<i>Andre E. Johnson</i>, No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner

The influence of Henry M. Turner, a nineteenth-century black Wesleyan churchman, spanned politics, black nationalism, African emigration, and institution-building. As a longtime pastor, denominational officer, and bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, he had an impact that reached beyond the United States into the Caribbean and Africa. Besides Stephen W. Angell’s superb biography, Bishop Henry M. Turner and African American Religion in the South (1992), only Andre E. Johnson has devoted sustained scholarly attention to Turner’s crucial advocacy for black diasporic advancement. Johnson has compiled an impressive roster of publications and bibliographies of Turner writings, letters, speeches, and sermons. In the present volume, Johnson examines Turner’s “prophetic pessimism” through the discipline of rhetoric. Turner’s public commentaries revealed his despair about the destructive force of racism and how it discredited the United States as a suitable place for African Americans. Instead, Turner sought other diasporic possibilities where the “full flourishing” of blacks could be realized.Turner, who lived from 1834 to 1915, witnessed in rapid succession several benchmark events that shaped the African American experience. Born free in South Carolina and licensed as an exhorter in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Turner preached as an evangelist to slaves across the Southeast and Gulf regions until he learned about the AME Church and transferred his allegiance to that black Wesleyan body. During a pastorate in Washington, DC, Turner, whose parish became a recruiting venue for black Union soldiers, was commissioned as the military’s first African American chaplain. His regular reports to the AME newspaper, The Christian Recorder, remain an indispensable source on the wartime activities of black troops.During Reconstruction, Turner, who made Georgia his permanent residence, blended his role in expanding the AME presence in the state while holding various political offices, including a stint in the state legislature. The racism that spurred his ouster as a state representative in 1868 reinforced his long-held view that slavery and the retreat from Reconstruction showed the stubborn persistence of racial caste in American society. After he ascended to the AME bishopric in 1880, his perspectives about the fate of African Americans influenced his episcopacy and his attitude about their deteriorating position.While Turner celebrated the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that widened the access of African Americans to public facilities, he was profoundly disappointed when the Supreme Court invalidated the law in 1883. He codified the depth of his denunciation with the publication of The Barbarous Decision of the United States Supreme Court in 1893. This pamphlet was prescient in its disdain for the high court when that body, with a lone dissenter, issued the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that established the “separate but equal” doctrine. The lopsided majority opinion moved Turner to describe the justices as “an abominable conclave of Negro Hating Demons.” His former faith in the Republican Party also was dashed so that in 1900 he abandoned the incumbent president, William McKinley, and looked favorably upon his Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan. In vituperative language, in 1915 the bishop demanded to be taken from Detroit across the Canadian border so he would not die under an American flag that he deemed as “dirty and contemptible.”Turner’s pessimistic appraisal of American society was accompanied by the hope that black redemption lay in redefining the meaning of Christianity for African Americans. That he declared that “God is Negro” and maintained advocacy of black emigration to Africa showed that divinely ordained alternatives existed for ex-slaves and their descendants. These perspectives were accompanied by Turner’s thrust into Africa to strengthen an AME ecclesia on the “mother” continent. The formal founding of jurisdictions in Sierra Leone and Liberia in 1891 and South Africa in 1896 became ecclesial components of this “prophetic pessimism.”Because of Johnson’s rhetorical narrative strategy, his focus on topical subjects in some cases overlooks crucial elements in Turner’s multifaceted ministries and the contexts in which they were shaped. Despite the chronicle of his opposition to black participation in the Spanish-American War in 1898, there is no acknowledgment that the bishop took full ecclesiastical advantage of the conflict in launching from his Georgia jurisdiction a mission to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. These global initiatives, taken together with Africa, expand what Turner envisaged for subaltern peoples shackled with a heritage of slavery and colonialism. Such outreach actually strengthened Johnson’s theme of “prophetic pessimism.” Moreover, this theme of “prophetic pessimism” complements broader scholarship about “millennial Ethiopianism”— through which black religious thinkers believed that an emphasis upon a glorious African past portended a divinely ordained future in which racial subordination would be wiped away—is unmentioned in this study.Turner’s claim that “God is a Negro” was made in an 1895 conversation with his episcopal colleagues, Benjamin W. Arnett and Benjamin T. Tanner, who wrote in the 1890s about the foundational role of blacks in the development of Christianity and the non-white identity of Solomon. Turner’s discourse with fellow bishops suggests that he was neither a singular figure nor was unaffected by the “millennial Ethiopianism” that Timothy Fulop and other scholars have emphasized. A derivative component of Turner’s Afro-centricism lay in his celebration of idioms in black religious music and their interactive blend with Wesleyan hymnody in AME worship. An exploration of Turner’s Wesleyan sensibilities and his “prophetic pessimism” would illuminate the compelling theme of this study.Notwithstanding these related subjects, Johnson proposes that Turner’s rhetoric advances a particular eschatology notably absent from the scholarly literature on American millennial thought. Hence, for scholars of American Christianity Johnson’s book is a cornerstone contribution.

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