People, Locations, Episodes

Susan M. Steward, Teacher, and Doctor born

Susan M. Steward

*This date celebrates the birth of Susan McKinney Steward, a Black physician, in 1847.

Born Susan Maria Smith in Brooklyn, she trained and played the organ as a child.  Her early training qualified her for teaching positions, and she taught school in Washington, D.C., and New York City, using the proceeds of her New York teaching to pay tuition for medical school.  McKinney-Steward began medical study at the New York Medical College for Women in 1867. She specialized in homeopathic medicine and, after three years, graduated as class valedictorian.

After receiving her degree, she achieved wealth and a local reputation as a successful Brooklyn physician with a diverse clientele. McKinney-Steward excelled, especially in pediatric care and the treatment of childhood diseases. Outside her medical practice, she advocated for social reform, advocating female suffrage and temperance.  Until the early 1890s, she remained the local African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church organist, where she regularly worshiped.  Both of McKinney-Steward’s husbands were ministers.

She married South Carolina minister William G. McKinney in 1871 until he died in 1894.  In 1896, McKinney-Steward married U.S. Army chaplain Theophilus Gould Steward. She moved with him to army bases in Montana, Nebraska, and Texas.  By 1906, husband and wife had found positions at the AME’s Wilberforce University in Ohio, McKinney-Steward, as college physicians.  In 1911, McKinney-Steward joined luminaries, including W. E. B. Du Bois at a Universal Race Congress in London, where she delivered a paper on "Colored American Women." Susan M. Stewart, one of America's first Black women to earn a medical degree, the first in New York State, died on March 17, 1918, at Wilberforce University.

She is buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York, not far from the grave of composer James Weldon Johnson.

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