Rebecca Stiles Taylor: Leading the Way

Rebecca Stiles Taylor was one of Savannah’s early civil rights leader. She was born in Savannah in 1879. Reconstruction had ended in 1877 when President Rutherford B. Hayes, in a bargain to attain the presidency, agreed to withdraw Federal troops from the South if Southern states granted him enough delegates to win his presidential election. They did. The world of Jim Crow was gaining strength by the time she was a teenager. Freed slaves were now under a new regime. But this would only stiffen her resolve to see change in the world of her fellow black citizens.  
Taylor went to school at the Beach Institute here in Savannah and college a Atlanta University. She later also attended Hampton Institute and Columbia University. She was a well-educated woman. While in Savannah she started writing for a local newspaper. It was here her voice was first heard on racial issues and civil rights. She was the first woman to become a Probation Officer in Savannah. She wrote a letter to southerner and President Woodrow Wilson asking him to address lynching in the South. Remarkably, he soon after made a strong condemnation of lynching in the South.
Her journalism skills were quickly recognized and the legendary Chicago Defender hired her as journalist. She would be one of the few women journalists for the paper. She would work there from 1937-1953. Her writings soon put her on a national stage as a voice against racial segregation and for civil rights. She wrote a weekly column, “Activities of Women’s National Organizations”, during the war time in order to keep the readers up to date about women’s organizations across the country. This column helped her to organize the National Association of Colored Women. She led the Savannah Chapter of the National Association of Colored Women’s Club, which provided the means to open a nursing home, a home for girls, and two free health clinics. In 1917 she founded the Toussaint L’Ouverture Branch of the American Red Cross.
She joined hand in hand with Mary McLeod Bethune to organize the entire Southeastern Region of the National Association of Colored Women’s Club in 1919, assuming the position of corresponding secretary and president of the Association's Georgia State Federation. She was convinced of the power of women to better the lives of everyone. She wrote:
‘It is the duty of the Negro woman to join hands with the women of the world ... to bring about a better order of things. The white woman has only two battle fronts-rousing her women and educating her men. The Negro woman has a harder fight to arouse her women, a harder fight to inject manhood into her men while she educates them, and the hardest of all fights to educate her government and the entire world to see her as a HUMAN BEING deserving of the rights and privileges accorded her under the constitution of the government.’
 She died in 1958. She lived long enough to see Rosa Parks in 1955 refuse to sit in the back of the bus, an act that started the Civil Rights Movement. She probably smiled to herself at the time, ladies now that is what I’m talking about. Taylor was inducted into the Georgia Women of Achievement in 2014.
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