Born into slavery, George Washington Carver became one of the United States’ leading agricultural scientists and inventors during the first half of the 20th century due to his work in mainstreaming the peanut and showing others how crops can be utilized in ways other than consumption.
While his exact year of birth is unknown, Carver was born in Diamond Grove, Missouri in the early 1860s, and over the years managed to get a high school diploma in Minneapolis, Kansas. Through a series of odd jobs and attending higher education institutions, Carver landed at Iowa State University in 1891 to study botany.
A barrier-breaker throughout life, Carver was the first Black student enrolled at Iowa State University and eventually became the inaugural African American faculty member, also.
Carver’s work caught the attention of Tuskegee Institute Principal Booker T. Washington. In April 1896, Washington offered Carver the chance to come to Tuskegee to continue his academic career.
“I cannot offer you money, position or fame,” Washington said in the letter. “The first two you have. The last from the position you now occupy you will no doubt achieve. These things I now ask you to give up. I offer you in their place: hard work, the task of bringing people from degradation, poverty, and waste to full manhood. Your department exists only on paper and your laboratory will have to be in your head.”
Carver at Tuskegee Institute, Making Waves for Farmers Nationwide
Carver accepted Washington’s initial offer, eventually becoming the chairman of the agriculture department at Tuskegee, and staying at the institution for the rest of his life.
He used his agricultural research to help African American and poor white farmers become more self-sufficient and less reliant on cotton, the major cash crop of the South.
Carver’s work stood out in 1914 when the boll weevil threatened to disseminate cotton, and he came up with alternative crops for Black and poor white farmers to grow.
Dealing with the crop and food shortages as a result of World War I, Carver began developing other uses for sweet potatoes, soybeans, and peanuts according to a February 25, 2014 United States Department of Agriculture blog “More Than a Peanut Man.” Peanuts were used at the time to feed livestock, but Carver developed the crop for use in plastics, synthetic rubber and paper.
With soybeans, Carver invented a process for producing paints and stains, for which three separate patents were issued.
In all, he developed 300 products from peanuts and 118 from sweet potatoes, in addition to new products from waste materials including recycled oil, and paints and stains from clay, the blog reported.
The soybean was also at the center of Carver’s relationship with Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford, according to Bob Hovansian, the operations manager at the Richmond Hill History Museum in Richmond Hill, Georgia.
“Being a botanist, as Carver was, and being an enthusiast for the usage of plants in everyday life, his collaboration with Ford was pretty deep in the fact that he actually enabled Henry Ford to offer cars in different colors of paint, believe it or not,” said Hovansian, in a February 2023, broadcast on WSAV-TV in Savannah, Georgia. “He actually had, using soybean oil, invented a binder that allowed multi-pigmented colors to be introduced into that sticky film that you couldn’t get the color to stick to before.”
Hovansian emphasized Carver’s critical contributions to the world.
“No white industrialist at the time would ever think of pairing with a Black man,” Hovansian said, “but he didn’t care because he knew this was going to be a good pair for all of humanity.”