Union League (also known as Loyal League): one of a number of organizations
established starting in 1862 to promote loyalty to the Union and the
policies of Abraham Lincoln. During Reconstruction, Union Leagues were formed
across the South after 1867 as working members of the Republican Party. They
convinced freedmen to vote for the Republicans.
Henry McNeal Turner
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Henry McNeal Turner was born free on February 1, 1834 in South Carolina where he learned to read and write. He was appointed to the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia. He settled in Macon and was elected to the state legislature in 1868 during Reconstruction. He was a pioneer in Georgia in organizing new audiences
of the independent black denomination after the American Civil War. In 1880 he was elected as the first southern bishop
of the AME Church after a fierce battle within the denomination. In the late
nineteenth century South, Turner began to support black nationalism and
emigration of blacks to Africa, because he was angered by the Democrats'
regaining power and founding Jim Crow laws. He was the leading person to do so in the late nineteenth century.
Aaron Alpeoria Bradley
Aaron Alpeoria Bradley was born in Edgefield, South Carolina in 1815, and he was born into slavery. In 1834, Bradley ran away to the North and became a lawyer. In 1865 he returned to Georgia, where he became the most outspoken member of the black delegation to the constitutional convention. In 1868 he was elected state senator from the First District. Despite an inconsistent past, Bradley rallied plantation blacks around Savannah with his persistence that the former slaves should be given land.
Tunis G. Campbell, Jr.
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Tunis G. Campbell, Jr. was the most influential black politician in Georgia. He was born in Middle brook, New Jersey. He preached against slavery and established schools. In March 1865, Campbell was appointed to supervise land claims and resettlement on five Georgia islands. In the legislature Campbell pushed for
laws for equal education, integrated jury boxes, homestead exemptions,
abolishment of imprisonment for debt, open access to public facilities, and
fair voting procedures. As a justice of the peace, minister, and political
boss, Campbell organized a black power structure in McIntosh County that
protected freed people from white abuses, whether against their bodies or in
labor negotiations. After Democrats regained state power in 1871, Campbell's
seat was taken, and a series of lawsuits kept him in legal trouble. Finally,
in 1876, Campbell was convicted of misconduct in office, taken from a Savannah
jail, handcuffed, chained, and leased out for one year to a convict labor
camp.