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February 05, 2008
Influences of Blacks on the world
As we celebrate black history month you can't help but reflect on the great contributions blacks made in making life better for all.
YardFlex in celebration of Black History Month will be featuring some outstanding black luminaries throughout the month.
We start off with George Washington Carver one of the most famous black inventor in history.
His contributions to the world in the areas of agriculture have influenced the economy and provided us with great products ranging from peanut butter to colors for our clothing.
George Washington Carver was born on July 12, 1864 in Diamond Grove, Missouri. He was a sickly child who would remain that way for the majority of his childhood years. He and his mother lived on a farm owned by Moses and Susan Carver, when they were kidnapped during a raid one night. Days later, neighbors found George and returned him to the Carvers, but now he had contracted whooping cough. His mother was nowhere to be found, so the Carver family raised him as their own.
Because of his poor health, George Washington Carver was not able to help out by working in the fields, but he did have a great interest in plants, and even planted his own garden in the woods near their farm. He produced medicines for his family and was soon given the nicknamed, 'The Plant Doctor.'
George was unable to get into any schools until he was 12, due to his race. To get into first formal school, he had to move to Newton County, Missouri and leave his adoptive parents behind, because there were no black schools any closer. He worked on a farm to earn money for his education in a one-room schoolhouse. Shortly afterward, he moved with another family to Fort Scott, Kansas.
When it was time to move on and continue his education at the University level, George Washington Carver again ran into resistance because of the color of his skin. After being denied entrance into Highland University, he was accepted into Simpson College in Iowa in the year 1890. George was very talented in Art, and earned great respect for that, but his passion was in Science and Agriculture. He transferred to the Iowa Agricultural College, which is now known as Iowa State University, and graduated in 1894. Upon graduation, Carver was offered a position on the faculty and allowed great freedom in the school's greenhouses to pursue his agricultural work. He was the first African American to be offered a faculty position at that College.
In 1896, George Washington Carver received his Master's Degree in Agriculture having co-authored a series of papers on the cures for fungus diseases. In 1897, he discovered two new fungi that were later named after him.
Booker T. Washington convinced George to come down to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to serve as the Director of Agriculture in 1897.
Carver accepted, and there is where the majority of the work was done that led to him being regarded as the most famous black inventor of all time.
In the south at that time, Tobacco and Cotton were the primary crops grown. The problem is that those crops deplete the soil of all of its nutrients. Between that and the devastation to the land from the Civil War, the agricultural situation in the south was not good. Considering that the majority of the agricultural products for the United States came from the south, this affected all of America.
George Washington Carver came up with a solution to the problem. Crop rotation was the key. George convinced the farmers to plant legumes like peanuts and peas because they produced nitrates and replenished the soil. He told them to rotate planting cotton and tobacco with the peanuts so that they could continue to have plentiful cotton and tobacco harvests. The farmers followed his instructions and were thrilled with the results, except for one thing. The production of cotton and tobacco was great, but now the farmers were left with all of these useless peanuts that were rotting in their overflowing warehouses. George Washington Carver took the challenge and quickly found new uses for peanuts. As a matter of fact, he eventually found over 300 uses for the peanut, such as peanut butter, ink, facial cream, and shampoo.
During this process, he also discovered that sweet potatoes and pecans enriched the soil, too. He convinced the farmers to work these crops into their rotation as well, and then found multiple uses for these products. Some of the uses of these crops include synthetic rubber and material for paving highways. From the pecan he invented over 75 products, and from common clays he developed dyes and paints. Many of these were used to color textiles, which made the colorful clothing people would wear.
Henry Ford, the famous inventor of the automobile, invited George Washington Carver to the Ford plant in Michigan where he came up with a way to use a plant weed named goldenrod to create synthetic rubber.
The famous inventor Thomas Edison was so impressed with Carver's work that he offered him a salary of $100,000 a year to work for him at the Edison Laboratories in their state of the art facilities. He turned it down, however, so that he could continue his research at Tuskegee.
Another way that George Washington Carver showed that his work was never about money and personal gain, is that even though he did hold 3 patents, the majority of his discoveries and inventions he never patented. When asked about this he replied, "God gave them to me, how can I sell them to someone else?"
The United States Government also took notice of Carver's brilliance and appointed him Collaborator in the Division of Plant Mycology and Disease Survey of the Bureau of Plant Industry of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1935.
By 1938, peanuts were 200 million dollar industry and Alabama's chief product. In 1940 George donated over $60,000 of his own savings to the George Washington Carver Foundation. He later willed the remaining money he had to the foundation to carry on his work after he was gone.
Carver died on January 5, 1943 on the campus of the Tuskegee Institute. Governments from around the world honored him for his many inventions and his work that improved the life of all of mankind.
The United States Government designated the farmland he grew up on, as a national monument, and made January 5, 1946 George Washington Carver day.