Born in Edwards Mississippi in 1927, Cornelius Turner is one of 12 children born on a farm owned by his parents.

At the age of 15, Mr. Turner and his siblings moved to San Pedro, California where he continued his education and eventually joined the Merchant Marines.  In the Merchant Marines, he traveled the world and learned of the various people and cultures that embodied humanity.  He and his wife, whom he met during a visit to New Orleans, reluctantly returned to Mississippi after the birth of their first child.  

Upon his return to Mississippi, “C” (as his friends refer to him) immediately befriended a young Medgar Evers, whom he shared an office with, and he began to embrace the ideology of transforming Mississippi’s insidious segregation laws.  Mr. Turner and Medgar Evers, with the help of others, founded the Mississippi Free Press as a mechanism to share with other Black people the activities revolving around the NAACP and other civil rights organizations that were focusing on tearing down the walls of Jim Crow.  

Mr. Turner then committed to challenging Jim Crow form a business perspective.  He formed a general contracting company called Major Associates in an effort to become the largest Black contractor in the South.  Today, Major Associates is one of the largest African American owned construction companies in Mississippi.  Separate from building numerous housing developments, public and private sector dwellings, Major Associates via a joint venture with Fountain Construction, is the contractor for the multimillion dollar Capitol City Convention City scheduled to open in Downtown Jackson in 2009.