Susan McKinney Stewart

Who was Susan McKinney Stewart?

Susan Maria McKinney Steward was an American physician and author. She was the third African-American woman to earn a medical degree, and the first in New York state.

She was born as Susan Maria Smith to Anne and Sylvanus Smith, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Her sister Sarah J. Garnet was the first African-American female school principal in the New York City public school system.

She played the organ at Siloam Presbyterian Church and the Bridge Street African Methodist Episcopal Church.

She taught school in Washington, D.C., and New York City then attended medical school at the New York Medical College for Women starting in 1867 and graduated as valedictorian in 1869.

In 1871 she was married to Reverend William G. McKinney from South Carolina. They had two children and he died in 1894. In 1896 she remarried to United States Army Buffalo Soldier and chaplain Theophilus Gould Steward. She moved with him to Montana, Nebraska and Texas.

By 1906 both found positions at the AME's Wilberforce University in Ohio, where she worked as college physician.

In 1911 she attended the Universal Race Congress in London, where she delivered a paper entitled Colored American Women.