Women's History Month and African Americans in Times of War: The Susie King Taylor Story on March 20th

Guest speakers Ramona La Roche, Ph. D., and Hermina Glass Hill will presenting about the first African American nurse, Susie King Taylor, for Women’s History Month on March 20, 2018 in the downtown Palmer Amphitheater. Dr. La Roache will come dressed as Susie King Taylor and will share her extensive knowledge in the voice of her character.

Susie King Taylor, formerly enslaved, was the first African American to teach openly in a school for former slaves in Georgia. She also became the first African American nurse during the Civil War. As the author of Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops Late 1^st S.C. Volunteers, she was the only African American women to publish a memoir of her wartime experiences.

Ramona La Roche, Ph.D. is a Cultural Heritage Information Scientist.  A recent Institute of Library and Museum Services (ILMS): Cultural Heritage Informatics Leadership (CHIL) Fellow, she received her doctorate from the University of SC’s College of Communications and Information Science. Her research on the Gullah community and its cultural connections to Barbados, West Indies focuses on artisans, critical archives, and digital humanities. She received her M.Ed in Divergent Learning from Columbia College, Columbia, SC, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.  

The author of Gullah Connections: Crossing Over, Passing The Links between the Worlds in Falola, T., & Genova, A. (2005). Orisa: Yoruba gods and spiritual identity in Africa and the diaspora, and Black America Series: Georgetown County, South Carolina (2000), Dr. La Roche is also a mixed media artist, photographer and former SC Arts Educator. She is the mother of two sons, one daughter-in-law, and has three grandchildren.

As the founder and director of Family TYES SC [to youth everywhere solace], the non profit youth services arm of Gullah Galz Ink, Dr. La Roche provides consultant work for The Gullah Society as Community Education Strategist and Genealogy Research Director, and the Georgetown Gullah Geechee Institute.  She also teaches online courses at the USC, provides genealogy, family history research services, community archive and digital technology training and presentations wherever interest in the global African diaspora may be found!

Dr. La Roche is “ very excited, joyful and grateful for the Trident Technical College Palmer campus family’s warm reception and interest in honoring Mrs. Susie King Taylor, our Gullah Geechee ancestor of lowcountry Georgia.”  

Hermina Glass-Hill, MA, is an accomplished public historian, writer, preservationist, artist, and motivational speaker. For more than twenty years she has listened, gathered, compiled, penned, spoken, shared, recorded, stored, and embodied the buried histories of ordinary African American men, women, and children, who have lived extraordinary lives. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, she is passionate about history and public access and engagement to historical knowledge.

She is the foremost scholar in the United States on Susannah "Susie" Baker King Taylor and she travels the country lecturing on the life of this nineteenth century African-descended girl-child-heroine who survived and emerged from the trauma of slavery in America with an intact identity of self, a knowledge of her ancestors, education, and the agency which helped her to overcome the challenges of life before, during, and after the Civil War despite the lies our teachers have told us in American public schools about the history of Captive Africans in America.

The former associate director of the Center for the Study of the Civil War Era at Kennesaw State University, she collaborated with Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park to facilitate symposia that highlighted counter-narratives for the Civil War Sesquicentennial titled Alternative Southern Realities: African Americans and the American Civil War (2010) and From Civil War to Civil Rights (2011). In addition, her work as the principal ethnographic researcher of the focus group report on African American attitudes toward the Civil War, The War of Jubilee: Tell Our Story and We Will Come (2011), continues as a highly acclaimed publication of the National Park Service. Also, her expertise in oral history afforded her the opportunity to spearhead The Freedom Mosaic, an online exhibit space honoring survivors of modern global antidemocracy movements, at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia and funded by the Ford Foundation in New York.

In 2016, Hermina Glass-Hill founded the Susie King Taylor Women's Institute and Ecology Center in Atlanta and she recently relocated the Institute to Isle of Wight-Midway, Liberty County, Georgia – the hometown of the Institute's namesake. Of Susie King Taylor she says, "As a Georgia Geechee, Susie lived an exemplary life of human excellence, commitment to education, and serving the needs of her community all under the slave regime in the American south, through the landmines of the Civil War, across the landscape of Reconstruction, and into the dawn of a new century where she found a platform to use her voice and energies for Black uplift and social justice. What an example for us today!” Justice Sweet Land of Liberty: The Service and Activism of Ex-Slave Susie Baker King Taylor is Hermina Glass-Hill's current work-in-progress due out in September 2018. And, Happy Birthday, Susie! (2018) is her first installment of the Oh Susannah Children's Book Series published by Ubuntu Strategic Concepts. Hermina Glass-Hill attended Spelman College and Georgia State University where she earned a Master of Arts degree in Heritage Preservation and Public History. She lives in Midway, Georgia with her husband Kelvin. They are the proud parents of three adult children and the grandparents of one grandgirl, Kamryn Giovanni, who is the inspiration for Happy Birthday, Susie! She enjoys reading, art, nature, and engaging young people on living their best life and sharing their unique gifts and treasures with the Universe and humanity which desperately needs them. For more information about her work at the Susie King Taylor Women’s Institute, visit www.susiekingtaylorinstitute.org.

Some teaching resources:

• ·         Teaching tolerance lesson plan
• ·         Healing Touch: Susie King Taylor – Civil War Teacher and Nurse lesson plan
• ·         Free online version of her book Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33^rd United States Colored Troops Late 1^st S.C. Volunteers
• ·         Biography
• ·         Videos of one of our speakers talking about Susie King Taylor:  Susie King Taylor Institute, Hermina Glass Hill at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, and Hermina Glass Hill.
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Come join us for this important celebration, supported by the TTC Transfer Scholars Club and part of the Downtown Palmer Campus' year-long exploration of African Americans in Times of War.