James Milton Turner and the Promise of America: The Public Life of a Post-Civil War Black Leader

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University of Missouri Press, 1991 - Biography & Autobiography - 245 pages
James Milton Turner, Missouri's most prominent nineteenth-century African American political figure, possessed a deep faith in America. The Civil War, he believed, had purged the land of its sins and allowed the country to realize what had always been its promise: the creation of a social and political environment in which merit, not race, mattered.

Born a slave, Turner gained freedom when he was a child and received his education in clandestine St. Louis schools, later briefly attending Oberlin College. A self-taught lawyer, Turner earned a statewide reputation and wielded power far out of proportion to Missouri's relatively small black population.

After working nearly a decade in Liberia, Turner never regained the prominence he had enjoyed during Reconstruction.
 

Contents

CHAPTER I
8
CHAPTER II
25
CHAPTER III
40
CHAPTER IV
57
CHAPTER V
78
CHAPTER VI
98
CHAPTER VII
131
A Pyrrhic Victory
155
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About the author (1991)

Gary R. Kremer, a professor of history at Lincoln University from 1972 to 1988, now serves as Missouri's State Archivist. He is also a member of the history faculty at William Woods College in Fulton, Missouri. He is author of George Washington Carver: In His Own Words and co-author of Missouri's Black Heritage. William E. Foley is Professor of History at Central Missouri State University. He is the author of several books on the history of the heartland, including The Genesis of Missouri: From Wilderness Outpost to Statehood and A History of Missouri, Volume I: 1673-1820. The Missouri Biography Series, edited by William E. Foley