George Washington Carver

In addition to being Black History Month, February is National Inventors Month. So who better to feature this week than the brilliant Black scientist and inventor George Washington Carver.

Born at the end of the Civil War, he began his formal education at the age of twelve in a one-room schoolhouse in Missouri. College was nearly impossible for Black Americans in the South but at the age of thirty he gained acceptance to Simpson College in Iowa, where he was the first black student.

The college did not offer science classes so Carver had to study piano and art. But his true love was science. He later transferred to Iowa Agricultural College in 1891, where he gained a Bachelor of Science degree in 1894 and a Master of Science degree in bacterial botany and agriculture in 1897.

He went on to become a member of the faculty there teaching classes about soil conservation. In 1897, Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute for Negroes, convinced Carver to come south and serve as the school's Director of Agriculture.

At Tuskegee Carver developed his crop rotation method, which revolutionized southern agriculture. He educated the farmers to alternate the soil-depleting cotton crops with soil-enriching crops such as; peanuts, peas, soybeans, sweet potatoes, and pecans. Many southern farmers followed his suggestions and helped the region, devastated by years of civil war, to recover. He changed the South from being a one-crop land of cotton, to being multi-crop farmlands, with farmers having hundreds of profitable uses for their new crops according to the website About.com.

Carver also worked at developing industrial applications from agricultural crops. He produced dyes of 500 different shades of dye and he was responsible for the invention in 1927 of a process for producing paints and stains from soybeans. For that he received three separate patents. In 1939, he received the Roosevelt medal for restoring southern agriculture. Carver remained on the faculty at Tuskegee until his death in 1943.

During Black History Month we should recognize Black Americans for their contributions to industry, business and science. Look for displays, books and bookmarks at your schools and local library.

-This first appeared in the Feb 11, 2011 issue of the Highland Community News, Highland, Ca