The Eternal Alpha Wolf:
THE HONORABLE BISHOP HENRY McNEAL TURNER

Henry McNeal Turner High School was named in honor of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, one of the most influential African-American leaders in Georgia during the nineteenth century. Henry McNeal Turner was a pioneering church organizer and missionary for the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Georgia, later rising to the position of bishop in 1880. Turner was also an active politician and Reconstruction-era state legislator from Macon, Georgia.

Turner was born in 1834 in Newberry Courthouse, South Carolina, to Sarah Greer and Hardy Turner. He was never a slave. His paternal grandmother was a white plantation owner. His paternal grandfather, David Greer, arrived in North America aboard a slave ship but, according to family legend, was found to have a tattoo with the Mandingo coat of arms, signifying his royal status. The South Carolinians decided not to sell Greer into slavery and sent hi to live with a Quaker family.

Against great odd, Turner Managers to receive an education. An Abbeville, South Carolina law firm employed him at age fifteen to do janitorial tasks, and the firm's lawyers, appreciating his high intelligence, helped provide him with a well-rounded education. About a year earlier, Turner had been converted during a methodist revival and decided he would one day be a preacher. After receiving his preacher's license in 1853, he traveled throughout the south as an itinerant evangelist, going as far as New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1856 he married Eliza Peacher, the daughter of a wealthy African American house building in Columbia, South Carolina. They had fourteen children.

In 1858, he and his family journeyed north to St. Louis, Missouri, where he was accepted as a preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. in 1863, Turner was instrumental in organizing the First Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops in his own church yard and as mustered into service as an army chaplain for that regiment.

At the end of the Civil War, US President Andrew Johnson reassigned Turner to a black regiment in Atlanta, but Turner resigned when he realized it already had a chaplain. He spent much of the next three years traveling throughout Georgia, helping to organize the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was in its infancy. African-Americans flocked to the new denomination, but lack of essentials such as trained pastors and adequate meeting spaces challenged him.

He served as a pastor of the prestigious St. Philip's AME Church in Savannah, Georgia. Four years later, in a hard-fought and controversial contest, he won the election as the twelfth bishop of the AME Church. He was also a politician, and served in the Georgia General Assembly and the House of Representatives.

Bishop Turner died on May 8, 1915, in Windsor, Canada, while traveling on church business. His funeral was attended by more than 25,000 people. There were many dignitaries present; however, most of the crowds were poor African-Americans. He is buried at the Historic Southview Cemetery in Atlanta, Georgia.

A portrait of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner hangs in the Georgia State Capitol on the third floor.