African Methodist Episcopal Bishop

Nothing but Freedom.

Henry McNeal Turner, the best-known evangelist among former slaves, was himself born free on 1 February 1834. His father died when he was young, and Turner was raised by his mother and grandmother until 1848, when Sarah Greer Turner married Jabez Story and the family moved to Abbeville, South Carolina. There he joined the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Methodism had only recently separated into northern and southern branches over the issue of slavery). Turner found work as a janitor in a law firm, and his employers, impressed with his desire to learn, taught him reading, arithmetic, geography, history, law, and theology. However, religion, not law, was to be his career. A white Methodist circuit rider, Robert Jones Boyd, issued him a license as an exhorter in 1851 and another as a preacher in 1853. In December 1854 he obtained a guardian, John McLauren...