George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver (born 1861?, near Diamond Grove, Missouri, U.S.—died January 5, 1943, Tuskegee, Alabama) was a revolutionary American agricultural chemist, agronomist, and experimenter who was born into slavery and sought to uplift Black farmers through the development of new products derived from peanuts, sweet potatoes, and soybeans. His work helped transform the stagnant agricultural economy of the South after the American Civil War. For most of his career he taught and conducted research at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Carver was the son of an enslaved woman named Mary, who was owned by Moses Carver; his father was killed in an accident before he was born. Of his early life, Carver wrote, “I was born in Diamond Grove, Missouri, about the close of the great Civil War, in a little one-roomed log shanty, on the home of Mr. Moses Carver, a German by birth and the owner of my mother, my father being the property of Mr. Grant, who owned the adjoining plantation.” During the turbulence of the Civil War, the Carver farm was raided, and infant George and his mother were kidnapped and taken to Arkansas to be sold. Moses Carver was eventually able to track down young George but was unable to find Mary. Frail and sick, the orphaned child was returned to the Carver plantation and nursed back to health.

With the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, George was no longer enslaved. He remained with the Carvers until he was about 10 or 12 years old, when he left to acquire an education. He traveled 8 miles (13 km) to the county seat of Neosho, Missouri, where he found room and board with Mariah and Andrew Watkins, an African American couple. He briefly attended a school for Black children but quickly moved beyond the basic literacy offered by the schoolmaster, who himself had a limited education. Carver then spent some time wandering about, working with his hands and developing his keen interest in plants and animals. Both Susan Carver—the wife of his former owner—and Mariah Watkins had taught him about gardening and medicinal herbs, and he continued to grow his botanical knowledge. He also learned to draw, and later in life he devoted considerable time to painting flowers, plants, and landscapes.

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By both books—including Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book, which he learned nearly by heart—and experience, young George acquired a fragmentary education while doing whatever work came to hand in order to subsist. He supported himself by varied occupations that included general household worker, hotel cook, laundryman, farm laborer, and homesteader. In his late 20s he obtained a high-school education in Minneapolis, Kansas, while working as a farmhand. He applied and was accepted to Highland College in Kansas, but, when he appeared in person to register, the school refused to admit him because he was Black. Pained by that rejection, he continued to travel the country and eventually landed in Iowa, where he met the white Milhollands sometime in the late 1800s. The couple befriended him and urged Carver to enroll in nearby Simpson College in Indianola; he would later credit them for his continued pursuit of higher education. Carver studied piano and art at Simpson before transferring to Iowa State Agricultural College (later Iowa State University), where he received a bachelor’s degree in agricultural science in 1894 and a Master of Science degree in 1896.

Carver left Iowa for Alabama in the fall of 1896 to direct the newly organized department of agriculture at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, a school headed by noted African American educator Booker T. Washington. Given that Carver was the only African American in the United States with a graduate degree in agricultural science, Washington aggressively pursued him for the all-Black faculty of the school. In accepting the position, Carver wrote:

It has always been the one great ideal of my life to be of the greatest good to the greatest number of ‘my people’ possible and to this end I have been preparing myself these many years; feeling as I do that this line of education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom to our people.

Indeed, at Tuskegee, Washington sought to improve the lot of African Americans through education and the acquisition of useful skills rather than through political agitation, and he stressed conciliation and compromise. Carver complemented those aims in his desire to help Black farmers rise above sharecropping and saw economic development as a path for Black advancement in American society. Despite many offers elsewhere, Carver remained at Tuskegee for the rest of his life.

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After becoming the institute’s director of agricultural research in 1896, Carver devoted his time to research projects aimed at helping Southern agriculture, demonstrating ways in which farmers could improve their economic situation. He conducted experiments in soil management and crop production and directed an experimental farm. At this time, agriculture in the Deep South was in steep decline because the unremitting single-crop cultivation of cotton had left the soil of many fields exhausted and worthless, and erosion had then taken its toll on areas that could no longer sustain any plant cover. As a remedy, Carver urged Southern farmers to plant peanuts (Arachis hypogaea) and soybeans (Glycine max). As members of the legume family (Fabaceae), these plants could restore nitrogen to the soil while also providing the protein so badly needed in the diet of many Southerners.

Carver found that Alabama’s soils were particularly well suited to growing peanuts and sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas), but, when the state’s farmers began cultivating these crops instead of cotton, they found little demand for them on the market. In response to this problem, Carver set about enlarging the commercial possibilities of the peanut and sweet potato through a long and ingenious program of laboratory research. He ultimately developed 300 derivative products from peanuts—among them milk, flour, ink, dyes, plastics, wood stains, soap, linoleum, medicinal oils, and cosmetics—and 118 from sweet potatoes, including flour, vinegar, molasses, ink, a synthetic rubber, and postage stamp glue. In helping farmers, particularly Black sharecroppers, find a market for their crops and increase the productivity of their farms by protecting and regenerating the soil, Carver hoped to bring them closer to financial security and liberation.

In 1914, at a time when the boll weevil had almost ruined cotton growers, Carver revealed his experiments to the public, and increasing numbers of the South’s farmers began to turn to peanuts, sweet potatoes, and their derivatives for income. Much exhausted land was renewed, and the South became a major new supplier of agricultural products. When Carver arrived at Tuskegee in 1896, the peanut had not even been recognized as a crop, but within the next half century it became one of the six leading crops throughout the United States and, in the South, the second cash crop (after cotton) by 1940. In 1942 the U.S. government allotted 2,023,428 hectares (5,000,000 acres) of peanuts to farmers. Carver’s efforts had finally helped liberate the South from its excessive dependence on cotton.

Among Carver’s many honors were his election to Britain’s Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (London) in 1916 and his receipt of the Spingarn Medal in 1923. Late in his career he declined an invitation to work for Thomas Edison at a salary of more than $100,000 a year. U.S. Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Franklin D. Roosevelt visited him, and his friends included Henry Ford and Mahatma Gandhi. Foreign governments requested his counsel on agricultural matters: Joseph Stalin, for example, in 1931 invited him to manage cotton plantations in southern Russia and to make a tour of the Soviet Union, but Carver refused.

In 1940 Carver donated his life savings to the establishment of the Carver Research Foundation at Tuskegee for continuing research in agriculture. During World War II he worked to replace the textile dyes formerly imported from Europe, and in all he produced dyes of 500 shades.

Many scientists thought of Carver more as a concoctionist than as a contributor to scientific knowledge. Many of his fellow African Americans were critical of what they regarded as his subservience. Certainly, this small, mild, soft-spoken, innately modest man, eccentric in dress and mannerism, seemed unbelievably heedless of the conventional pleasures and rewards of this life. But these qualities endeared Carver to many whites, who were almost invariably charmed by his humble demeanor and his quiet work in self-imposed segregation at Tuskegee. As a result of his accommodation to the mores of the South, many whites came to regard him with a sort of patronizing adulation.

Carver thus, for much of white America, increasingly came to stand as a kind of saintly and comfortable symbol of the intellectual achievements of African Americans. Carver was evidently uninterested in the role his image played in the racial politics of the time. His great desire in later life was simply to serve humanity, and his work, which began for the sake of the poorest of the Black sharecroppers, paved the way for a better life for the entire South. On the importance of leaving a legacy, he famously quipped, “No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it.” His efforts brought about a significant advance in agricultural training in an era when agriculture was the largest single occupation of Americans, and he extended Tuskegee’s influence throughout the South by encouraging improved farm methods, crop diversification, and soil conservation.