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Bishop Henry McNeal Turner
Speaks
Note: Bishop Turner (1834-1915)
was a leader in civil rights through the AME church. He also spoke
on other subjects which we excerpt from Respect Black: the
Writings and Speeches of Henry McNeal Turner, ed. Edwin S.
Redkey, Arno Press, 1971.
"Social
equality carries with it civil equality, political equality,
financial equality, judicial equality, business equality. Wherever
social equality is denied by legislative enactments and judicial
decrees, the sequel must be discrimination, proscription, injustice,
and degradation." (1895, p. 166)
"Much
is being said about fighting poor little Spain, the eighth power of
the world, for the purpose of humanity, that the Spanish are cruel
and brutal in their treatment toward the Cubans. 'Physician, heal
thyself,' very appropriately comes in here. ... The United States
puts more people to death without law than all the other nations of
the earth combined. So our humanitarianism is too ridiculous to be
made a count in the argument of justification." (1898, p. 173)
"Paralyzed as I am, and nearly speechless, I feel called upon
in my declining days to enter my solemn protest against the unholy
war of conquest now being waged by this country against the
Philippines. I hole William McKinley and his advisors responsible
for this crime of the century. These Filipinos are a feeble band of
sable patriots, not white, on their native soil, surrounded by their
homes and the graves of their sires, maintaining a heroic but
pitifully unequal struggle for their God-given rights and for their
liberties. ...
"These Filipino and their Puerto Rican
brethren are being taxed without representation, the very outrage
that gave birth to the American revolution. McKinley's present
policy does not contemplate that to take their country away and deny
them the humble honor or representing their own people in a
legislature there or in the National Congress here, the very thing
for which the patriots of 1776 fought, bled and died, to secure to
their posterity." (1900, p. 186)
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