Shut out of the universities, a high-school teacher proved in a city park that insects can learn, remember, and hear.
On autumn mornings in 1908, a neatly dressed Black schoolteacher could be seen pacing the lawns of O'Fallon Park in St. Louis, driving rows of wooden dowels into the grass as makeshift flowers and watching which bees came back, and when. Charles Henry Turner had a doctorate from the University of Chicago, earned magna cum laude. No university would give him a permanent post, so he taught at Sumner High School and did his research in the hours left over, with no laboratory, no research library and no graduate students.
Most scientists of his day saw insects as reflex machines driven by instinct. Turner's experiments said otherwise: bees remember landmarks, cockroaches learn from their mistakes, and moths respond to sound. He published more than 70 papers and died at 56. It took most of a century for the field to catch up with him.
A life spent watching small things
The lifeline
1867
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a church custodian and a nurse; his father kept several hundred books at home
1891
B.S., University of Cincinnati. His study of the bird brain makes him the first Black author in Science
1893
Becomes professor of biology at Clark College, Atlanta, and later chairs its science department
1907
Ph.D. magna cum laude, University of Chicago, with a thesis on how ants find their way home
1908
Starts teaching at Sumner High School in St. Louis and stays until ill health forces him out in 1922
1923
Dies of acute myocarditis at his son Darwin's home in Chicago, aged 56
By the numbers
The measure of him
71
Scientific papers over a 33-year career
41
Of them written while teaching high school at Sumner, 1908–1923
3
Papers in Science, the first in 1891
56
His age when he died, a year after leaving the classroom
What he showed about small minds
The work
1892
The gallery spider. Turner documented how individual spiders change the way they build their webs and argued that this was intelligent variation, not blind instinct.
1907
The homing of ants. His doctoral study showed that ants use what they learn about light and landmarks to find their way back to the nest. Neuroscientists still cite it.
1908
Bees that remember. In O'Fallon Park he dug a fake burrow and surrounded it with the same landmarks that marked a burrowing bee's real nest. The bee went into the fake. It was the first experiment to show that bees find home by remembering landmarks.
1910–11
Colour and pattern in the honeybee. He trained bees to coloured discs and patterned boxes, and showed that bees learn visual patterns.His experiments with red were later found to be flawed, because bees do not see red as a colour. The learning principles he set out still hold.
1910s
Roaches in a maze, moths that hear. He showed that cockroaches learn a maze by trial and error, and that insects can hear sound and tell one pitch from another.
Shut out, then rediscovered
Recognition
In his lifetime
Despite his Chicago doctorate, he never held a permanent research post. Applying to the Tuskegee Institute went nowhere.
Did his research around a full high-school teaching load, with no lab and no students
After his death his work slipped out of view for most of a century
Spoke out for education and civil rights for Black citizens in St. Louis
Today
Science called him a "pioneer in animal cognition" in 2020
Bee researchers have revisited his experiments and found that many of them anticipated modern work
The Animal Behavior Society named its programme for undergraduates from under-represented groups after him
A St. Louis school (now Turner Middle School) and Clark Atlanta's Turner-Tanner Hall carry his name
The city that became his laboratory
St. Louis
Turner's laboratory was a public park in North St. Louis. In O'Fallon Park he set out dowel "flowers" to see whether bees could learn a schedule, and built a fake nest to test their memory. During the school day he taught at Sumner, a school with an outsized place in Black American history. When he died, St. Louis named a new school after him.
1875
Sumner opens as the first high school for Black students west of the Mississippi
14
Years he taught at Sumner, 1908 to 1922
1925
The Charles Henry Turner Open Air School for Crippled Children opens in his name
"If we will cast aside our prejudices and try the highest education upon both white and black, in a few decades there will be no Negro problem."
— Charles Henry Turner, "Will the Education of the Negro Solve the Race Problem?" · 1902
