Usually, when there is discussion of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the role of African-Americans who volunteered to battle against fascism is given little mention. And when they are cited, as a few books have recently done, there is nothing said about Black women volunteers. One such courageous freedom fighter was Salaria Kea, a nurse from Harlem who was associated with the community’s hospital.
Kea, who was born July 13, 1913, in Georgia, arrived in Spain April 7, 1938, and she was among 70 other African-American nurses who served with the Republican Medical Services, American Hospital in Villa Paz. She later wrote in her diary that she had no idea so many African-Americans were involved in the war. “The Negro men who fought for Loyalist Spain never tire of telling how they celebrated when they got news that the Second American Medical Unit included a Negro nurse. Their battalion had been in the trenches 120 days of continuous fighting. I am told that during the entire First World War, a fighting unit was never required to be under fire longer than this. Their clothing was shabby and worn. Many had so little to wear, they could not appear in public. I was so excited over going to Spain, I did not realize that many other Negroes had already recognized Spain’s fight for freedom and liberty as a part of our struggle, too. I didn’t know that almost a hundred young Negro men were already fighting Hitler’s and Mussolini’s forces there in Spain.”
When Kea was 6 months old, her father, employed in a sanitarium, was killed by a patient. Her mother took her and the three other children to Akron, Ohio. They were later left in the care of family friends when Kea’s mother returned to Georgia. Meanwhile, Kea’s three older brothers provided for her while she completed her education.
During the summer vacations, Kea often worked in a local doctor’s office, which introduced her to the medical practice and obviously influenced her toward nursing. But a career in nursing did not come without setbacks and obstacles, none more enduring than race. Three nursing schools denied her entry because she was a Black woman. One option she chose was to pursue an opportunity to participate in the Harlem Hospital Training School program. She graduated from the program in 1934.
Although she was fully employed at Harlem Hospital and Seaview Hospital, she still found time to help organize support for Ethiopia, which had been invaded by Italy. Incensed by the invasion, she sought to volunteer her services but by then Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie had closed the door to foreign volunteers. There was also time to exercise her political activism, becoming affiliated with a number of progressive groups, including the Communist Party, which she allegedly joined in 1935. According to one source, she denied being a party member. “I thought communism was for white people only, just like the mafia,” she told reporters.
A year later, she volunteered as a Red Cross nurse to assist victims of the floods that ravaged the Midwest. As with the nursing schools in Akron, she was denied this opportunity because of her race.
Unable to practice her occupation as she desired, Kea left for Spain in 1937, arriving there in 1938. Even among so-called progressives, there were moments of bigotry. “I sailed from New York with the second American Medical Unit,” she recalled in her diary. “I was the lone representative of the Negro race. The doctor in charge of the group refused to sit at the same table with me in the dining room and demanded to see the captain. The captain moved me to his table, where I remained throughout the voyage.”
In Spain, she was assigned to the American Hospital in Villa Paz, where she was instrumental in establishing the first field hospital. “The villa is set in a lavish garden,” she wrote in her diary. “The peasants attached to the estate, impoverished and illiterate, still lived in the same cramped, poorly lit quarters they had before. In a corner of the usual one-room hut, on top of a tile, they burned dried dung from the cattle. This was their only source of heat in rainy and cold weather. They had turned the villa itself over to the cattle.”
One of the patients under her care in the hospital was Pat O’Reilly, who was wounded while fighting as a member of a British International unit. They were married at the hospital and later returned to the U.S. in 1938. In her engagements with the people of Spain, Kea learned that their status and attitude were similar to Blacks in America.
“The Spanish peasants had been psychologically just as imprisoned, had accepted the belief that nothing could be done about their situation as had the Harlem nurses earlier accepted racial discrimination in their dining room,” she asserted. “Like the Harlem nurses, too, the peasants were now learning that something could be done about it. … There was nothing inviolable about the old prejudices … they could be changed and justice established.”
Several accounts of her life failed to denote that she was captured by the Nationalist Army and held prisoner for seven weeks before managing to escape. After returning to the hospital, she was later badly wounded by a bomb. Her injuries were severe and she was returned to the states.
Back in the states, Kea, having left her husband in Spain, joined a number of activists to bring attention to the war in Spain. Most of her speeches occurred in New York City before various organizations, including the NAACP. She also taught courses in practical nursing at several institutions.
A Carnegie Hall concert and tribute dinner for Kea included Cab Calloway, Count Basie and Fats Waller. Historian Mark Naison in his book “Communists in Harlem During the Depression,” mentions her once in his discussion of the tribute, although he spells her last name Kee, one used by several other authors.
During the final months of World War II, she served in the Army Nurse Corps, and her experiences in Spain were invaluable.
After the war, she and her husband lived for a while in New York City before moving to Akron. “Once back in the United States—and especially in Akron—she and O’Reilly experienced extensive racism in the form of personal threats and property damage: according to various interviews, at certain points they were afraid to leave the house together,” wrote Emily Robins Sharpe.
Salaria Kea O’Reilly died May 18, 1990. She was 76.