Life And Times Of Henry M Turner

One of America's most prominent historians and a noted feminist bring together the most important political writings and testimonials from African-Americans over three centuries.

Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915) was a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of America’s earliest Black activists and social reformers, and an outspoken proponent of emigration. In The Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner: The Press, the Platform, and the Pulpit, Andre E. Johnson has compiled selected political speeches, sermons, lectures, and religious addresses delivered by Turner in their original form. Alongside Turner’s oratory, Johnson places the speeches in their historical context and traces his influence on Black social movements in the twentieth century, from W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea of cultural nationalism to Marcus Garvey’s "Back to Africa" movement, the modern-day civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, James Cone’s Black liberation theology, and more. While Turner was widely known as a great orator and published copious articles, essays, and editorials, no single collection of only Turner’s speeches has yet been published, and scholars have largely ignored his legacy. This volume recovers a lost voice within American and African American rhetorical history, expanding the canon of the African American oratorical tradition.

Henry McNeal Turner was an "epoch-making man, " as his colleague Reverdy Ransom called him. A bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church from 1880 to 1915, Turner was also a politician and Georgia legislator during Reconstruction, U.S. Army chaplain, newspaper editor, prohibition advocate, civil rights and back-to-Africa activist, African missionary, and early proponent of black theology. This richly detailed book, the first full-length critical biography of Turner, firmly places him alongside DuBois and Washington as a preeminent visionary of the postbellum African-American experience. The strength and vitality of today's black church tradition owes much to the herculean labors of pioneers such as Turner, one of the most skillful denominational builders in American history. When emancipation created the prerequisites for a strong national religious organization, Turner, with his boldness, charisma, political wisdom, eloquence, and energy, took full advantage of the opportunity. Combining evangelicalism with forthright agitation for racial freedom, he instigated the most momentous transformation in A.M.E. Church history--the mission to the South. Stephen Angell views Turner's advocacy of ordination for women and his missionary work in Africa as a further outgrowth of the bishop's deep evangelical commitment. The book's epilogue offers the first serious analysis of Turner's theology and his replies to racist distortions of the Christian message.

The black social gospel emerged from the trauma of Reconstruction to ask what a "new abolition" would require in American society. It became an important tradition of religious thought and resistance, helping to create an alternative public sphere of excluded voices and providing the intellectual underpinnings of the civil rights movement. This tradition has been seriously overlooked, despite its immense legacy. In this groundbreaking work, Gary Dorrien describes the early history of the black social gospel from its nineteenth-century founding to its close association in the twentieth century with W. E. B. Du Bois. He offers a new perspective on modern Christianity and the civil rights era by delineating the tradition of social justice theology and activism that led to Martin Luther King Jr.

This volume unpacks the long history and varied meanings of the emancipation of American slaves.