Religion
“I am here to demand my rights and to hurl thunderbolts at the man who would dare to cross the threshold of my manhood. . . .”
Henry McNeal Turner is remembered mostly as one of the first Bishops in the African American Episcopal Church, yet his occupations were many. He was an army chaplain, political organizer, magazine editor, college chancellor and preacher. From his youth Turner was active in Georgia politics. During reconstruction he worked with Georgia politicians with hopes to make life for 19th century Georgia a better place for blacks. During his political career Turner introduced bills for higher education for blacks and for the creation of a Black militia to protect black people form the Klu Klux Klan. He also introduced a bill to give women the right to vote.
Turner later became frustrated with the treatment that Black people received in the south and vigorously encouraged black people to return to Africa. He had the support of thousands of black peasants and sharecroppers in the south.
Henry McNeal Turner was a theologian and the thinking of the Black church was a major concern to him. Much of his time was spent trying to explain the relationship between God, history and the struggle of black people in America. Turner would declare that, “God is a Negro.” He told black people to reject everything that the white church said about the inferiority of blacks. Turner believed that the role of the black church was to develop racial pride and consciousness among the millions of blacks that had been beaten down by centuries of slavery and oppression. Turner played a major role in the introduction of the African Methodist Episcopal Church into South Africa.
Bishop Turner’s funeral was attended by 25,000 people. There were many dignitaries present, however most of the crowd was poor blacks. Henry McNeal Turner was an agitator and a prophet who addressed the hopes and frustrations of African-Americans struggling in the 19th century.
Religion
One of the world’s best-known advocates of nonviolent social change. King was born in Atlanta, Georgia. As a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, and at Boston University, he deepened his understanding of theological scholarship and of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent strategy for social change. He became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954 and received a Ph.D. in theology in 1955.
In December 1955, after Montgomery civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to obey the city’s policy mandating segregation on buses, black residents launched a bus boycott and elected King as president of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association, gaining him national prominence for his exceptional oratorical skills and personal courage. His house was bombed, and he and other boycott leaders were convicted on charges of conspiring to interfere with the bus company’s operations. But, in December 1956, Montgomery’s buses were desegregated when the Supreme Court declared Alabama’s segregation laws unconstitutional.
In 1957, seeking to build upon the success in Montgomery, King and other black ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president, King emphasized the goal of black voting rights when he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial during the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. He traveled to West Africa to attend the independence celebration of Ghana and toured India, increasing his understanding of Gandhi’s ideas. At the end of 1959, he resigned from Dexter and returned to Atlanta where the SCLC headquarters were located.
Although increasingly portrayed as the preeminent black spokesman, King did not mobilize mass protest activity during SCLC’s first few years. Then southern black college students launched a wave of sit-in protests in 1960. Although King sympathized with their movement and spoke at the founding meeting of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee SNCC in April 1960, he soon became the target of criticisms from SNCC activists. Even King’s joining a student sit-in and his subsequent arrest in October 1960 did not allay the tensions. (After the arrest, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s sympathetic telephone call to King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, helped attract crucial black support for Kennedy’s campaign.)
King and his staff then initiated a major campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, where white police officials were notorious for their anti-black attitudes. In 1963, clashes between unarmed black demonstrators and police with attack dogs and fire hoses generated newspaper headlines throughout the world. Subsequent mass demonstrations in many communities culminated in a march on August 28, 1963, attracting more than 250,000 protesters to Washington, D.C. Addressing the marchers from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” oration.
During the year following the march, King’s renown as a nonviolent leader grew, and, in 1964, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Despite the accolades, however, King faced strong challenges to his leadership. In 1966, King encountered strong criticism from “black power” proponent Stokely Carmichael. Shortly afterward, white counter-protestors in Chicago physically assaulted King during an unsuccessful effort to transfer nonviolent protest techniques to the North. Nevertheless, King remained committed to nonviolence.
King’s ability to achieve his objectives was also limited by the increasing resistance he encountered from national political leaders. As urban racial violence escalated, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover intensified his efforts to discredit King, and King’s public criticism of American intervention in the Vietnam War soured his relations with the Johnson administration. He delivered his last speech during a bitter sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis on April 3, 1968. The following evening, April 4, he was assassinated.
After his death, King remained a controversial symbol of the civil rights struggle, revered by many for his martyrdom on behalf of nonviolence and condemned by others for his insurgent views. In 1986, King’s birthday, January 15, became a federal holiday.
