Photograph of John P. O’Reilly and Salaria Kea

In December 1937, a report on a wedding between a man from Tipperary, Ireland and a woman raised in Akron, Ohio appeared in the Baltimore Afro-American: 

‘Miss Salaria Kee of Harlem, charming nurse at one of the American hospitals in Spain, was married on October 2 to John Joseph O’Reilly, ambulance driver from Thurles, County Tipperary, Ireland. Her husband was one of the first international volunteers to come to fight on the loyalist side in Spain, and was for several months in the trenches.’ 

The report continued with an account of the marriage celebration, with a ceremony presided over by an ‘old judge from Salices’ sporting a large handlebar moustache and music supplied by a three-piece band that ‘dished out pretty good swing.’  

Why would an African American newspaper take an interest in an Irish man’s marriage? The answer to this questions tells us a great deal about the transnational solidarity networks that Irish volunteers in the international brigades found themselves enmeshed within. 

The author of the report was Langston Hughes, well-known pro-Republican poet and author. The photograph of the happy couple that we feature here survived through its inclusion in Hughes’ own archive at the Beinecke Library, Yale University.  

For reporters like Hughes, this marriage between the African-American nurse Salaria Kea and the Thurles-born volunteer John O’Reilly symbolised the very internationalism they believed they were fighting for, one that superseded racial dividing lines.   

Kea, who features elsewhere in our Virtual Museum, was born in Millidgeville, Georgia in 1911 and raised in Ohio. She was the only African American nurse who served with the American Medical Bureau.  

Both survived their service with Republican forces and returned to the United States, where they settled as a couple, initially in New York where John worked for the Transit Authority, before retiring to Akron Ohio to be near Salaria’s family.  

In 1975, Bob August, a reporter for the Cleveland Magazine, profiled the couple in their older years. He found ‘little in the modest Akron apartment’ which the couple shared to suggest the roles they played in the Spanish Civil War. ‘Only the photograph – and a wall-hanging from Spain’ August continued ‘recall their youthful adventure with the International Brigade’.