By Eric Curl
July 7, 2024 – The city of Savannah will not have to rename a downtown square after John C. Calhoun, a former U.S. vice president and staunch supporter of slavery from South Carolina.
Taylor Square, recently named for Susie King Taylor, a former enslaved educator and nurse, will remain in place at Abercorn and Wayne streets.
Last week, Chatham County Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley granted the city’s motion for summary judgement to dismiss a lawsuit filed last July by Savannah resident David tootle, who claimed the renaming of the square violated state law.
The judge’s order stated that Tootle was not harmed by the renaming and had no standing to file the complaint. In addition, the city’s removal of Calhoun’s name from the square and subsequent renaming was not prohibited by the Georgia code that regulates monuments, Walmsley ruled.
Walmsley also granted a motion to intervene by the Susie King Taylor Center for Jubilee, an origination led by Patt Gunn that petitioned for the name change. The organization asserted with its motion an interest in the renaming and claimed that Tootle’s inunction would violate the group’s right to free speech and due process.
The rulings come after the Savannah City Council approved a resolution to remove the name in November 2022. An application process was then initiated for the public to submit potential square names. After the city held several public meetings regarding the naming of the square, the city council on August 24, 2023 approved the name “Taylor Square” and held a dedication ceremony in February celebrating what is also the first of Savannah’s 22 squares to be named after a woman, as reported by The Current.
About Susie King Taylor
Susie Baker King Taylor (August 6, 1848 – October 6, 1912) achieved many firsts in a lifetime spent overcoming adversity and helping elevate others out of slavery. Born into slavery in Liberty County, Ga., she moved to Savannah at age seven to live with her grandmother. Though illegal, she attended two secret schools taught by Black women. In April 1862, she fled to Union occupied St. Simons Island, where she established a school and became the first Black teacher openly teaching African Americans in Georgia. Her students included 40 children and “a number of adults who came to me nights, all of them so eager to learn to read, to read above anything else.”
Married in 1862 to Edward King, a Black Union officer, she moved with his regiment for the duration of the Civil War, serving as a nurse, laundress, and teacher. Postwar, she opened a private school for freedmen’s children in Savannah. Widowed and working as a domestic servant by the 1870s, she moved to Boston, Mass., where she married Russell Taylor. There she became heavily involved with the Women’s Relief Corps, a national organization for female Civil War veterans. As the author of Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers (1902), she was the only African American woman to publish a memoir of her wartime experiences.
Source: City of Savannah
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