Susie King Taylor

Susie Baker was born into slavery on the sixth of August 1848, on a plantation on the Isle of Wight in Liberty County, Georgia, held by an enslaver named Valentine Grest. At the age of seven she was permitted to go and live with her free Black grandmother, Dolly Reed, in Savannah. There, though Georgia law forbade the education of Black people, she was schooled in secret — taught by Black women in clandestine classrooms and quietly tutored by two white youths — acquiring a literacy that would shape the whole of her life.

In April 1862, at the age of thirteen, she escaped to Union lines, reaching the federally held coast and settling on St. Simons Island among hundreds of other newly freed refugees. There she opened a school, becoming one of the first Black teachers to openly instruct African Americans in Georgia. She married Edward King, a soldier in what became the 33rd United States Colored Troops, and attached herself to the regiment.

For nearly four years she served alongside the 1st South Carolina Volunteers — later the 33rd USCT — as laundress, teacher, and above all as a nurse, tending the wounded and the fevered. During this service she encountered Clara Barton, later founder of the American Red Cross, and worked at her side among the sick and injured.

In 1902 she published Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, the only memoir of the Civil War written by a Black woman. She died in Boston on the sixth of October 1912. May her name endure among the honored, a keeper of memory who wrote her people's truth so it could never be unremembered.