Reminiscences of my life in camp / Susie King Taylor

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Date

1902;1968

Biography

Susie King Taylor is known for becoming the first Black nurse during the American Civil War. She was born in 1848 into slavery and lived on a plantation until the age of seven, when she was allowed to move in with her free grandmother in Savannah, Georgia. Despite it being illegal for enslaved people to receive an education in Georgia, Susie attended ‘underground education’ – secret schools taught by free women of colour. In 1862, Susie fled with her uncle and other African Americans to Union-occupied St Simons Island off the coast of Georgia, where, at the age of 14, she married an officer of the US Colored Infantry Regiment, Edward King. The same year, Susie became the first black teacher to openly educate African Americans in Georgia. She also began serving as a nurse and later worked at a hospital for African American soldiers in South Carolina. After the war in 1866, Susie and Edward moved to Savannah and she opened a school for African American children. A month after their child was born, Edward died and Susie was forced to take a job as a domestic servant. She moved to Boston with the family she worked for in the early 1870s, where she married Russell Taylor and joined the Women’s Relief Corps. In 1902, she became the first African American woman to publish an account of her Civil War experience, My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops. She died in Boston in 1912.

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