Biography

Sarah Jett was an early Black Saint baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Kentucky. Sarah’s father, George Jett, converted first in 1898, and then Sarah and her sister Katie received baptism eleven years later, on the same day as their stepmother, Alwilda. Sarah grew up in the segregated South but would live to see significant changes in the nation and in her church before she passed away at age 96.

Sarah Jett was born on 9 October 1898 to George Jett and Susan Jackson in Jackson, Kentucky, a rural county in the eastern part of the state known for its rich farmland and Appalachian topography.^[1] Sarah had one older sister, Katie, who was born a few years earlier.^[2] They were both young girls when their father and mother divorced sometime after 1900. In 1905, George married Alwilda Jackson who became Sarah and Katie’s stepmother and raised them to adulthood.^[3] No doubt such a family disruption proved difficult for Sarah and her sister, especially because it meant having to adjust to another mother figure in the home.

Two years before Sarah was born, the United States Supreme Court put its stamp of approval on racial segregation in its now infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Sarah thus grew up in an era of racial division dominated by a reassertion of white supremacy. There was some contention between white and Black people within the farming communities of Kentucky, especially as Black workers advocated for better pay. As one historian of Kentucky described it, “violence often erupted when black workers attempted to quit their jobs to protest the repeated abuses of white farmers.”^[4] Black people ultimately wanted to own their own land but too often their efforts were met with violence. In response, some Black people shifted to industrial work, a pattern that matches what we know about the home in which Sarah grew up.^[5] Her father George left farming and became a railroad laborer when Sarah was an early adolescent.^[6]

Despite the economic and social challenges that segregation presented, missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints preached a message of Christian redemption to anyone who would listen, including Black people in eastern Kentucky. Sarah’s parents both embraced the Latter-day Saint gospel near the time of Sarah’s birth.^[7]Both Katie and Sarah were later given baby blessings in their Latter-day Saint congregation on the same day in March 1899, when Sarah was five months old.^[8]

Sarah’s father, George, must have continued to nourish the family’s new faith, even through his divorce and remarriage. In fact, his new wife Alwilda joined Sarah and Katie in receiving baptism into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on the same day in September, 1909, a month shy of Sarah’s eleventh birthday. Robert E. Bunker, a missionary from St. Thomas, Nevada, baptized Sarah and confirmed her on the same day.^[9] There is no indication what may have attracted Sarah to the Latter-day Saint message, but her dad’s influence was no doubt crucial to her conversion.

Four years later, in the summer of 1913, when Sarah was just fourteen years old, she married a Black man named Dan Lewis who was born in Texas and was twenty-two years old at the time. Like Sarah’s father, Lewis worked in the railroad industry. Sarah indicated that she was sixteen when she married Lewis, a fabrication that may have helped her avoid the need for parental consent.^[10]

In any case, the marriage did not last. It is unclear if Sarah divorced Lewis or if he passed away, but over a decade later she married again. This time Sarah married a man named Robert Curt around 1928—a union that would endure for over sixty years.^[11] The young couple lived in Estill County, just north of Jackson County where Sarah had grown up. Robert worked as a laborer for the railroad, up until 1950.^[12]

Sarah must have been the glue that held her family together given that her father and stepmother eventually moved to be near her in Estill County. By 1940 her biological mother, Susan, moved there too.^[13]

 The nature and extent of Sarah’s religious life as an adult is unclear. Her second husband, Robert, was not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Even still, Sarah and Robert appear in a 1950 Latter-day Saint census, an indication of an ongoing relationship with the faith of her youth at least through that year. Unfortunately, the church census does not list a ward or branch, but counts Sarah as a member in the East Central States Mission.^[14] It is also unclear if Sarah and Robert had any children together but they remained married for over sixty years before Robert died in 1993. He was buried in Taylor Mill, Kenton County, Kentucky.^[15]

Late in life Sarah moved to Columbus, Ohio, where she passed away on 20 July 1995, two years after Robert died.^[16] Her cause of death is unknown, but Sarah was 96 years old at her passing. Her life had spanned nearly a century; she had witnessed significant changes take place over that time, not only in Kentucky but across the nation. The segregation and Jim Crow laws of her youth eventually gave way to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, which in turn brought the passage of civil rights and voting rights legislation. If she continued to practice the faith of her youth, she would have also lived to witness the revelation, in June 1978, that ended nearly 130 years of segregated priesthood and temples and restored the church that she had embraced at age ten to its universal roots.

By Serena Juhasz

With research assistance from Karlee Twiner

[1] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, Kentucky (State), CR 375 8, box 3337, folder 2, image 14, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah; U.S., Social Security Death Index, 1935-2014, entry for Sarah Curt, 20 July 1995; George C. Wright, A History of Blacks in Kentucky: In Pursuit of Equality, 1890-1980, vol 2. (Frankfurt: Kentucky Historical Society, 1992).

[2] United States, 1900 Census, Kentucky, Breathitt County, Jackson; Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, Kelly-Toponce Ward, CR 375 8, box 3337, folder 2, image 14, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[3] Kentucky, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1783-1965, Breathitt County, George Jett and Alwilda Jackson, 15 June 1905; United States, 1910 Census, Kentucky, Breathitt County, Jackson.

[4] Wright, A History of Blacks in Kentucky, Volume 2, 3.

[5] Joe William Trotter, Jr., Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 47.

[6] United States, 1910 Census, Kentucky, Breathitt County, Jackson.

[7] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, Kentucky (State), CR 375 8, box 3337, folder 2, image 132, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[8] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, Kentucky (State), CR 375 8, box 3337, folder 2, image 14, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[9] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, -Kentucky (State), CR 375 8, box 3338, folder 1, image 192, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[10] Kentucky, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1783-1965, Jackson, Breathitt County, Kentucky, Sarah Jett and Dan Lewis, 27 August 1913.

[11] United States, 1930 Census, Kentucky, Estill County, Irvine; Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, Kentucky (State), CR 375 8, box 3338, folder 1, image 192, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[12] United States, 1930 Census, Kentucky, Estill County, Irvine; United States, 1950 Census, Kentucky, Estill County, Irvine.

[13] United States, 1930 Census, Kentucky, Estill County, Irvine; United States, 1940 Census, Kentucky, Estill County, Irvine; United States, 1950 Census, Kentucky, Estill County, Irvine; “Curt,” Presiding Bishopric mission census 1950, CR 4 314, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[14] “Curt,” Presiding Bishopric mission census 1950, CR 4 314, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[15] Robert Curt, Findagrave.com.

[16] U.S., Social Security Death Index, 1935-2014, entry for Sarah Curt, 20 July 1995; Ohio Death Index, 1908-1932, 1938-1944, and 1958-2007, entry for Sarah Curt, 20 July 1995; U.S., Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007, entry for Sarah Curt, 20 July 1995.

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