William V. Turner, Multiracial Organizing, and the Unlikely Outcomes of White “Justice” after Emancipation

William V. Turner envisioned a multiracial world of untold possibility in emancipation. Born enslaved in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1834 before being sold into Alabama at just eighteen years old, Turner was an incredibly well-read thinker and newspaper editor, a powerful orator, and an important labor and political organizer whose influence would stretch from Kansas to North Carolina and from the Alabama legislature to the halls of power Washington, D.C.

 

I first came across Turner’s story while completing the state level search for the in-progress “Church, School, and Community” volume of Freedom in my role as editor at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP). I was immediately struck by the transnational and reciprocal way he understood Black freedom at the advent of emancipation. Genuine freedom would bring about untold benefits and advance civilization, not only for Black Alabamians, but also for white residents bound to the retrograde “order” of white supremacy. That vision of freedom proved to be powerful, but also dangerous, especially to white conservatives who sought to preserve Black subordination and to relegate formerly enslaved people to plantation labor after emancipation.

 

What follows is an account of Turner’s early career, the extreme dangers he faced for engaging in interracial organizing in the immediate aftermath of emancipation, and the strange case of his success in bringing at least some white Alabamians into the struggle for a more just and equal state.

 

Little is known about Turner’s life before 1865, but he emerged from enslavement as a renowned man of letters. In August 1865, he traveled to the town of Wetumpka, Alabama, having been recruited by Black families there to start a school for their children.

 

When Turner arrived in Wetumpka, he began the work of establishing connections with the white community there. “[T]he time has come,” he wrote white minister J.D. Williams, “that we the dark sons and daughters of Ethiopia has the privelege of moral mental and Intellectual improvement.” He observed that this project of partnership and Black education would be “a difficult task to start and still harder to perform. but still I hope that with perseverance and an untiring energy we may accomplish a great deal towards the mental improvement of my race.” A new school established with the support of white religious leaders, Turner argued, would accomplish just that.^[1]

 

The society Turner envisioned in his letter to Williams was nothing short of revolutionary. “I hope that our efforts may be crowned with success,” he told the white minister, “so that our children may be as the rough stone passing through the hands of the artist may come out to be a shining ornament to the age in which we live.” Not Black children or white children, but our children, Turner theorized, would benefit from a Black school founded in a spirit of racial cooperation. A better world for all was within reach.

 

The impact of this new world, Turner asserted, would expand far beyond the boundaries of Wetumpka. “[W]e have now arrived at the conclusion that a brighter day is arising on Africa already we seem to see her chains dissolved, her desert plain turned into a fruitfull field her Congo and her Senegal the seats of science and religion,” he argued. African nations would be “whitend with [t]he[i]r floating commerce,” their “crowded cities sending forth the hum of business her poets and orators standing on the same shelf with Milton and Burke. and all her sons employed in the songs of salvation.” The difficult work of education in Wetumpka went far beyond racial uplift—it invoked a new, worldwide march of a multiracial civilization that would enrich the lives of everyone involved, Turner’s children as well as those of the white minister Williams.

 

William V. Turner letters

 

Turner did found a Black school in Wetumpka, the first of its kind, with help from the Freedmen’s Bureau, where Williams had apparently sent his letter. A far cry from the liberatory vision of white and Black Alabamians working in cooperation towards their mutual benefit, the school nonetheless offered new and exciting opportunities to the more than sixty students Turner taught on a monthly basis.

 

Months after his arrival and his unsuccessful efforts to win the support of white leaders in the community, however, Turner wrote the head of the Alabama Freedmen’s Bureau that “last night the police of this place made the law to suit themselves.” In his letter to General Wager Swayne, Turner explained that “several of the most respectable young Col^d people of this place were cooped up in the calaboose [jail] for nothing but being out to a tea party after nine oclock also some three or four who were coming from church were treated in the same manner myself among the number.” Arrested for the grave crime of walking home from church, Turner asked Swayne “to do something in our behalf for under the men who controls the affairs of this town we will never enjoy any of the rights of freedmen in this town unless some alterations is made.” Rather than supporting Black churches and schools, as Turner had hoped, white leaders and local officials abused the law to break up these newly-formed Black institutions. Nonetheless, it does not appear that Freedmen’s Bureau Assistant Commissioner Swayne responded to Turner’s pleas or took any action in the case.^[2]

