Sarah (Hunt) Rogers

Hunt provided her photograph for a family tree illustration in a 1932 ethnographic study.

Caroline Bond Day, “A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States,” Harvard University.

Quick Facts

Place of Birth:

Hancock County, GA

Date of Birth:

1869

Place of Death:

Los Angeles, CA

Date of Death:

1955

Place of Burial:

Cremated

“There are some students here who work in the day and go to school at night. They come mostly from the farming districts of this State. They are not able to go to day school, and although they work hard all day and are tired and sleepy when night comes, they are so anxious to learn that they work faithfully and hard with their lessons for about two hours every night. I am one of the night school teachers. In this way I pay my board bills.”
- Sarah L. Hunt to Alice Longfellow, 31 May 1887

Sarah Hunt was the sixth of nine children born to Mariah Hunt, a free woman with Black, Creek, and white ancestry, and Henry A. Hunt, a white veteran of the Confederate army. She grew up in Hancock County, Georgia, in the midst of Reconstruction, in a small, closely connected, middle-class Black community.

Hunt’s older sister, Adella (Hunt) Logan, was one of the first female teachers at Tuskegee Institute. After three years at Atlanta University, Sarah followed her sister to Tuskegee, where she taught in the night school while studying. After graduation, she continued to teach Reading, English, and Geography in the Academic Department and Fourth Grade in the Children’s House. While at Tuskegee, she met and apparently had a relationship with George Washington Carver.

In 1900, the US census records her living in the household of her sister and brother-in-law, the Treasurer of Tuskegee Institute, next door to Booker and Margaret Washington. After Adella Logan’s death in 1915, Sarah Hunt left teaching to help raise her nieces and nephews.

Later in life, Hunt married her cousin, Felix Rogers, and moved to Los Angeles, California.

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Alexander, Adele Logan. Ambiguous Lives, Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789-1879. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1991.

Day, Caroline Bond. “A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States,” Harvard African Studies, Vol. 10. Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Harvard, 1932.