She learned to read in secret—because freedom was illegal.Then she spent her life making sure no one could take knowledge away again.Susie King Taylor was born into slavery in Georgia in 1848, in a world where teaching an enslaved person to read could cost someone their life. Literacy was considered dangerous. Knowledge was contraband.Her grandmother understood the risk—and took it anyway.She found secret schools. Hidden rooms. Quiet corners where Black women taught children by whisper and candlelight. There, young Susie learned to read and write, carrying words like stolen fire—knowing they could change everything.Many of the stories we share, especially Black history, were ignored or erased for generations.When the Civil War broke open the South and Union forces reached the coast of South Carolina, fourteen-year-old Susie made a choice that defined her life.She fled to freedom.And almost immediately, she began to teach.Susie opened what is believed to be the first school for formerly enslaved Black people to operate openly in Georgia. By day, she taught children. By night, adults—men and women exhausted from labor but starving for learning. Education had been denied to them their entire lives. She gave it back.At just fourteen, she married Sergeant Edward King of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, one of the first officially recognized Black regiments in the Union Army. She followed her husband into war—not as an observer, but as a lifeline.Officially, she was listed as a laundress.In reality, she was a battlefield nurse.For more than four years, Susie King Taylor tended to wounded and dying soldiers—without pay, without rank, without recognition. She cleaned blood-soaked uniforms. She treated infections. She sat with men as they took their final breaths. She taught soldiers to read by firelight. And when necessary, she learned to load and fire a musket herself.She worked alongside Clara Barton in makeshift hospitals where medicine was scarce and death was constant. She witnessed bullets, disease, neglect—and racism. Black soldiers fought for a country that relied on their bodies while denying their humanity. Promises were broken. Contributions erased.Susie saw it all. And she remembered.After the war, she returned to Georgia during Reconstruction and opened schools for Black communities once again. She taught in the face of poverty, violence, and white supremacist terror—building educational foundations as the nation abandoned its commitment to Black freedom.Then, in 1902, at the age of fifty-four, she did something no other Black woman had done.She told the truth in her own words.Susie King Taylor published Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, becoming the only Black woman to publish a firsthand account of Civil War service. Her memoir was not romantic. It was precise. Clear. Unflinching. It preserved the courage and suffering of Black soldiers exactly as history tried to erase them.For decades, her book was ignored.Her name was left off her own grave marker.But her voice refused to disappear.Today, historians recognize what she always knew: literacy is liberation. Memory is resistance. And some stories—no matter how hard the world tries to silence them—will be heard.Susie King Taylor didn’t just survive history.She wrote it—line by line, lesson by lesson—so we would never forget.