Ned Jilton II: From slave to scientist: The remarkable story of George Washington Carver

February has been designated as Black History Month. As I sit here contemplating that fact, I remember back to my elementary school days. We didn't study much in the way of Black history in the mid to late '60s. I remember learning who Frederick Douglass was. We didn't learned about Martian Luther King in school, but on the evening news where we could hear him speak and watch him leading marches.When King was shot, my Uncle Bob was in the National Guard and was sent to Memphis. He said it was terrible there, worrying about snipers, sleeping on concrete floors, and they were given bad food which made most of them sick.However, the person that I remember most learning about, probably because we were a rural school, was George Washington Carver — the man who in many ways saved Southern agriculture.Of course to us kids it was all about what he did with peanuts.Carver was born into slavery on the farm of Moses Carver in Missouri near the end of the Civil War. His father was killed in an accident just before Carver's birth, and George, his sister and his mother where kidnapped by raiders from Arkansas. Moses hired a Union Army scout to track down the raiders, but he was only able to find George. His mother and sister were never seen again.When slavery ended, Moses and his wife Susan raised George and his brother James as their own children. Susan taught George the basics of reading and writing. But as George got older, his thirst for education led him to leave home.There was no school for Blacks in Diamond Grove, Missouri, where he was living at the time, so he decided to go to the school for Black children some 8 to 10 miles away. It was there he met a kind woman named Mariah Watkins, who took him in until he turned 13 and left to attend high school. After moving in with another foster family and attending multiple schools, Carver finally earned his diploma at Minneapolis High School in Minneapolis, Kansas.Carver applied to several colleges before being accepted by Highland University in Kansas. But when he arrived there and the administration saw that he was Black, they refused to admit him. He was finally accepted by Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. It was there he started to study art and piano.His art teacher, Etta Budd, seeing Carver's talent for painting flowers and the detail of his work, suggested he should study botany at Iowa State Agricultural College. The college is today known as Iowa State University, and Carver was the first Black student to be accepted there.Carver excelled at Iowa State, earning his bachelor's degree in agriculture with his thesis "Plants as Modified by Man." The faculty encouraged him to continue on at the college, leading him to receive his master of science degree and then become the first Black teacher there.The quality of Carver's work and research began to get him noticed outside of Iowa. In 1896, he received a letter from Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute asking him to head the Agriculture Department there. Washington even sweetened the deal with an above average salary and two rooms for his personal use.In an odd twist, members of the Black faculty at Tuskegee resented Carver because his degrees were from a White college. But Carver, who easily made friends among both Black and White, eventually settled in and began the research and teaching that was desperately needed across the South at the time, especially in Alabama.Decades of growing cotton had seriously depleted the soil of nitrogen. On top of this, there were poor Black farmers and sharecroppers just trying to make ends meet. Carver set to work developing and teaching a system of crop rotation in which different crops would be planted in place of cotton from time to time to restore the soil.In order to teach the new system to the farmers, Carver developed the "Jesup wagon," a portable classroom that traveled the rural roads to bring knowledge to the farmers. He also wrote bulletins in simple, straightforward language on agricultural developments that were widely distributed at no cost to the farmer. He also developed an agricultural extension program for the state of Alabama.When Carver began researching crops to use in rotation with cotton, he realized they had to be profitable as well as aid in the restoration of the soil.He began working with sweet potatoes, peanuts, soybeans and cowpeas. He then established an industrial research laboratory to develop useful products from these crops to turn a better profit for the farmer. From this research he came up with 325 uses for peanuts, 108 uses for sweet potatoes and 75 uses for pecans. He developed things like peanut milk, Worcestershire sauce, cooking oils, cosmetics, soaps and paint just to name a few.He only patented maybe three of his developments. In fact, Carver turned down a very generous offer from Thomas Edison to come to New York and work in his labs. Choosing to stay at Tuskegee, he sought more to aid his fellow man than make a profit.This came from his strong Christian faith.Carver came to know Christianity at an early age as he noted in a letter he wrote in 1931."I was just a mere boy when converted, hardly ten years old," he wrote. "There isn't much of a story to it. God just came into my heart one afternoon while I was alone in the 'loft' of our big barn while I was shelling corn to carry to the mill to be ground into meal.""A dear little white boy, one of our neighbors, about my age came by one Saturday morning, and in talking and playing he told me he was going to Sunday school tomorrow morning," Carver continued. "I was eager to know what a Sunday school was. He said they sang hymns and prayed. I asked him what prayer was and what they said. I do not remember what he said; only remember that as soon as he left I climbed up into the 'loft,' knelt down by the barrel of corn and prayed as best I could. I do not remember what I said. I only recall that I felt so good that I prayed several times before I quit."In the 1920s, peanut farmers here in American were being undercut by low prices on peanuts imported from China. Farmers, both Black and White, asked Carver to testify before the Ways and Means Committee of the United States House of Representatives. Carver's testimony was so compelling that in 1922 the Fordney-McCumber Tariff was enacted and included a duty on imported peanuts.Carver's work was noticed worldwide. In 1916, Carver was made a member of the Royal Society of Arts in England, one of a very few Americans granted the honor at the time. President Theodore Roosevelt publicly admired his work, and Henry Ford called him the world's greatest living scientist. In 1941, Time magazine named him the Black Leonardo da Vinci.Following his death in 1943, Congress established the George Washington Carver National Monument. A quote from the hearings reads, "Occasionally there moves across the stage of time a historic figure, a creative teacher, a profound thinker, a humble servant, or an inspiring teacher. George Washington Carver was all of these. The memorial we create only indicates to the world that once there was a man named George Washington Carver, whose life was a source of inspiration to all men, a pillar of hope to his race, a fountain of service to his fellows, a tower of devotion to his God; and that this man achieved a worthy and enduring stature in the memories of men."Carver's story is so amazing, born in slavery and raising to become an artist, teacher and great scientist. This column hardly does the story justice, but to do so would probably fill the entire newspaper.Ned Jilton II is a photographer, history lover and columnist. You can contact him at ndjphoto@aol.com.