AN EARLY PROPONENT OF “GOING GREEN”
During Black History Month each February in the USA, the nation celebrates the lives of black Americans whose lives have made a difference, both in the past and currently. With so many talented African Americans, both famous and unknown, it’s hard to know whom to single out.
What about Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcom X, or Frederick Douglass? Duke Ellington, Buddy Guy, Odette, or Stevie Wonder? Michael Jordan, Thurgood Marshall, or Shirley Chisholm? And now, Barak Obama?
However, I will focus on George Washington Carver (1864-1943), as his life exemplifies the many contributions African Americans have made to American life, notably as a scientist and an inventor.
Carver was a man way ahead of his time. He first considered a career as an artist, but later became one of the country’s leading experts on peanuts, sweet potatoes and soybeans.
Carver was also a proponent of “going green” and preserving natural resources long before the concept became popular.
George Washington Carver was born sickly in 1864 into a family of slaves. He and his mother were kidnapped by slave traders, but his owners (Moses and Susan Carver, Missouri farmers) rescued him and adopted George and his brother. Because he was too frail for outdoor work, the young George learned embroidery, knitting and crocheting from his adopted mother. But, he liked to play outdoors, where he created a garden, collected rocks and observed nature. He soon earned the nickname, “The Plant Doctor”, and made his own medicines there on the farm.
Later, he wrote that he’d wanted to know the names of everything, how creatures got their colors, and where they got their life. But, because there was nobody to tell him, as there were no nearby schools for black children, he left home at age 13 to find a formal education. He supported himself with jobs in laundries, railroad depots and hotels.
At first he thought he wanted a career in art. He loved plants and had a talent for drawing them. But, when he traveled through meager cotton fields on poor soil and saw many poor black people struggling to survive, he decided that he wanted to help the poor. He wanted to help them turn their fields green with crops and show them how to grow vegetables and flowers. So, he was already thinking about agriculture.
When he was ready to enter college, Carver was accepted by mail at a small Presbyterian college in Highland, Kansas, but he was rejected when the faculty realized he was black. He ended up at Simpson College in Iowa (now Iowa State University), where he became the first black member of the faculty. He was an assistant professor of biology by 1894. He co-authored a series of papers on the prevention and treatment of fungus diseases in cherry trees, and in 1897 discovered two funguses that were named after him.
After that, he took a research and teaching position, as director of Agriculture, at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama. He set out to inform farmers about the benefits of crop rotation and alternating crops, both as a source for their own food and as a source of other products to improve their lives. He especially advocated rotating cotton and peanuts, as the peanuts helped to enrich the soil. Large surpluses of peanuts soon developed, so Carver experimented with different uses of the peanut, from cooking oil to printers ink, to facial creams and shampoo, and developed more than 115 products from peanuts.
He also discovered that the sweet potato enriched the soil too and found many uses for this crop, including flour, starch, material for paving highways and synthetic rubber (the U.S. Army used many of his products in WW1). Pecans also enriched the soil, and Carver found at least 75 products from them.
He had a wagon built that he took to rural areas to demonstrate farming and composting techniques, chicken raising, cooking and canning. From the wagon, farm families could buy whitewash made from clay to paint their fences, and fabric for sewing. He also published bulletins full of advice and recipes for farmers. Bulletin No. 31 is “How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of preparing it for Human Consumption.” Before Carver’s ideas became widespread, the main use of peanuts was as pig feed. His peanut recipe file had about 150 recipes. In the 1930s, Mahatma Ghandi wrote to ask for copies of Carver’s bulletins to help the poor in India, showing just how well-known Carver’s ideas were becoming.
As mentioned, Carver also had many ideas for making non-edible products out of plants, and in this way was a pioneer in bio-fuels. Henry Ford, the pioneer in automobiles, was interested in Carver’s fuel ideas as well as his substitutes for rubber and plastics. Ford invited Carver to Dearborn, where the two devised a way to use goldenrod, a plant weed, to create synthetic rubber.
Other examples of Carver’s research included making synthetic marble from green wood shavings; rope from corn stalk fibers; plant dyes, and paints and stains from soybeans; fuel briquettes, lotions and medicines made from compressed peanut shells.
His formulas for these, and other products, such as laundry soap, linoleum and wallboard from plants went out of style for decades, but were rediscovered at the end of the 1900s.
In addition to this work on sustainable agriculture, agricultural extension and appreciation of plants and nature, Carver was also important for other accomplishments: his help in improving racial relations; his mentoring of children; his poetry and painting. He was an example of hard work, a positive attitude and a good education. He is also admired for his humility, humanitarianism, good nature, frugality and lack of economic materialism.
Nowadays, many of Carver’s ideas are being re-visited and his achievements are celebrated in a number of different places. For example, he appeared on US commemorative stamps in 1948 and 1998, was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1977, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1990.
In 2005, the St Louis Botanical Garden in St Louis established a special George Washington Carver Garden, which includes a life-size statue of him. The one-and-a-half acre garden is designed for peaceful contemplation and learning, through educational outreach and various interpretive activities. A path leading to a central reflecting pool is lined with inspirational inscriptions from his writings and speeches. Some of his famous sayings:
*Be clean both inside and out
*Neither look up to the rich nor down on the poor
*Be too brave to lie
*Take your share of the world and let others take theirs.
The pool, with fountains and surrounded by benches, has a life-size statue of Carver (by African-American sculptor Tina Allen). The six-foot statue shows Carver at 65 years old, wearing a lab jacket and a wise, gentle expression as he stands holding a small plant to the sunlight. The garden is landscaped with flowers such as viburnums and hydrangeas, pear trees, and sweet potato vines, us well as having many vegetables. It’s a pretty garden and as we contemplate his sayings and remember what he achieved, we realize that George Washington Carver can still be an inspiration to all of us nowadays.
