Feisty Female Friday: Susie King Taylor

The FFF this week is Susie King Taylor.

Susie was an American nurse, educator, and the daughter of enslaved parents. She was born and lived in GA where it was against the law for anyone to teach an African American child to read or write but that did not stop Susie and her family.

The people who taught her knew they were breaking the law and did it anyway. When Susie was about seven years old and living on a plantation, her grandmother arranged for her and her brother to travel to Savannah, enrolled them in two different secret schools, both run by Black women who risked everything to educate the children who came to them. As the Civil War tore the country apart, Susie made her way with her uncle's family through dangerous Confederate-held territory to the protection of Union lines. She arrived on the Georgia Sea Islands, where thousands of formerly enslaved people were seeking safety behind Union forces. The Union officers noticed immediately that this teenager could read and write and wanted to organize a school there. At the age of fourteen, Susie became the first Black teacher to openly operate a school for freed African Americans in GA. Every day, children filed into her classroom; every night, adults came by candlelight.

Susie married Edward King, a Black NCO stationed with the First SC Volunteers, one of the earliest Black regiments in the Union Army. When the regiment moved, Susie moved with them. She became the regiment's nurse, teacher, its backbone, and for four years and three months, serving without receiving a single dollar of pay with no rank, pension, or official recognition of any kind from the US government. She became the first Black Army nurse and nursed soldiers through dysentery, typhoid, smallpox, and the wounds of battle working alongside Clara Barton. After the war she worked for the WRC, a national organization for Female Civil War veterans.

Susie was the only African American woman to publish a memoir of her wartime experiences called, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp. After the war she opened several schools for freed children in GA and continued her community and veterans' relief work in MA. She has a national park, Susie King Taylor Freedom Park at Jones Creek, which is part of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom located in GA.

She had a son, died in Boston, and was buried there with her second husband.