In a small cove of Madison County, a modest wood-frame building served as a cornerstone of education for generations of Black students. Sarah Roland Weston Hart was one of them.
“Our day began with prayer,” she recalls of her time at the Mars Hill Anderson Rosenwald School (MHARS) in the 1940s. “Then we would close the sliding doors. Grades first through fourth were in one room and fifth through eighth in the other.”
Hart still remembers those school days: walking home for lunch, playing games like dodgeball and preparing for annual events such as the annual May Day celebration…