Bro. George Washington Carver

To understand the magnitude of the excellence and accomplishments that Brother George Washington Carver achieved, you must first understand the cruelty of the American system into which he was born. Bro. Carver was born a slave in 1864 in Diamond, Missouri. When Bro. Carver was an infant, he, his mother, and his sister were kidnapped from the Carver farm by one of the bands of slave raiders that roamed Missouri during the Civil War era. It turns out, he and his mother were sold as slaves in Kentucky. Their original slave owner, Moses Carver, hired a neighbor to retrieve them, but the neighbor only succeeded in finding George, whom he purchased by trading one of Moses’ finest horses. The history books tell us that Moses Carver and his wife Susan would raise young George as their own, except that, because they had a young daughter in the home, they castrated him as a child. Nonetheless, he would one day save the South through two distinct innovations. First, he introduced crop rotation strategies that replenished the land of the plantations upon which cotton was grown and had depleted the soil’s nutrients—the peanut being one of the main crops that were used. Second, his experimentation with the peanut, yielding approximately 300 uses therefrom ranging from food to textile to cleansers, and other industrial uses, gave the southern farmer a cash crop that could be sold in place of cotton. This substitute crop was a lifesaver as it provided farmers with a cash crop when the “boll weevil” epidemic destroyed cotton fields throughout the south. Proudly Bro. Carver was initiated into Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc., in 1920.

At age 11, Bro. Carver left the ‘Moses Carver’ Farm to attend an all-Black school in the nearby town of Neosho where he developed a keen interest in plants, experimenting with natural pesticides, fungicides, and soil conditioners. He became known as the “plant doctor” to local farmers due to his ability to discern how to improve the health of their gardens, fields, and orchards. Disappointed with the education he received at the Neosho school, Bro. Carver moved to Kansas about two years later, joining numerous other African Americans who were traveling west. He graduated from Minneapolis High School in Minneapolis, Kansas; in 1880 he applied to Highland College in Kansas. He was initially accepted at the all-white college but was later rejected when the administration learned he was Black. Years later, Bro. Carver applied to the Iowa State Agricultural School (now Iowa State University) to study botany.

In 1894, Bro. Carver became the first African American to earn a Bachelor of Science degree. Impressed by his research on the fungal infections of soybean plants, his professors asked him to stay on for graduate studies. Bro. Carver worked with famed mycologist (fungal scientist) L.H. Pammel at the Iowa State Experimental Station, honing his skills in identifying and treating plant diseases. In 1896, Bro. Carver earned his Master of Agriculture degree and immediately received several offers, the most attractive of which came from Booker T. Washington (whose last name George would later add to his own) of Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama. Washington convinced the university’s trustees to establish an agricultural school, which could only be run by Bro. Carver if Tuskegee was to keep its all-Black faculty. Bro. Carver accepted the offer and would work at Tuskegee Institute for the rest of his life.

Bro. Carver experienced great successes in the laboratory and the community. He taught poor farmers that they could feed hogs acorns instead of commercial feed and enrich croplands with swamp muck instead of fertilizers. His idea of crop rotation proved to be most valuable. Through his work on soil chemistry, Carver learned that years of growing cotton had depleted the nutrients from the soil, resulting in low yields. But by growing nitrogen-fixing plants like peanuts, soybeans, and sweet potatoes, the soil could be restored, allowing yield to increase dramatically when the land was reverted to cotton use a few years later. To further help farmers, he invented the Jessup wagon, a kind of mobile (horse-drawn) classroom and laboratory used to demonstrate soil chemistry.

Farmers, of course, loved the high yields of cotton they were now getting from Bro. Carver’s crop rotation technique. But the method had an unintended consequence: A surplus of peanuts and other non-cotton products. Bro. Carver set to work on finding alternative uses for these products. For example, he invented numerous products from sweet potatoes, including edible products like flour and vinegar and non-food items such as stains, dyes, paints, and writing ink. But Carver’s biggest success came from peanuts. In all, he developed more than 300 food, industrial and commercial products from peanuts, including milk, Worcestershire sauce, punches, cooking oils and salad oil, paper, cosmetics, soaps, and wood stains. He also experimented with peanut-based medicines, such as antiseptics, laxatives, and goiter medications. Bro. Carver’s experiments would save the southern farmer, not just because it lent itself to the replenishment of soil due to crop rotation strategies, but also because it gave these farmers a cash crop after the “boll weevil epidemic” had destroyed the cotton fields. The peanut gave them a cash crop from which to survive.

In the last two decades of his life, Bro. Carver lived as a minor celebrity but his focus was always on helping people. He traveled the South to promote racial harmony, and he traveled to India to discuss nutrition in developing nations with Mahatma Gandhi. Upon Bro. Carver’s death, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed legislation for Carver to receive his own monument, an honor previously only granted to Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The George Washington Carver monument now stands in Diamond, Missouri. Bro. Carver was also posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.