 

Speaking to Black attendees of an Independence Day celebration in 1866, Turner tied the destruction of slavery to the transformation of the state, one that rested on a partnership with white Alabamians and former enslavers. Published in the July 26th issue of the Mobile Nationalist, Turner’s speech offered a vision of emancipation that transcended the present, attempting to convert a freedom in name only to one that reflected total liberation. “The days are no more when our labor, pastime, strength and health are only portions of a master’s wealth,” he observed, now that “[w]e rise to look as freemen on God’s daylight, and the curfew no longer tools our hour for retiring.” Yet that “[f]reedom will prove worse than worthless,” Turner argued, “if we fail to improve upon it.” This required incredible discipline and overwhelming virtue since “the duties which [freedom] devolves upon us is great—yes, almost overpowering.”^[3]

 

Turner told listeners that Black Alabamians would have to cultivate friendship and community with their former enslavers, those most ardent enemies of freedom. “Practice politeness yourselves, and teach it to your children; and be sure to cultivate friendly feelings towards those who were your former masters—your homes are to be among them, and it is of the utmost importance that those kindly relations which have heretofore existed be not rudely broken.” Turning the language of freedom into genuine liberation could only be achieved, in Turner’s analysis, through a spirit of friendship and shared labor with those in white communities willing to engage in the struggle, the very relationship Turner had proposed to Reverend Williams a year earlier.

 

While Turner’s extensive work and public speaking on behalf of interracial organizing and the mutual benefits it would bring to both Black and white Alabamians charted a path towards multiracial democracy, it also made him a target.

 

In September 1866, just months after his soaring Independence Day speech, Turner was called out of bed “to address an assembly of col[ore]d people at the African church relative to a col^d National Convention to be holden at Cincinnatti.” He rose to the occasion, but explained that he “was carefull how I spoke. using no epithets nor language disrepectful of any one.” Nonetheless, Turner recalled, “[d]uring my discourse. a Justice of the Peace, James Thomas, by name came up and using profane language threatend to arrest every one of us.” Turner replied that it would be illegal to do so and continued his speech.^[4]

 

The next day, Turner encountered Thomas while crossing a bridge over the Coosa River. The justice of the peace confronted him, Turner recalled, shouting “‘you are a d—d liar,’ and struck me three times with a stick which shivered to pieces.” Then, “he drew a long murderous looking knife, with which he attempted to stab me, which I avoided by getting out of his way as fast as I could.” Turner reported the assault and attempted murder at the hands of the local official to General Swayne, noting that “[a]ll this was done in the presense of the Marshall of the town, who took no steps whatever to arrest the aforesaid Jas Thomas in his murderous intentions.” If justice was to be done, Turner suggested, it would have to come from Swayne, but again, the Assistant Commissioner apparently failed to respond.

 

Turner hired a lawyer and attempted to secure justice in the wake of the assault, writing again to General Swayne for advice and assistance. “There is more misrepresentations of my case among the white people than I ever though[t] of,” he lamented, observing that “[t]hey are greatly incensed at the idea of a negro trying to prosecute a white man.” Even as Turner sought the protections of the law, he was forced to operate in hiding. Despite the language of democracy and equality, white Alabamians refused to accept a legal system that recognized the rights of their Black neighbors. “They have been looking around every night for a chance to kill me,” he explained, “but I have avoided them thus far. It is very dangerous for me to stay here. But I will put my trust in the Lord and stay as long as I can.” Once more, it does not appear that the head of the Alabama Freedmen’s Bureau, General Swayne, took any action in response to Turner’s pleas for justice.

