What would it be like to be an orphan? What would it be like to have your country discriminate against you because of the color of your skin? What would it be like to have great dreams, but then encounter huge obstacles and not know if your dreams would come true? One little boy knew. His name was George.
George was born a slave in Missouri in 1864, and he and his mother were owned by the Carver Farm. One night, when he was a small baby, they were kidnapped by slave raiders. His mother was sold and shipped away but the Carver family was able to reclaim George.
One year later, in 1865, slavery became illegal, and all of the slaves on the Carver Farm were emancipated. But George stayed with the Carvers, who treated him like family. They gave him their name, and he became known as George Washington Carver. The Carvers were kind and encouraged the young boy to learn and realize his potential. While he was living with them, Mrs. Carver taught him to read and write, and Mr. Carver taught him about plants and basic agriculture.
The young Carver was a very fast learner. The only books he owned were a dictionary and a Bible, and he read them all the time. He learned to love plants by watching and painting pictures of them as they changed throughout the year. In fact, he became so skilled in his understanding of the biology of plants that the neighbors brought their sick plants to him and called him "the Plant Doctor."
As much as he loved the farm, Carver only stayed there until he was about 11 years old. What he wanted more than anything was to study at a university. In order to do this, he first had to attend high school. Tragically, the schools in his town refused to teach him because he was black. Slavery had been abolished for ten years, but many white people were still racist, and segregation still existed in many places in the southern United States.
For the next seven years, Carver moved around, eventually graduating from high school in Minnesota. In 1885, he was accepted to Highland University in Kansas. He was thrilled! But as soon as the school saw his skin color, the school administrators forced him to leave. They refused to teach a black man.
One day, Carver received a letter from Simpson College in the state of Iowa; it was an invitation to become their first black student. Carver was jubilant to see his dream come true. So, at the age of 25, he began his study of art at the college and worked as a farmhand to support himself. Carver was a wonderful painter, but he missed working with plants. So he transferred from Simpson College to nearby Iowa State College to study agriculture.
In 1896, Carver graduated from Iowa State College with a master's degree in science. Booker T. Washington, a respected African American political leader and the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, invited him to teach there. Carver happily accepted the position. During his time at Tuskegee, Carver became a world-famous scientist. He discovered that planting cotton damaged and exhausted the nutrients in the soil, while planting peanuts and sweet potatoes replenished them. But, the farmers were dependent on cotton, and no one wanted to plant acres and acres of peanuts or sweet potatoes. Who would want so much of these crops? So Carver worked hard to solve that problem.
Carver was convinced that he could teach the farmers of the South to enrich their soil. Over the next 44 years, Carver experimented with peanuts and sweet potatoes. He discovered a hundred new ways to use sweet potatoes, to make vinegar, flour, syrup, coffee, glue, alcohol, soap, and many other everyday products. What was even more amazing was that he discovered three hundred applications for peanuts! Peanuts could be used to make cheese, candy, shampoo, ink, linoleum, paper, and even medicine.
To prove the importance of peanuts, Carver invited some very famous people over for dinner to discuss his discoveries; politicians, academics, leaders of industry, and other scientists accepted the invitation. He served a mouthwatering meal of soup, chicken casserole, bread, salad, coffee, cake, and ice cream. After dinner, Carver got up to give a speech. "Every dish I have served tonight included peanuts in some form," he said. The guests were astounded and applauded his work. In 1921, Carver made a speech to the U.S. Congress about how American-grown peanuts could help the South, and Congress agreed by imposing a tax on imported peanuts. To this day, many people credit Carver with saving the South's way of life.
With all his monumental discoveries, Carver could have received international acclaim and great wealth. But George refused to accept money for his inventions. He believed God had given him his ideas, so it would have been wrong to profit financially from them. Instead, he continued to teach and inspire his students. "I am trying to get black Americans to understand that their color does not inhibit them as much as they might think," he once said.
Carver also traveled throughout the South, helping black and white farmers understand how to take care of their land and how to diversify their crops. Once again, he was the "Plant Doctor" that farmers respected. "I believe God's gifts will transform our race in the eyes of the world," he would tell the black farmers. Carver knew that helping black people become better farmers would help them earn respect as Americans.
As Carver's reputation grew, he met with three U.S. presidents. The crown prince of Sweden also once spent three weeks studying with him. Despite his busy career, Carver also continued to create art. Seventy-one of his paintings made from vegetables and clay pigments were called masterpieces and showcased in an art exhibit in 1941.
Despite his fame and accomplishments, his favorite place to be was in his laboratory doing experiments. And that is where he stayed, working every day until he died on January 5, 1943, at the age of 79. Since he had no family, in his will, he left all his earnings to the Tuskegee Institute to help future scientists.
"It is not the style of clothes one wears," wrote Carver, "neither the kind of automobile one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success." Because of his service to others, George Washington Carver earned the respect of an entire nation.
"He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither,
he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world."
- Epitaph on George Washington Carver's grave