BLACK, FEMALE AND AS MAD AS HELL

Salaria Kea was Black, female and as mad as hell. She grew up with the double burden of race and gender in Depression-era America, a country that celebrated democracy abroad while practising segregation at home. She suffered daily humiliations at Harlem Hospital in New York, where she trained and worked as a nurse in the 1930s, but she carried within her a steel defiance that would take her far beyond Harlem’s streets and into the battlefields of Spain.

Harlem Hospital, 1933

One day, when Salaria was sixteen and still a student nurse, she and some friends were eating lunch in the hospital canteen. Three white doctors entered the room. One of them demanded that the black girls give up their table. It was 1933, three decades before Martin Luther King would march on Washington. Black nurses were used to being second best, at the back of the bus, the last in the queue. Her friends scurried off to the far corner.

Salaria did not. Later, she would recall feeling “as mad as hell.” She walked back to the sunny window spot where the doctors were eating, grabbed the edge of the tablecloth, and yanked it hard. Plates shattered. Food spilled across the floor. Gasps filled the dining room. No one had ever done anything like this before.

Her teenage rebellion could easily have ended her career — dismissal, disgrace, or worse. Instead, it caught the imagination of the staff. Other nurses , including her white colleagues, rallied to her protest. A month later, the mayor ordered the end of discriminatory practices in the hospital dining room. It was a small victory, but it showed that rage could ripple outward and change things.

Roots of Defiance

Salaria was born in 1917 in Georgia, one of four children. Her father, an orderly in the state asylum, was murdered by a patient — a loss that haunted her life. She grew up in Akron, Ohio, and dreamed of becoming a nurse, though black girls were barred from nursing schools in the state. Harlem, with its hospitals, libraries, and the promise of education, became her path.

She worked hard at her studies and spent every free moment in the library. Her proudest possession was her library card. In 1934 she passed her exams and began working on the tuberculosis ward at Sea View Hospital. Harlem in those years was a place of jazz and speakeasies, but also of political ferment. Black intellectuals, communists and trade unionists rubbed shoulders in cafés and street-corner meetings.

Mussolini on the Newsreel

In October 1935, Salaria went to the picture house in Harlem. The newsreel changed her life. On screen was Benito Mussolini, Italy’s dictator, strutting like a giant pigeon in his black uniform, chin raised, saluting the crowds with their arms raised in the fascist salute. To Salaria, he looked just like the white doctor who had ordered her away from the canteen table.

When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia — the last independent African kingdom, a symbol of pride across the black diaspora — outrage swept through Harlem. Demonstrations filled the streets. The Abyssinian Baptist Church raised funds. Musicians played benefit concerts. Salaria went to the embassy. She wanted to go, to fight, to nurse, but Ethiopia had no way of receiving foreign volunteers. So she did what she could: she organised a committee of nurses and raised money for medical supplies.

Spain, 1937

The following year, fascism struck its first major blow in Europe. In July 1936, General Francisco Franco led a military uprising against Spain’s elected Republican government. A call went out for international volunteers to defend the Republic. Thousands answered, forming the International Brigades: workers, students, writers and dreamers from more than fifty countries. Among them were many African Americans, who saw in Spain a chance to fight fascism abroad and racism at home.

On 27 March 1937, Salaria sailed from New York. She was twenty, the only black nurse in a unit of twelve. On board were a hundred recruits — black, white, Hispanic — led by Captain Oliver Law, a tall Texan, former soldier, and union activist who would become the first black officer to command white troops in U.S. history. His very presence was revolutionary.

In Spain, Salaria learned that racism and fascism were intertwined. The enemy wasn’t only Franco’s Nationalists, backed by Hitler and Mussolini, but also the bigotry that stalked even the ranks of volunteers. Still, she persevered. She set up a field hospital in Villa Paz.

Mad as Hell

It was there that she met John Patrick O’Reilly, an Irish ambulance driver with blue eyes and a sharp wit. They fell in love, quickly and intensely. They married, then parted almost at once — she was sent to a hospital in Barcelona while he remained on the front.

 

The Fight Continues

Her work was brutal. Wounded soldiers poured in daily. Supplies were scarce. Once, during a bombing raid by the German Condor Legion — the same squadron that obliterated Guernica — Salaria was gravely injured. She spent weeks recovering, then returned to her duties until her health broke. In May 1938, she sailed back to the United States.

Back home, she threw herself into activism. She toured the country raising funds for the International Brigades. She published a pamphlet, A Negro Nurse in Republican Spain, a first-hand testimony of what it meant to nurse on the front lines of the doomed Republic. Asked by a reporter if she was a communist, she shrugged: “That’s only for white people. Like the Mafia.”

She fought to bring John Patrick O’Reilly to America, despite the barriers of immigration and race. Eventually he joined her. Both served in World War II — she in the Army Nurses Corps, he as a soldier. Afterward, they settled in New York, where segregation still marked the hospitals. Salaria continued her struggle, campaigning relentlessly for integration.

An Interracial Marriage in America

Life was not easy. As an interracial couple in mid-century America, they faced threats, insults, and violence. Once their house was firebombed by white supremacists. Yet they stayed together, supporting every cause they believed in — civil rights, peace, workers’ rights. They faced hatred with courage and answered prejudice with persistence.

Legacy

Salaria Kea O’Reilly died in 1990 in Akron, aged seventy-three. Few Black women born in Georgia in 1917 could have imagined such a life — Harlem, Spain, love, marches, firebombs, and endless battles for dignity. Asked in later years about her happiest time, she replied without hesitation: Spain, when people from all over the world came to fight for the Republic. “The volunteers saw people for what they were, not for their rank, their position, or the colour of their skin.”

She was black. She was female. And she was as mad as hell — and because of that fury, she helped change the world around her.

                                                                                               oOo

You may enjoy my novel We Shall Pass – 

‘Young idealistic British volunteers to the Spanish Civil War find themselves in a Guernica-like nightmare, an ever-rising body-count. Add a love triangle stretched across the extremes of the English 1930s class system and you have something very powerful.’ PETER YORK

WE SHALL PASS is available from indy publisher Luath Press – click HERE.

All the Amazons – click HERE.

Waterstones.

And all good bookshops.