Henry McNeal Turner (February 1, 1834 – May 8, 1915) was an American minister, politician, and the 12th elected and consecrated bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME).

In 1863 during the American Civil War, Turner was appointed by the US Army as the first African-American chaplain in the United States Colored Troops.

Turner was the chief figure in the late nineteenth century to support such emigration to Liberia; most African-American leaders of the time were pushing for rights in the United States.

According to the family's oral tradition, his maternal grandfather had been enslaved in the African continent and imported to South Carolina, where he was renamed as David Greer.

Turner traveled through the South for a few years as an evangelist and exhorter, a position usually reserved for young, unmarried men.

The demand for slaves in the South had made him fear that members of his family might be kidnapped and sold into slavery, as has been documented for hundreds of free blacks.

In St. Louis, Turner became ordained as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), which had been founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as the first independent black denomination in the United States.

[1] Turner served in pastorates in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, DC, where he met influential Republicans in the early 1860s.

In 1856, Turner had married Eliza Peacher, daughter of a wealthy free black contractor in Columbia, South Carolina.

(The latter term refers to enslaved people who had escaped slavery and had their status classified as "unreturnable" because their former masters were engaged in war against the US government).

Turner regularly preached to the men while they trained and reminded them that the "destiny of their race depended on their loyalty and courage".

During the war, the duties expanded to include holding worship services and prayer meetings, visiting the sick and wounded in hospitals, and burying the dead.

Discharged in September, Turner was commissioned as chaplain of a different African-American regiment, which was assigned to the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia.

After the war, Turner was appointed by President Andrew Johnson to work with the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia during Reconstruction.

In the postwar years, Turner became politically active with the Republican Party, whose officials had led the war effort and, under Abraham Lincoln, emancipated the slaves throughout the Confederacy.

At the time, the Democratic Party still controlled the legislature and refused to seat Turner and 26 other newly elected black legislators, all Republicans.

In 1883, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875, forbidding racial discrimination in hotels, trains, and other public places, was unconstitutional.

Turner was incensed: The world has never witnessed such barbarous laws entailed upon a free people as have grown out of the decision of the United States Supreme Court, issued October 15, 1883.

For that decision alone authorized and now sustains all the unjust discriminations, proscriptions and robberies perpetrated by public carriers upon millions of the nation's most loyal defenders.

It has engendered the bitterest feeling between the whites and blacks, and resulted in the deaths of thousands, who would have been living and enjoying life today.

"[7]In the late nineteenth century, Turner witnessed state legislatures in Georgia and across the South passing measures to disfranchise blacks, largely by raising barriers to voter registration.

Disliking the lack of economic opportunity, cultural shock, and widespread tropical diseases, some of the migrants returned to the United States.

[10] While serving as chaplain, Turner had written extensively about the Civil War as a correspondent for The Christian Recorder, the weekly newspaper of the AME Church.

When Turner joined the AME Church in 1858, its members lived mostly in the Northern and border states, as it had been founded earlier in the century in Philadelphia and the mid-Atlantic area.

"[11] After the Civil War, Turner founded many AME congregations in Georgia as part of the church's missionary effort in the South.

[11] But Turner crossed denominational lines in the United States, to build connections across African-American communities, for instance with black Baptists.

For the bulk of you and all the fool Negroes of the country believe that God is white-skinned, blue eyed, straight-haired, projected nosed, compressed lipped and finely robed white gentleman, sitting upon a throne somewhere in the heavens.

Du Bois wrote in The Crisis magazine about him: 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.