George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver was born around 1864 on the Moses Carver farm near Diamond Grove, Missouri. His mother, Mary, had been enslaved by Moses Carver. His father was a man on a neighboring farm, killed in an accident before his son was born. The exact date of his birth was never recorded, a condition Carver shared with most children born to enslaved mothers in the final years of the war.

When he was an infant, a band of Confederate night riders crossed the border from Arkansas, kidnapped him and his mother, and rode off to sell them in Kentucky. Moses Carver hired a scout named John Bentley to find them. Bentley recovered the baby in exchange for a racehorse. Mary was never recovered. The boy, sickly and small, grew up in the Carvers' cabin, raised by Moses and Susan Carver and assigned the light chores his health allowed. He learned the woods first: which plants healed, which killed, which bloomed when. Neighbors called him "the plant doctor."

He wanted school. The Diamond Grove school would not admit a Black child. So at about twelve he walked ten miles to Neosho, Missouri and enrolled at the Lincoln School for Colored Children. He lived with a woman named Mariah Watkins, who told him: "You must learn all you can, then go back out into the world and give your learning back to the people." He carried that sentence for the rest of his life.

He moved from town to town through his teens and twenties, working as a cook, a laundryman, a farmhand. He applied by mail to Highland College in Kansas and was accepted. When he arrived in person, the college discovered he was Black and refused to enroll him. He homesteaded a quarter-section in Ness County for several years, then began to paint in oils, which carried him into art classes at Simpson College in Iowa. His art teacher there, Etta Budd, recognized his eye for botanical detail and told him he would do more good in science than in painting. She sent him to Iowa State Agricultural College in Ames. He was the first Black student in the school's history.

He earned his BS in 1894 and an MS in 1896, writing his thesis on plant pathology and mycology. Iowa State kept him on as its first Black faculty member. His early resistance from some white colleagues eased only as they watched his research in hybridization and fungal crop disease produce results other assistants could not match. He might have stayed at Iowa State for life. In the spring of 1896, a letter arrived from Alabama.

The letter was from Booker T. Washington, principal of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. It read, in part: "I cannot offer you money, position, or fame. The first two you have. The last, from the place you now occupy, you will no doubt achieve. These things I now ask you to give up. I offer you in their place work, hard, hard work, the task of bringing a people from degradation, poverty and waste to full manhood." Carver accepted and arrived at Tuskegee in October 1896. He stayed 47 years.

Tuskegee had no laboratory. Carver built one out of scavenged bottles, jars, fruit crates, and wire salvaged from the trash heap behind the campus. He called it "God's little workshop." He taught chemistry, agriculture, botany, and the practical repair of worn-out land. He walked the red Alabama clay of Macon County and watched what a century of cotton had done to it. Soil depleted of nitrogen produced smaller bolls each season. Tenant farmers, most of them descendants of the people enslaved on the same land, were trapped in a cycle of shrinking yields and rising debt.

Carver's solution was a rotation: plant peanuts, cowpeas, or sweet potatoes one season to return nitrogen to the soil, then plant cotton the next. The legumes fed the soil. The sweet potatoes fed the family. But farmers needed a market for the rotation crops, or they would refuse to plant them. Carver set out to create one. He ran peanuts through his lab and produced flour, milk, coffee substitute, ink, dye, soap, face cream, wood stain, insulation board, axle grease, shaving cream, and mock chicken. He published it all in Tuskegee bulletins, free to any farmer who wrote in. By the end of his career he had documented more than 300 uses for the peanut and more than 100 for the sweet potato.

In 1906 he designed the Jesup Agricultural Wagon, a movable school on wheels named for the New York financier who funded it. The wagon carried Carver and his students into the back country of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. They demonstrated rotation, canning, hog-feeding, and seed selection to farmers who had never set foot on a college campus. The wagon reached tens of thousands of families a year. The U.S. Department of Agriculture later copied the model into its cooperative extension service.

In January 1921 he testified before the House Ways and Means Committee in Washington on behalf of the United Peanut Associations of America, asking for a protective tariff on imported peanuts. He was allotted ten minutes. He stayed for more than an hour. He pulled product after product out of his sample case: peanut butter, peanut oil, peanut milk, peanut flour, a peanut-based cosmetic. The committee, nearly all of it southern and white, extended his time repeatedly. The tariff passed. Carver became a national figure.

The fame drew offers. Thomas Edison offered him a position at the Edison Laboratories in New Jersey at a reported salary of $100,000 a year, an enormous sum in the 1920s. Carver declined. Henry Ford became a late-career friend and funded a Carver laboratory at Tuskegee, convinced that peanut and soybean plastics could remake the automobile. Mahatma Gandhi corresponded with Carver on soil fertility and the nutrition of a rural population trying to feed itself. Carver filed only three U.S. patents in his life, all on cosmetic applications, and abandoned even those. He said God had given him the discoveries for free and he would not sell them.

He died at Tuskegee on January 5, 1943, after a fall down a flight of stairs. His estate of $33,000 went to the George Washington Carver Foundation at Tuskegee, which he had established in 1940 to continue the research after him. President Franklin Roosevelt signed legislation six months later creating the George Washington Carver National Monument in Diamond, Missouri, on the ground where he was born. It was the first national monument in U.S. history established to honor a Black American, and the first for a person who had never held the presidency.