"Marylanders Cry Freedom: Civil Rights at Home & Abroad," a companion exhibit to "America's Voice Against Apartheid: Confronting Injustice at Home & Abroad," tells the story of American anti-apartheid activism and of American and South African ties to the days of Booker T. Washington and Bishop Henry McNeil Turner.

This traveling exhibition opened for South African visitors at the Apartheid Museum in Soweto in Spring 2023 and ran at The Kennedy Center's Hall of Nations in Washington, D.C. in Fall 2023. The companion exhibit runs until August 2024 in the Baltimore City Hall.

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Booker T. Washington inspired the Duba's to create the Ohlange Institute.

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The exhibit's panels illuminate the work of better-known and lesser-known South African activists, including John and Nokutela Duba. Washington inspired them to create the Ohlange Institute. The couple also birthed the Zulu language newspaper Illnage lase Natal (Natal Sun). Like many of Washington's legacies, Tuskegee University and the National Business League, Olhange and Illnage are still elevating African people.

The school is the first South African educational institution founded by a Black. John Dube later became president of what was to become the ANC and was buried at the school. In 1994, Nelson Mandela chose to cast his initial vote in a politically liberated South Africa at Ohlange and near Duba's grave. When Mandela voted, he said, "Mr. President, I have come to report to you that South Africa is free today." Duba must have smiled along with his American cousins, Washington and Bishop Turner, both of whom died in 1915.

Columbus, Ohio-based African American Methodist Episcopal (AME) Bishop Henry McNeil Turner visited South Africa in 1898. In his last of four trips to Africa, he met with Rev. Mangena Mokone in Cape Town.

Eight years earlier, in 1892, Mokone founded the first branch of the Ethiopian church in South Africa. In 1895, he wrote to Turner. Their relationship developed and led to a call from the Ethiopian church in South Africa to form a union with the AME.

After the Ethiopian Church 1896 conference, church leaders decided that the two churches should merge. After the meeting, Rev. Mokone, James M. Dwane, and J G Xaba visited the United States to formalize the union of the two churches. (Click here to see an image of Bishop H. M. Turner receiving James M. Dwane.) Turner's 1898 visit marked the formal establishment of the AME church in South Africa.

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A.M.E. Bishop H. M. Turner met with a delegation of South Africans in 1900.

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Turner later met with a delegation of South Africans in 1900. They meet to organize a movement to resettle African Americans to the African continent. 

Port of Harlem has longed posted on Facebook a meme of Turner and one of his pan-African sayings. Nevertheless, long before 1974, when JJ painted Black Jesus on an episode of the USA TV comedy, "Good Times," the Bishop declared: "God is a Negro."