George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver was a remarkable black scientist. His achievements made him famous in the world of agriculture after the 1920's. His ideas helped transform southern agriculture following the Civil War years. He was born in 1864 near Diamond Grove, Missouri on the farm of Moses Carver. Carver's parents were Miles and Mary. He was born into difficult and changing times near the end of the Civil War. The infant George and his mother were kidnapped by Confederate night-raiders and possibly sent away to Arkansas. Moses found and reclaimed George after the war but his mother had disappeared forever. Moses and Susan Carver reared George and his brother James as their own children. It was on Moses' farm where George first fell in love with nature. He was nicknamed "The Plant Doctor" and collected all manner of rocks and plants.

Carver began his formal education at the age of 12, which required him to leave the home of his adopted parents. There was no segregated school near him that accepted black students. He moved to Newton County in Southwest Missouri where he worked as a farm hand and studied in a one-room schoolhouse. He later attended Minneapolis High School in Kansas. College entrance was a struggle because of racial barriers. At the age of 30, Carver gained acceptance to Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa where he was the first black student. He had to study piano and art. The college didn't offer science classes. Intent on studying science, he later transferred to Iowa Agricultural College (Iowa State University) in 1891, where he gained a Bachelor of Science degree in 1894 and a Master of Science degree in bacterial botany and agriculture in 1897. He became a member of Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanics. He was the first black faculty member for Iowa College. He taught classes about soil conservation and chemurgy. In 1897, Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, convinced Carver to come south and serve as the school's Director of Agriculture. He remained on that faculty until his death in 1943.

Carver wrote a book entitled, Help for Hard Times to help farmers in agriculture. Carver developed his crop rotation method which revolutionized southern agriculture. He educated the farmers to alternate the soil-depleting cotton crops with soil-enriching crops such as peanuts, peas, soybeans, sweet potatotes, and pecans. Carver's achievements were significant because America's economy was heavily dependent upon agriculture during this period. Decades of growing only cotton and tobacco had depleted the soils of the southern area of the United States. The economy of the farming south had been devastated by years of Civil War as well as there wasn't slave labor to be used. Carver also worked at developing industrial applications from agricultural crops. During World War I, he found a way to replace textile dyes formerly imported from Europe. He produced dyes of 500 different shades of dye and was responsible in 1927 for the invention of a process for producing paints and stains from soybeans. He received three separate patents from that.

As an agricultural chemist, he discovered three hundred uses for peanuts and hundreds more uses for soybeans, pecans, and sweet potatoes. Among the listed items that he suggested to southern farmers that he thought would help them economically were his recipes and improvements for: adhesives, axle grease, bleach, buttermilk, chili sauce, fuel briquettes, ink, instant coffee, linoleum, mayonnaise , metal polish, and paper. He only applied for three patents which were in cosmetics and plant products, paints, and stains.

Carver didn't patent or profit from most of his products. He freely gave his discoveries to mankind. Most important he changed the South from being a one-crop land of cotton to multi-crop farmlands. In 1940 Carver donated his life savings to the establishment of the Carver Research Foundation at Tuskegee for continuing research in agriculture. He was bestowed an honorary doctorate from Simpson College in 1928. In 1939, he received the Roosevelt medal for restoring southern agriculture. On July 14, 1943 FDR honored Carver with a National monument dedicated to his accomplishments. The area of his childhood near Diamond Grove in Missouri is preserved as a park, which is the first for an African American.