Former Patchogue resident Joyce Moore Turner, educator, activist, dies at 104

Born in Harlem during its Renaissance, raised in a Caribbean American family that counted such figures as poet Claude McKay among their friends and contemporaries, longtime Patchogue resident Joyce Moore Turner not only saw much change in her more than century on Earth, but created change.

A nutritionist, educator, writer and community activist, Turner was appointed by Suffolk County Executive H. Lee Dennison in 1967 to a hospitals and health care task force to combat the county’s high infant mortality rate. Among other endeavors, she served as a president of the Nassau-Suffolk Health Systems Agency, chaired the Suffolk County Economic Opportunity Commission, and helped found what became the Brookhaven branch of the NAACP.

“We grew up on picket lines from the time I was 8,” her daughter Sylvia Turner, of Portsmouth, Virginia, recalled fondly, “fighting for fair pay, fair housing and things like that.” These often took place in front of the local post office because it was, she explained, “the only federal building in Patchogue.”

“I attended many NAACP meetings in the cafeteria of my elementary school,” remembered Joyce Turner’s son Richard Turner, of Westminster, Maryland, “where I would sit off to the side and do my homework.” Yet despite how busy both their mother and their activist-educator father, W. Burghardt Turner, were, “It was a house full of love, with an understanding of how important family was and family gatherings were.” 

Joyce Turner died Aug. 27 at home in the Riderwood senior community in Silver Spring, Maryland, at age 104.

“She was working on her latest article right up until then,” said her eldest child, Mitch Turner, of Tampa, Florida. Despite falling into some semiconscious days toward the end, he said, she rallied about a week before her death, “talking about ‘leaving’ and telling me what still needed to be done on the article,” a memoir about the historical African American Communist Hermina Huiswoud, an old family friend.

Born Aug. 14, 1920, Joyce Webster Moore was the only child of Caribbean immigrants Richard B. and Kathleen Ursula James Moore. Joyce discovered about a decade ago, said her daughter, that she had a half sister from a previous relationship of Kathleen’s in Jamaica, who died in England in 1998.

“My mother was delighted to discover she was actually an aunt” of a niece and a nephew living in Europe, said Sylvia Turner. 

Joyce’s parents divorced when she was 7, and Kathleen Moore went to work in a clothing factory. Joyce's father remained a part of her life, arranging to send the teenager to a socialist Jewish sleepaway camp for two summers.

After graduating at 16 from the now-defunct Morris High School in the Bronx, Joyce earned a chemistry degree from Hunter College. While at Columbia University for her master’s degree in nutrition and public health, she met fellow graduate student W. Burghardt Turner, who would go on to his own distinguished career. They married in February 1942.

Additionally earning a professional diploma in school administration from Columbia, she moved with her husband in 1954 to their decadeslong home in Patchogue. She taught homemaking at Brentwood High School and was soon that department’s chair. Later she became vice principal in charge of curriculum at South Junior High School, now South Ocean Middle School, and retired after 20 years in the district.

Turner also served as a nutrition consultant for the American Red Cross in New York and for the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association; as chairman of New York City Nutrition Week; and as a board member of the Stony Brook University Foundation. The college, where her husband taught history, holds 68 boxes of her donated papers, and bestows the $10,000 Joyce Turner Dissertation Fellowship to a graduate student each year.

She was initiated into the education honor society Kappa Delta Pi and the women’s honor society Pi Lambda Theta. Her books include “Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance” and a monograph about her father, “Richard B. Moore: Bibliophile, Activist Son of Barbados.” She and her husband also edited a book of Richard Moore’s writings.

In addition to her three children, she is survived by six grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. Her husband, with whom she retired to Tucson, Arizona, in the 1990s before moving to Maryland in 2006, died in 2009.

Turner was cremated. A memorial will be held at Riderwood Chapel in Silver Spring on Sept. 28. Donations may be made to Planned Parenthood or the League of Women Voters.