Wallace Turnage: Activism in the Black Church of Postbellum New York

Escape from Enslavement

Wallace Turnage was born around 1846 into enslavement in North Carolina. Following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Turnage joined the mass movement of slaves who took freedom into their own hands. He ran away four times before successfully escaping in August 1864 at the age of seventeen from a Mobile slave jail. He walked, waded, crawled, ran, and swam to freedom, ducking alligators, river snakes, and Confederate forces while enduring days on end without food or water, making his way haphazardly to Mobile Bay where he took refuge behind Union military lines.1

In his old age, Turnage wrote a post-emancipation narrative detailing his flight to freedom. Though he concludes his narrative in 1865 at the end of the Civil War, we can use historical documents to piece together the remainder of his life’s narrative. Census data and city directories offer clues about where Turnage lived and how he earned a living. From there, we can begin to glimpse the rhythms of Turnage’s daily life and understand the ways in which Turnage and New York’s wider Black communities resisted racial strictures in the urban North.

Post-Emancipation in "Little Africa"

After serving in the Union military during the Civil War, Turnage moved to New York City in 1870, joining postbellum America’s emerging urban Black working class. Turnage rented rooms at 526 Broome Street in what is now Greenwich Village, but what was then known as “Little Africa”. Many residents began to move farther uptown by the early 1870s, but a wave of Black refugees, such as Turnage, migrating north from the former Confederacy brought newcomers to the neighborhood.2 Due to limited educational opportunities and occupational discrimination, most residents of Little Africa were employed in similar labor industries as cooks, waiters, and laundresses.3 They formed networks of friendships based on these shared experiences.

White authors, including Jacob Riis in his How the Other Half Lives, wrote with relish about Little Africa’s notorious reputation for danger, poverty, and debauchery.4 This drew the attention of both city leaders and middle-class social reformers, who took this as evidence of the social decay of the neighborhood’s residents.5 As such, Little Africa was also highly surveilled by New York’s police. To young Turnage, who grew up on rural plantations in the deep South, he likely approached the streets of lower Manhattan with an unsettling mixture of excitement and trepidation.

Turnage alternated jobs, working as a waiter, a janitor, and a glassblower making lamps for the city’s streetlights. Despite the hope of economic betterment, he earned a wage of just a few dollars per week and was excluded from joining the city’s racially-segregated trade unions. He married Sarah Ann Elizabeth Bird in 1875, and the couple moved into a tenement building at 113 Thompson street.6

Abyssinian Baptist Church: Community Building and Activism

Despite its notorious reputation, Little Africa was also home to several well-established churches. These institutions created a community and stability that ran counter to what many white New Yorkers felt they knew about the neighborhood.7 Turnage belonged to Abyssinian Baptist Church on Waverly Place, whose congregants numbered in the hundreds. The church was an expression of the Black community’s vitality in New York City, an act of resistance in and of itself, and one of the only institutions which Black New Yorkers could definitively call their own.8

The community Turnage found within Abyssinian Baptist Church was a line of defense against the hostile racial discrimination that Black congregants met on a daily basis. In addition to Sunday services, Abyssinian offered clubs, classes, and entertainment such as prayer meetings and choir rehearsals nearly every day of the week. Sundays were an all-day affair, with events scheduled for the morning, afternoon, and evening.9

Turnage also joined the Hamilton Lodge of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows. Fraternal orders such as this were integral to forging and sustaining community among northern Black, working-class communities, offering a site for the expression respectability. In one instance, the Hamilton Lodge paid the fee for a plot for Turnage and his wife to bury their daughter Fanny, who tragically died at the age of one from tuberculosis. In fact, four of Turnage’s children died in the span of seven years, each of whom is buried at Cypress Hills Cemetery. The child mortality rate of New York’s Black communities was the highest of any race during this time in the city, and it was likely that many families of the Hamilton Lodge understood all too well the pain the Turnage family experienced.10

Relocation to New Jersey

When the Panic of 1873 led to mass unemployment and a decade-long depression, Turnage moved his family to Jersey City. However, he crossed the Hudson every day to continue to work and attend church in Manhattan until his death in 1916 at the age of seventy.11 His daughter, Lydia Turnage Connolly, carefully preserved the original manuscript of his post-emancipation narrative in a black clamshell box. Following Lydia’s 1984 death, her friend discovered the manuscript when going through Lydia’s personal belongings and donated it to a historical society in Connecticut. Finally, in 2007, nearly a century after it was written, Turnage’s narrative was published for the first time.

Citations and Further Reading

1 David W. Blight, A Slave No More (Orlando: Harcourt, 2007), 55, 87.

2 David Quigley, Second Founding (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 82.

3 Gerald W. McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 18.

4 McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village, 12.

5 McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village, 13.

6 Blight, A Save No More, 117.

7 McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village, 19.

8 McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village, 19.

9 McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village, 22.

10 Blight, A Slave No More, 121.

11 Blight, A Slave No More, 118.