Introduction
Born: February 1, 1834, Newberry, South Carolina.
Died: May 8, 1915, Windsor, Ontario, Canada.
Buried: South View Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia.
Born: February 1, 1834, Newberry, South Carolina.
Died: May 8, 1915, Windsor, Ontario, Canada.
Buried: South View Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia.
Turner was born free, the son of Hardy Turner and Sarah Greer Story.
He married four times: to Eliza Ann Peacher (1856), Martha Elizabeth DeWitt (1893), Harriet Ann Wyman (1900), and Laura Pearl Lemon (1907).
Turner learned to read and write and became a Methodist minister, receiving a preaching license at age 19 from the Methodist Church South.
He joined the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1858. He later served pastorates in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, DC.
During the American civil war, Turner organized Company B, First United States Colored Troops and became its chaplain. He caught smallpox shortly after reporting for duty, and spent a lengthy recovery in a hospital. He returned to his unit in 1864.
After the war, he was sent to Roanoke Island to help supervise a settlement of freed slaves.
He eventually settled in Macon, Georgia, helped found the Republican Party of Georgia, and was elected to the Georgia state legislature in 1868. In 1869, he became postmaster of Macon.
He planted many AME churches in Georgia, and in 1880 was elected the twelfth bishop of the AME, the first AME bishop from the American South.
He served as chancellor of Morris Brown College, Atlanta, Georgia, for 12 years.
After Turner’s death, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of him in The Crisis magazine:
Turner was the last of his clan, mighty men mentally and physically, men who started at the bottom and hammered their way to the top by sheer brute strength. They were the spiritual progeny of African chieftains, and they built the African church in America.
Turner also edited the newspapers The Voice of Missions (1893–1900), The Voice of the People (1901–04), and The Christian Reporter, and was a correspondent for The Christian Reporter, the weekly paper of the AME Church.