George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver was born into slavery on a Missouri farm around 1864 — the precise year is uncertain because birth records were not kept for enslaved children. He and his mother were kidnapped by Confederate raiders shortly after his birth; he was returned and raised by his former owners after his mother could not be recovered.

He took his undergraduate and master's degrees at Iowa State Agricultural College (1894, 1896) — the first African American student and the first African American faculty member at the institution. Booker T. Washington (also placed in this archive) recruited him to the Tuskegee Institute in 1896 to direct its Agricultural Department; he remained at Tuskegee for the next forty-seven years.

His agricultural research transformed Southern farming. He developed crop-rotation methods that restored soils exhausted by a century of cotton monoculture, identified peanut and sweet-potato cultivars suited to the South's depleted lands, and published over forty practical bulletins to teach the methods to Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The introduction of peanuts, sweet potatoes, and soybeans into Southern crop rotations under his teaching was the single most consequential intervention in twentieth-century Southern agriculture, restoring economic viability to hundreds of thousands of farms.

He developed over three hundred industrial uses for peanuts and over one hundred for sweet potatoes — plastics, dyes, paints, gasoline, soap, ink. He declined to patent his discoveries (with three minor exceptions), arguing they should belong to the public.

He testified before Congress on agricultural policy in 1921. He received the Spingarn Medal in 1923. He died at Tuskegee on the fifth of January 1943, age approximately seventy-eight.

He is honored here as the agricultural scientist whose research restored the soils of the American South.