Henry McNeal Turner, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Henry McNeal Turner

Union Army chaplain and Methodist bishop

Date of Birth: 01-Feb-1834

Place of Birth: Newberry, South Carolina, United States

Date of Death: 09-May-1915

Profession: priest

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Aquarius

Henry McNeal Turner (February 1, 1834 – May 8, 1915) was a minister, politician, and the 12th elected and consecrated bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME).
An African American, he was a pioneer in Georgia at organizing new congregations of African Americans after the American Civil War.
Born free in South Carolina, Turner learned to read and write and became a Methodist preacher.
He joined the AME Church in St.
Louis, Missouri, in 1858, where he became a minister.
Later he had pastorates in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, DC. In 1863 during the American Civil War, Turner was appointed as the first black chaplain in the United States Colored Troops.
Afterward, he was appointed to the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia.
He settled in Macon and was elected to the state legislature in 1868 during Reconstruction.
He planted many AME churches in Georgia after the war.
In 1880 he was elected as the first southern bishop of the AME Church after a fierce battle within the denomination. Angered by the Democrats' regaining power and instituting Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth century South, Turner began to support black nationalism and emigration of blacks to Africa.
He was the chief figure to do so in the late nineteenth century; this emigration movement increased after World War I.