Susie King Taylor: Reminiscences of the Black Angel of Mercy–Livestream

Hear the amazing story of this trailblazing nurse, teacher, and author.

DUE TO TECHNICAL ISSUES WITH FACEBOOK, THIS EVENT IS POSTPONED. PLEASE CHECK BACK ON OUR CALENDAR FOR A RESCHEDULED DATE AND TIME.

Join Hermina Glass-Hill, award-winning historian and the premier scholar on the life and legacy of Susie King Taylor on Tuesday, March 5 at 2:00 PM Eastern on Facebook for a livestream. You can tune in by visiting facebook.com/CivilWarMed at the scheduled time.

Hermina Glass-Hill will reminisce about Susie King Taylor’s apprenticeship as a healer in the tradition of Black women in antebellum Georgia, her service as a young battlefield nurse during the Civil War, and in subsequent years, her dedication to ensuring the well-being of Civil War veterans and civilians in Boston, Massachusetts. She will also highlight a situation in 1898 when Taylor, a former Civil War nurse who healed soldiers and fetched maimed, mangled, and dead bodies on the battlefields of America, was shown no mercy as she helplessly held her son and watched him die in her arms in Louisiana – the result of medical apartheid.

Today, Susie King Taylor is celebrated nationally and internationally for her commitment to our shared humanity, freedom, and democracy. For the first time in 250 years the city of Savannah, Georgia has renamed a colonial-era square after a woman–a formerly enslaved woman– “Taylor Square” for Susie King Taylor.

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Hermina Glass-Hill is an award-winning public historian and the premier scholar on the life and legacy of Civil War heroine of freedom and early social justice advocate Susannah “Susie” Baker King Taylor, who served as a laundress, cook, teacher, and nurse during the American Civil War. The former associate director of the Center for the Study of the Civil War Era at Kennesaw State University and author of the National Park Service’s Civil War Sesquicentennial focus group report, The War of Jubilee: Tell Our Story and We Will Come, in 2016, Hermina founded the Susie King Taylor Women’s Institute and Ecology Center in Taylor’s hometown in Liberty County, Georgia. In a joint collaboration with the Liberty County Historical Society, she designed and curated the permanent museum exhibition titled “SUSIE KING TAYLOR: MY TOWN, MY HEROINE OF FREEDOM, MY AMERICAN PATRIOT OF LIBERTY.” It is the only exhibit in the country solely dedicated to the life of Susie King Taylor and her USCT regiment, the 1st South Carolina Volunteers (African Descent)/later 33rd United States Colored Troops. The exhibition displays a letter written by the regiment’s first commanding officer Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, copies of the papers of Lt. Colonel Charles T. Trowbridge, ephemera representing Taylor’s leadership in the Woman’s Relief Corps,(Department of Massachusetts), the auxiliary to the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) Robert A. Bell Post 134, and contemporary newspaper articles highlighting Taylor’s dedicated service to Civil War veterans in the Boston, MA area.