Background
She was born as Susan Maria Smith to Anne and Sylvanus Smith, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
She was born as Susan Maria Smith to Anne and Sylvanus Smith, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
She was the third African-American woman to earn a medical degree, and the first in New York state. Her sister Sarah J. Garnet was the first African-American female school principal in the New York City public school system. She taught school in Washington, District of Columbia, 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.
They then had another child.
In 1911 he attended the Universal Race Congress in London, where she delivered a paper entitled Colored American Women. He died at Wilberforce University. She was interred at Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New New York
Doctor Susan McKinney Secondary School of the Arts, Brooklyn
Susan Smith McKinney Steward Medical Society.