2019 Susie King Taylor

MAMI WATA RISING 

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE​

Born on  Isle-of-Wight, Georgia on August 6, 1848, Susie (Baker) King Taylor was a young enslaved Geechee girlchild when she learned to read and write by her mistress Fredericka and at secret "bucket" schools in Savannah. On the evening of April 13, 1862, she resisted plantation slavery and escaped down Jones Creek and Grest River into the St. Catherine's Sound where she was rescued by the Union Navy. It is in this moment that she made a profound impact on history. During the Civil War, she defied two hundred years of slave laws and appropriated freedom. She married a non-commissioned black officer of the first group of black men to serve in the 1st South Carolina Volunteers of African Descent/33rd United States Colored Troops and she eventually enlisted in the regiment. Using the education she acquired in stealth, she was asked to openly  teach hundreds of other runaways/contrabands of war including black men who would become USCT soldiers and thereby becoming the first federally funded teacher in the state of Georgia.

The 2018 Susie King Taylor MAMI WATA RISING INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE™ wasthe first conference ever in the world that advances the scholarship, memory, and honor of American Civil War heroine of freedom and early social justice activist Susie King Taylor.

On August 9-11, 2019, the Susie King Taylor Women's Institute & Ecology Center will commemorate her 171th birthday and the 157th anniversary of Susie King Taylor’s resistance and escape from slavery on the Grest Island Plantation. The conference will be held in her hometown and it will trace her Footsteps to Freedom. For more information about the Mami Wata Rising Conference, call 404-587-3182.