Salaria Kea was a prominent African American figure of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades both during and after the Spanish Civil War. The only Black woman to serve in the Brigade nursing unit in Spain, Kea countered misogynist racism both in Jim Crow U.S. and abroad. Her passion for politics and justice led her to sympathize with the plight of the Ethiopians suffering the Italian invasion in 1935 and eventually led her to travel to Spain as part of the Lincoln Brigade. Kea’s position as a double minority (female and Black) within the military structure of the Brigades was later exacerbated while living in Ohio during the 1950s as part of an interracial marriage. Her experience has been appropriated, debated, archived, and rejected as invention. This paper asks the question: is it possible to understand the truth of an individual experience through archival material? Is it possible to arrive at an historical “truth” through individual experience when that experience is doubly marginalized, rewritten, and encoded?
