Glynn County Public Schools will be starting the 2026-27 school year on August 6. On that very same date in 1848, a girl named Susie Baker was born in Liberty County to enslaved parents. While the day and circumstances of her birth were not particularly remarkable, what Susie did with her life certainly was. One of the most prominent African American women in Georgia history, Susie Baker King Taylor became the first Black educator to openly teach in a school in the state.
When Susie was a young girl, her owner allowed her to go live with her grandmother in Savannah. While there, she attended two secret schools taught by Black women and gained basic literacy skills. It’s important to note that in the state of Georgia at the time, there were harsh laws against the formal education of African Americans. Two white youths helped her to continue and expand her education, knowingly violating law and custom.
These educational advantages benefited Susie greatly when she and many other African Americans fled to St. Simons Island in April 1862. The island was occupied by Union forces at the time, and army officers quickly learned of her literacy skills. They offered to obtain books for her to set up a school for contrabands. She taught approximately forty children during the day and “a number of adults who came to me nights, all of them so eager to learn to read, to read above anything else.” Thus, Baker became the first Black teacher for freed African American students to work in a freely operating freedmen’s school in Georgia. She taught there until the island was evacuated in October 1862.
While at the school on St. Simons Island, Baker married Edward King, a Black noncommissioned officer in the Union forces. After the island was evacuated, she moved with his regiment for three years, serving as nurse and laundress, and continuing to teach Black soldiers to read and write during their off-duty hours. She and Edward returned to Savannah in 1866, and she established a school for the freed children. The following year, after Edward’s death, she returned to Liberty County and established another school. In 1868, she relocated to Savannah, where she continued teaching freedmen for another year, supporting herself solely through small tuition charges, despite the existence of northern freedmen’s aid organizations.
In the 1870s ended up in Boston, where she met and married Russell Taylor. She remained there for the remainder of her life, only making occasional trips to the South. Susie’s memoir, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers, was privately published in 1902, ten years before her death.
The life of this passionate educator is honored by a historical marker erected by the Georgia Historical Society near the Midway First Presbyterian Church in Midway, Georgia. Midway is also the location of the The Susie King Taylor Women's Institute and Ecology Center (susiekingtaylorinstitute.org). For her heroism, bravery, courage, and trailblazing leadership during and after the American Civil War, Susie King Taylor is celebrated nationally in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. and on the Women's History Trail in Boston, Massachusetts. Savannah’s Taylor Square, named in her honor, was formally dedicated on February 11, 2024.
