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Two special Men P2:
By Willie Gaffer:
March 3, 2008:
This is the follow up essay I promised.
The first essay last week was about the life and times of Booker T. Washington.
This one is about George, Washington
Carver. Carver was born only a short time after Washington
in 1864 and lived a great deal longer. He passed on in 1943 when I was 13 years
old and had not yet heard of him. In Wyandotte,
Michigan, where I grew up, Negroes were not mentioned. So far as we
knew at the time there were no blacks worth mentioning. That was just one of
the myths that were perpetrated on children in those
days. In 1943, Carver’s life had just ended and mine was just beginning.
I had many things to consider with my immature mind. We were two years into a
horrific war. In spite of the Washington
rhetoric, even I knew we were caught unprepared and we
were in grave danger of loosing.
When Carver was born, the issues were quite different,
especially for Negroes. Sherman was
whacking hell out of Georgia, the Confederacy was buried in worthless money, worth about
5 cents on the dollar. The North was not doing all that well financially either
with the greenback falling to about 60 cents on the dollar. It was a very
difficult and dangerous time for everyone and especially for blacks. The threat
of white retaliation in the south loomed large. The Civil War, which began in 1861 would finally end in 1865. It was four years of hell.
Much like Booker T. Washington, Carver was born a slave.
Carver was born in Marion Township,
Missouri. There is no record of
who his father was, but he was owned by Moses Carver, who
owned the mother and by default owned the son. Moses had paid seven
hundred dollars for the mother in 1855. Perhaps he saw her as breeding stock.
We do not know. George had several sisters who all died early.
To give you a sense of the slave trade at that time, George,
one sister, and his mother were kidnapped by night
raiders when he was still an infant. They were sold in
Arkansas. Slaves were property
and worth money. Even with the south on the brink of disaster, these madmen could not change their mindset. They were still
intent on business as usual with Negroes being valuable property. George was recovered by an agent of his owner. The mother
and sister were not so lucky. They had apparently perished of whooping cough.
George was also very ill when he was
returned and he never really recovered. He was incapable of doing the
physical things required of a field hand. So, he spent
his time walking the fields where he gained first hand information about the
many wild plants. He became something of an amateur botanist. With slavery
abolished, Moses and his wife raised George and his brother as their own
children. These folks were George’s first benefactors teaching him to
read and write and encouraging his intellectual bend.
Blacks were not allowed to attend
school in his hometown, Diamond Grove so George resolved to go somewhere else.
Ten miles south of Diamond Grove, in Neosho there was a
school for Negroes and George went there with hopes of attending. When he arrived he found the school closed for the night and he had
no lodging. Not to worry, he slept in a barn and the next day he met his second
benefactor. His first landlady, Mariah Watkins told
him his name was George Carver, not Carver’s George. Thus, he acquired a
surname. She also told him to learn as much as he could and then go into the
world and give that learning back to the people. He undertook to do just that.
When thirteen he had a very nasty experience. In Fort Scott
Kansas, where he had gone to attend school he saw a black man beaten to death
by a white mob. He quickly got out of Fort
Scott and attended a series of
different schools until he received his diploma from Minneapolis
High School in Minneapolis
Kansas. Then he went to work. He set up a
laundry business in Olathe, Kansas.
Then, he began trying to get into college by sending letters of application.
Although he was initially accepted at Highland
College in Kansas,
when he made the journey to enroll, the offer was withdrawn. They did not
accept Negroes and had assumed he was white. That turned out to be Highland’s
loss.
About 1885, Carver was in Winterset Iowa
and met two more benefactors. These were Mr. and Mrs. Milholland who convinced
him to try Simpson College
in Indianola Iowa. He was accepted as only the second Negro student in the school.
Although he showed high aptitude for music and art, his art teacher Etta Budd
told him he ought to study something that would pay a living. Etta was another
benefactor. Carver transferred to Iowa State College in 1889. This time he was
the first black student and later the first black faculty member. In the
meantime, he changed his name to George Washington Carver. It seems there was
already a George Carver attending State.
George Washington Carver graduated in 1894 and went on to
earn his master’s degree there. While earning his master’s, he went
into research in the Agricultural and Home Economics station under Louis
Pammel. For that work in plant pathology and mycology, he got national
recognition as a first class botanist. Mycology is the branch of biology that
deals with fungi.
In 1896, Carver was asked to lead
the Agriculture Department at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, by no
less than Booker T. Washington. Carver, of course, accepted the position, and
there he stayed until he died in 1943. Carver’s life there was not
without incident. He was resented by other faculty members at
Tuskegee.
They thought he was overpaid and pampered. For Carver’s part, he
complained that he should not be expected to market
farm produce to make money for the school.
In 1902 Washington
invited a famous female photographer to Tuskegee.
Carver and Nelson Henry, a Tuskegee
graduate, made a tactical error by escorting the white woman to nearby Ramer.
Some shots were fired and Henry took off. Carver
remarked that he was lucky to avoid being killed
himself. In other incidents Carver proved to be quite
proud and thin skinned. There were three times when he offered to resign when
his faculty political rivals tried to criticize his work and reputation. Each
time, Washington handled it with
aplomb and Carver remained.
When Booker T. Washington died in 1915 his replacement left
Carver pretty much to his own devices. That allowed him to focus on developing
and proposing new uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes, and other crops. This was the work that gained him national recognition as the
most famous American Negro at that time.
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