Revisiting Salaria Kea’s Story

During the interwar period, Salaria Kea became one of the most famous Black American antifascist women of the early 20th century by risking her life to fight fascism and eradicate oppression abroad as a volunteer nurse during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Kea’s story of aiding and caring for wounded soldiers in Spain instead of attending to patients in her home country drew global attention to the racial apartheid African Americans experienced in Jim Crow America. During the 1930s, Black Americans viewed the global fight against fascism–particularly racial discrimination–as parallel to their own struggle against domestic oppression in the United States, which eventually led to the Double V Campaign African American soldiers during World War II (1941-1945) would undertake to establish freedom and democracy for all people at home and abroad. In a 1938 propaganda pamphlet entitled “A Negro Nurse in Republican Spain,”  Kea not only highlighted the personal discrimination she faced while working in Harlem during the 1930s, but also described Republican Spain as a more progressive and equal society than the United States where she could work “free of racial discrimination.” The Abraham Lincoln Brigade has long been touted as an inclusive, integrated group of volunteers who fought against fascism alongside Black soldiers in the name of all working-class people regardless of race.  Kea’s pamphlet highlights this progressive nature and lends hand to its image. Interestingly, upon revisiting the story of Salaria Kea in the late 20^th century, (white) researchers such as Walter Lear and Frances Patai have contested, discounted, and even declared Kea’s story inaccurate, as scholar Carmen Cañete Quesada describes in her chapter “Salaria Kea and the Spanish Civil War: Memoirs of a Negro Nurse in Republican Spain.”¹ However, recent scholars who have been evaluating Kea’s narrative have come to the conclusion that although her account contains some inaccuracies, it is a useful archival document that offers an eyewitness account of the Spanish Civil War and insight into the long-enduring Black Struggle for Civil Rights in America.

In July 1936, civil war broke out in Spain when a group of conservative military generals enacted a surprise rebellion on the democratically elected liberal government. When fascist leaders like Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Germany’s Adolf Hitler offered rebel leader Francisco Franco their support for the coup, the Communist International, known as the International Brigades, organized over 35,000 international volunteer soldiers and medical workers from over four dozen different countries, including the United States, to protect and aid the Spanish government during the civil war. Every volunteer was not a Communist and they certainly did not all speak the same language, but they worked and fought together in the spirit of comradeship and equality against a common enemy.

On March 27, 1937, Kea boarded a ship at the New York Harbor and left for Spain. In Spain, she worked at multiple hospitals and medical centers for the Republic, including the old royal hunting lodge, Villa Paz. Soon Kea’s photo appeared in newspapers such as The Chicago Defender and the New York Amsterdam News, wartime propaganda, and even films about the Spanish Civil War like “Heart of Spain” (1937). During her work as a nurse in Spain, Kea also met and married Irish Brigadier, John Patrick O’Reilly and spent a little over a year abroad before she returned home to New York due to an injury. Then Kea embarked on a successful ambulance tour across the United States to raise money in support of the Spanish Republic. Nevertheless, she achieved widespread acclaim for her humanitarian role during the war as the sole African American female volunteer nurse fighting against fascism in Spain.

By 1938, the Negro Committee to Aid Spain published and distributed Kea’s pamphlet “A Negro Nurse in Republican Spain.” The narrative explored Kea’s early life growing up in Akron, Ohio and later experiencing racism when she was denied enrollment at several nursing schools because of her race. Kea also detailed the volunteer work and antiracist activism she engaged in while she completed her training in nursing at Harlem Hospital. Regarding the Spanish Civil War, the pamphlet was filled with dramatic accounts of both chaos and survival, such as cows living in a former royal dwelling and Kea using wine to boil eggs for her nursing patients to ward off hunger and maintain their health. Nevertheless, Kea’s story was a tale of Republican Spain overcoming racial inequity and class-based differences at a time of great hardship that suggested Jim Crow America take notice and dismantle racial discrimination and oppression within its borders.

Kea’s pamphlet was originally written in the third person, but decades after its initial publication other versions of her story (this time written as a first-person account) were circulated. By the end of the twentieth century, some scholars discounted her memoir and even narratives written by other former volunteers because these academics believed the authors had included embellishments and falsities into the text to enhance their experiential accounts. One story that some scholars have alleged is untrue is Kea’s vignette, “While Passing Through,” in which she described a racist incident that happened between her and a white doctor on the ship to Spain when he refused to sit at the same table as her. This incident tarnished the image of Republican Spain as the land of equality filled with antiracist brotherly and sisterly comrades. Cañete Quesada even discovered in the Abraham Lincoln Brigades Archives a 1990 letter exchange between researcher Frances Patai and a Spanish Civil War veteran who warned her that such allegations “could endanger the honor of the military units” and denied that the incident between Kea and the doctor had ever taken place. The members of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion took pride in its reputation as the first racially integrated military (volunteer) unit in United States history. This “honor” was upheld throughout myth and legend to promote the Lincoln, and ultimately the anti-fascist cause of uniting all workers despite race and background against a common enemy. Though some volunteers claimed this incident never happened, at least one other nurse reported that she was a witness to the scene. Despite the allegations of false and embellished narratives, scholars like Cañete Quesada and Kathryn Everly have evaluated and published scholarship on Kea’s story for the value it holds as representation of the life of Black nurses in Spain. Cañete Quesada in particular suggests that scholars and everyday people can use the narrative “as a way of focusing attention on the exclusion, silence, and violence” in US society, while Everly argues that Kea’s story “reveals a different perspective of the silenced and forgotten Black experience in the U.S. and in Spain during the 1930s.” Nevertheless, Kea’s story should not be wholly discredited and quieted. To exclude her memoir is to silence the archive. Moreover, Kea’s participation in a transnational movement and her antifascist motives to demonstrate that racial equality is possible in a multiracial society have value in an American society that did (and often still does) cling to white supremacist narratives of exclusion while also maintaining racial hierarchy and oppression in a supposedly democratic nation.