continued……….

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Work Cited

Johnson, Andre E.(ed) and Henry McNeal Turner. An African American Pastor B efore and During the American Civil War. The Literary Archive of Henry McNeal Turner, Vol 3. Edwin Mellen Press, 2013

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