Salaria Kea, born July 13th 1913 in Georgia, the “Empire State of the South”, is the first woman in this series of short articles dedicated to Women’s History Month. Instead of writing about some of history’s better known characters, we have decided to focus on those great American women who forever changed history and whose memories we ought to do justice to, but who have often been forgotten or silenced.  

Salaria Kea has a Wikipedia page, and is the subject of a couple of book chapters and a few scattered journal articles, but if we mention her name, even among historians, no one seems to know who she is. A nurse by profession, Salaria Kea was to become the only African American woman to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War of 1936. But she was more than just a nurse: her life is a journey of activism, participating in the early path towards the Civil Rights Era, whilst also rallying for international causes such as opposing the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.

Born in the deeply segregated American South, Kea faced challenges and adversity from an early age. After the death of her father, stabbed whilst he was working at a Sanitarium, her mother had to leave 6-month-old Salaria and her 3 older brothers in the care of family friends to be able to work and raise her children. But after two years, her mother returned to Georgia to marry a farmer, and Kea remembers that her brothers had to take care of her while her mother was away. It was her brothers who, working small jobs instead of going to school, ensured that at least the youngest sister could pursue an education. 

It was during the last summers of high school, while working at a local doctor’s office, that Kea was introduced to her calling and future profession: medicine. But it was not that easy for her, and suffering from the harsh segregation laws of the South, she watched one school after the other deny her entry simply because of the color of her skin. Following the path to the North that many African Americans had to embark upon after the Great Depression, Salaria headed for New York. It was 1930 when she finally got accepted in the Harlem Hospital School of Nursing. 

Almost 30 years before the now-famous Greensboro sit-ins, Kea and some of her schoolmates, protesting the racial segregation rules of the school, rejected to stand up from a “Whites Only” table at the dining room. Kea’s first experiences in organized protest eventually led to the school ending segregation in the dining areas. In 1934, she graduated and, shortly after, started to work in various hospitals where, meeting with the most progressive nurses, she increasingly became more politicized. 

When in the Fall of 1935 the fascist troops of Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, Kea was ready to get into action to support what was hailed as the last free country in Africa. Together with other nurses, they raised enough money to send 75 beds to Ethiopia. When the troops of Mussolini, following Franco’s coup d’etat in 1936 entered the Spanish peninsula, Kea knew it was her call to volunteer to fight for the antifascist Spanish Republican side. 

On March 27, 1937 Kea sailed for Spain aboard the Paris. Following the path of around 2,800 other American volunteers to fight in the Lincoln and Washington Brigades, she would be the only African American woman amongst them (in total around 85 African American men would also fight for the International Brigades). Assigned to a medical unit, Kea was responsible, during her first months in Spain, to turn the abandoned summer residence of king Alfonso XII into the Hospital Villa Paz. The old palace had been occupied by cattle, infested by mosquitos, and the plumbing and electricity were no longer working. 

Kea noticed that amongst the Republican women helping to fix the building into the hospital, most of them could not read, and so together with other international nurses, and in only six months, not only did they finish the project, but also taught everyone who worked there how to read and write. Soon the hospital, that never ceased to be operated in the harshest conditions, was filled with Ethiopians, Cubans, Americans, Italians, Germans and all the nationalities of the international brigades. 

During the Aragon Campaign in early 1938, Kea was moved to the front to treat the patients that were in most urgent care and couldn’t be moved to the hospitals. In a pamphlet published shortly after her return to the U.S., she remembered how, in the midst of the battle, with planes of both sides flying above, “they battled just over our hospital unit. We could hear the stray bullets as they fell through the olive trees.” 

During one of the fascist bombings, Kea lost the rest of her unit and had to hitchhike all the way back to Barcelona, where, in the last attempt to resist the fascist advance, the international troops had been stationed. But with the powerful German and Italian aviation supporting Franco’s army, it was only a matter of time before the International Brigades and the Republican troops would be forced to retreat. And so, sometime in March 1938, one of the bombings left Kea under 2 meters of rubble and, seriously injured, she was eventually sent back to the U.S. 

Back in New York, she continued to organize convoys of medical supplies to be sent to Spain and, after the International Brigades where finally dismantled and survivors returned home, she was also active amongst the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB for short, now Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, the organization behind the archive collections and whose activities keep the memory of all the American volunteers and their struggle against fascism in Spain alive). In a 1938 pamphlet narrating her story to raise funds for the still ongoing war, she ends with a note: “Surely Negro people will just as willingly give of their means to relieve the suffering of a people attacked by the enemy of all racial minorities, – fascism – and it’s most aggressive exponents – Italy and Germany.”

After the civil war in Spain ended, Kea would also fight overseas as a nurse during WWII. Back home in Akron, Ohio, Kea and her husband, John O’Reilly – an Irish volunteer of the International Brigades that she met and married while they were in Spain – would live a peaceful life still working against fascism, “the enemies of the world”, as she would put it. On May 18^th, 1990 Kea passed away in her home. 

Hers was a life of struggle and activism, of constant opposition to the hardest realities of the world: discrimination and fascism. Her story is one of intersectionality, as a Black woman and a nurse in a war that was happening thousands of kilometers away from her home. Today, this month, but forever, we ought to remember and honor the life and legacy of Salaria Kea.

Sources

• https://alba-valb.org/volunteers/salaria-kea/
• https://alba-valb.org/resource/salaria-kea-a-negro-nurse-in-republican-spain/   
• https://albavolunteer.org/2022/02/salaria-kea-in-the-archive/
• https://albavolunteer.org/2011/12/salaria-keas-spanish-memoirs/

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About the author

_{Dario is a student in American Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He has previously completed a bachelor in History at the University of Zaragoza and bachelor in Communication at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. During his bachelor years, he also had the chance to study abroad in countries such as the U.S., Italy or Romania, which have made him specially interested in transnational movements and perspectives. He is currently writing a dissertation on the unpublished autobiography of Vaughn Love, one of the African Americans who fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. In his free time, Dario is also a member of the Young Minds Network of the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam.}

_{For more information about the Young Adams Institute, check out https://www.john-adams.nl/.}