From inauspicious and dramatic beginnings, George Washington
Carver became one of the nation's greatest educators and
agricultural researchers. He was born in about 1864 (the exact
year is unknown) on the Moses Carver plantation in Diamond Grove,
Mo. His father died in an accident shortly before his birth, and
when he was still an infant, Carver and his mother were kidnapped
by slave raiders. The baby was returned to the plantation, but his
mother was never heard from again.
Carver grew to be a
student of life and a scholar, despite the illness and frailty of
his early childhood. Because he was not strong enough to work in
the fields, he helped with household chores and gardening.
Probably as a result of these duties and because of the hours he
would spend exploring the woods around his home, he developed a
keen interest in plants at an early age. He gathered and cared for
a wide variety of flora from the land near his home and became
known as the "plant doctor," helping neighbors and friends with
ailing plants. He learned to read, write and spell at home because
there were no schools for African Americans in Diamond Grove. From
age 10, his thirst for knowledge and desire for formal education
led him to several communities in Missouri and Kansas and finally,
in 1890, to Indianola, Iowa, were he enrolled at Simpson College
to study piano and painting.
He excelled in art and
music, but art instructor Etta Budd,
whose father was head of the Iowa State College Department of
Horticulture, recognized Carver's horticultural talents. She
convinced him to pursue a more pragmatic career in scientific
agriculture and, in 1891, he became the first African American to
enroll at Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts,
which today is Iowa State University.
Through quiet
determination and perseverance, Carver soon became involved in all
facets of campus life. He was a leader in the YMCA and the debate
club. He worked in the dining rooms and as a trainer for the
athletic teams. He was captain, the highest student rank, of the
campus military regiment. His poetry was published in the student
newspaper and two of his paintings were exhibited at the 1893
World's Fair in Chicago.
Carver's interests
in music and art remained strong, but it was his excellence in
botany and horticulture that prompted professors Joseph Budd and
Louis Pammel to encourage him to stay on as a graduate student
after he completed his bachelor's degree in 1894. Because of his
proficiency in plant breeding, Carver was appointed to the
faculty, becoming Iowa State's first African American faculty
member.
Over the next two
years, as assistant botanist for the College Experiment Station,
Carver quickly developed scientific skills in plant pathology and
mycology, the branch of botany that deals with fungi. He published
several articles on his work and gained national respect. In 1896,
he completed his master's degree and was invited by Booker T.
Washington to join the faculty of Alabama's Tuskegee Institute.
At Tuskegee, he
gained an international reputation in research, teaching and
outreach. Carver taught his students that nature is the greatest
teacher and that by understanding the forces in nature, one can
understand the dynamics of agriculture. He instilled in them the
attitude of gentleness and taught that education should be "made
common" --used for betterment of the people in the community.
Carver's work
resulted in the creation of 325 products from
peanuts, more than 100 products
from sweet potatoes and hundreds more from a dozen other plants
native to the South. These products contributed to rural economic
improvement by offering alternative crops to cotton that were
beneficial for the farmers and for the land. During this time,
Carver also carried the Iowa State extension concept to the South
and created "movable schools," bringing practical agricultural
knowledge to farmers, thereby promoting health, sound nutrition
and self-sufficiency. Dennis Keeney, director of the
Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa
State University, writes in the Leopold Letter newsletter
about Carver's contributions:
Carver worked on
improving soils, growing crops with low inputs, and using
species that fixed nitrogen (hence, the work on the cowpea and
the peanut). Carver wrote in The Need of Scientific
Agriculture in the South: "The virgin fertility of our
soils and the vast amount of unskilled labor have been more of a
curse than a blessing to agriculture. This exhaustive system
for cultivation, the destruction of forest, the rapid and almost
constant decomposition of organic matter, have made our
agricultural problem one requiring more brains than of the
North, East or West."
Carver died in
1943. He received many honors in his lifetime and after, including
a 1938 feature film, Life of George Washington Carver; the
George Washington Carver Museum, dedicated at Tuskegee Institute
in 1941; the Roosevelt Medal for Outstanding Contribution to
Southern Agriculture in 1939; a national monument in Diamond
Grove, Mo.; commemorative postage stamps in 1947 and 1998; and a
fifty-cent coin in 1951. He was elected to the Hall of Fame for
Great Americans in 1977 and inducted into the National Inventors
Hall of Fame in 1990. In 1994, Iowa State awarded him the degree,
Doctor of Humane Letters. In recent years, Dr. Carver has also
been recognized by being named to the USDA Hall of Heroes (2000)
and one of 100 nominees for the "The Greatest American," series on
the Discovery Channel (2005).
