Black History Month: Susie King Taylor

Susie King Taylor was born a slave in 1848.  When she was seven her owner sent her to live with her grandmother in Savannah.  Even though Georgia had particularly horrible laws about the education of African Americans, she attended two schools taught by black women.  From them she gained literacy and furthered her education with the help of two white youths, both of whom knowingly broke the law.

When the Civil War started Susie and many other African Americans fled to St. Simons island which was occupied by Union troops. Union officers recognized her education and got books for her to become the first African American teacher for freed slaves. She taught forty children in day school and “a number of adults who came to me nights, all of them so eager to learn to read, to read above anything else.” She taught there until October 1862, when the island was evacuated.

On St. Simons she married a black non-commissioned officer of the Union forces, Edward King.  For three years during the war she moved with her husband’s regiment, serving as nurse and laundress.  When the war was over she and Edward returned to Savannah where she established a school for the freed children.   Her husband died in 1866 just before the birth of their child.  In 1867 she returned to Liberty County to open another school and in 1868 returned to Savannah where she continued to teach freedmen for another year.  She supported her efforts through a small tuition charge and did not receive aid from any of the northern freedmen aid groups.

In the 1870s she traveled to Boston as a domestic servant of a wealthy white family While in Boston she met and married Russell Taylor. She remained in Boston for the rest of her life, returning to the South only occasionally. After a trip to Louisiana in the 1890s to care for a dying son, she wrote her Reminiscences, which were privately published in 1902. As the author of Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers, she was the only African American woman to publish a memoir of her wartime experiences.She died ten years later.