Sarah Rector was born on March 3, 1902, in a rural area that is today part of Muskogee County, Oklahoma.
In 1904 the local post office and the land surrounding it became the all-black town of Taft. Residents named the tiny municipality for William Howard Taft who was at that time the United States secretary of war and who would – in 1909 – become president.
The U.S. government had allotted the settlement to former slaves of the Muscogee [sic] or Creek Indians. This was part of the Reconstruction program that the government implemented between 1865 and 1877 to help ex-slaves transition to freed...
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