 

However, a letter from Reverend Williams about the case did reach the desk of the governor of Alabama, Robert M. Patton. In it, the minister explained that the current trouble in the town grew in part from “a little too frequent a use of negro right, of their privilege to hold orderly meetings.” “In regard to the negroes, some few of them are quite indiscret,” he complained, and “a few others who hear read from the ‘National’ of Mobile, the ‘Radicalism’ it contains[?] become progressives and now, and then, manifest this spirit by [hostile?] words.” This was the crucial context for the attack on Turner for Reverend Williams, when James Thomas “publicly assaulted one of the negro speakers, in a furious way, breaking his cane over him and then drawing his knife upon him—of which he plod guilty before the Citty Council and paid a fine of $10.” Guilty of reading newspapers and making speeches, the white minister suggested that Black organizers like Turner had created this problem in the first place. While Williams positioned himself as sympathetic to Turner and criticized Thomas as “rather an impetus young man,” he devoted the bulk of his comments to complaining about his Black neighbors and the narrow expressions of freedom to which they availed themselves.

 

If this had been the end of the story—of the assault on Turner and his efforts at multiracial organizing in the immediate aftermath of emancipation—it would have been understandable. White local officials like Thomas and prominent figures like Williams seemed at best unwilling to support genuine equality and, in the case of Thomas, openly hostile. But Turner could not be so easily defeated.

 

After serving a term in the Alabama State legislature representing Elmore County, Turner turned his attention to campaigning for the state Republican Party in 1869. To help build support for the campaign, Turner sought the help of none other than James Thomas. “I want you to get the signatures of the Postmaster and Esq. Helony,” he wrote the former justice of the peace who had once tried to kill him, since “[t]hey promised me that they would sign” the petition enlisting Benjamin W. Norris to run for Congress. Turner also asked Thomas to enlist “old man Ned Adkins, Isaac Parker, and other leading colored men.”

 

Turner’s letter to Thomas offers significant insight into the interracial organizing that Turner had pursued since the moment of emancipation, and which he would continue to advance as integral to multiracial democracy. The Republican Party, which had been the party of democracy and equality in the 1860s, could only be advanced through a genuinely multiracial coalition. Here, Turner put into practice the words of his Independence Day speech, attempting to organize with the man who had beaten him if it was possible to do so. And in fact, Turner not only partnered with Thomas, but assigned him to gather the endorsements of potential supporters, both Black and white.

 

Thomas, for his part, took up the work after Turner “came to me in Montgomery and told me personally to return home and go to work for Maj. Norris, saying, that every true Republican should rally at once to his support, or we are defeated, which I did.”

 

A remarkable story, it is one that might have ended very differently and illustrates the instability of the white conservative lawlessness against which Turner struggled so fiercely. Thomas might have succeeded in stabbing Turner, for example, or white locals might have found Turner in hiding and assassinated him. These tragedies unfolded constantly in the postemancipation South. They still do. But contingency cuts both ways. White Alabamians might have chosen democracy, equality, and the rule of law. They might have chosen a stable society that, as Turner had written to Reverend Williams, would have advanced their collective prosperity and civilization.

 

What Turner pursued was a vision of an assertive democracy more powerful than white supremacy. One in which the rule of law would be brought about, not only through petitions and prayer, but by capturing and totally transforming the lawless system that existed. It was a vision too compelling even for the justice of the peace to deny.

 

 

NOTE:

While we usually publish transcriptions of the documents in our collection at FSSP, I have opted not to do so here because some of this material will be published in forthcoming volumes of Freedom. I also want to thank the former editors of FSSP, who compiled and analyzed these documents over the course of the project’s history, and especially John McKerley, Steven F. Miller, and Leslie S. Rowland for editorial work on two of the documents provided here.

 

^[1] William V. Turner to Rev. J. D. Williams, 16 Aug. 1865, Unregistered Letters Received, series 9, AL Assistant Commissioner, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, & Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, National Archives, FSSP Project Number A-1806 (noted hereafter in brackets).

^[2] William V. Turner to his honor Gen. Wager Swayne, 17 Nov. 1865, Unregistered Letters Received, series 9, AL Assistant Commissioner, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, & Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, National Archives [A-1653].

^[3] The text of Turner’s speech is printed in Richard Bailey, Neither Carpetbaggers Nor Scalawags: Black Officeholders during the Reconstruction of Alabama, 1867-1878 (NewSouth Books, 2010), 371-372.

^[4] Statement of Wm. V. Turner, 10 Sept. 1866, and Wm. V. Turner to Maj Gen Wager Swayne, 13 Sept. [18]66, Unregistered Letters Received, series 9, AL Assistant Commissioner, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, & Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, National Archives [A-1808].