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 1st 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:
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.
The Vietnam War saw the highest proportion of
African Americans to ever to serve in an American war. During the height of the
U.S. involvement, 1965-69, African Americans, who formed 11 percent of the
American population, made up 12.6 percent of the soldiers in Vietnam. The majority of these were in the infantry, and although
authorities differ on the figures, the percentage of African American combat
fatalities in that period was a staggering 14.9 percent, a proportion that
subsequently declined. Volunteers and draftees included many frustrated blacks
whose impatience with the war and the delays in racial progress in America led
to race riots on a number of ships and military bases, beginning in 1968, and
the services' response in creating interracial councils and racial sensitivity
training. . . .
