Funding for George Washington Carver: An
Uncommon Life is brought to you by --
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And by the Des Moines Community
Playhouse.
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He was a man of many talents.
He was an individual with a broad foundation and a
love of life.
He was more than just a scientist, he was an
artist, he was an educator, he was a
humanitarian.
And he did so much to help others.
Scientist, professor, a leader, a man of faith.
He was a conservationist.
He was very creative and he had a childlike
wonderment about life.
He loved humanity in the beginning.
He loved blacks and whites.
George Washington Carver was a man of hope.
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Who was George Washington
Carver?
George Washington Carver's rise from slavery to
scientific accomplishment has inspired people
worldwide.
Even today, children study the story of Carver, and
lists of prominent African-Americans always
contain his name.
Yet time has dulled the luster of his reputation,
reducing him to the man who did something with
peanuts.
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George Washington Carver was a complex man
who had many gifts.
In 1941, Time magazine dubbed him the "black
Leonardo".
Dana Chandler: George Washington Carver was an
artist.
He was a scientist.
He was a geologist.
He was a poet.
He was a Bible scholar.
That's a renaissance man.
Luther Williams: George Washington Carver was a
creative genius who was able to invoke personal
and shared identities to protect him from the
verogances of enslavement, discrimination and who
took those negative experiences and translated
them into the unit of humanity that is
extraordinary locally, nationally and
internationally.
Following Carver's death in 1943, the nation rushed
to memorialize him.
Congress made his birthplace a national
monument.
Postage stamps and coins were issued with his
likeness.
And naval vessels and scores of public buildings
were named in his honor.
Sceiva Holland: He was a man of concern, a man of
vision, a man who actually wanted to make a
difference and the difference wasn't
necessarily for him, it was a difference for other
people.
Born into slavery in the final months of the Civil
War, George Washington Carver rose to become one
of the best-known and widely respected
African-Americans in the world.
Henry Ford called him "the world's greatest living
scientist".
Presidents and poor black farmers alike praised him.
Mahatma Gandhi's assistant asked him for advice in
creating a vegetarian diet for the Indian activist.
Groups as different as the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People and the United
Daughters of the Confederacy honored him.
Gary Kremer: He is a useable hero for Americans
and I think that's a disservice to Carver.
I think he is important for a lot of reasons other
than that.
In reality, Carver was a complicated man.
Thousands of people around the world held warm
affection for him and regarded him as a personal
friend.
Yet, Carver never married, lived alone in a dormitory
room most of his adult life, seldom socialized
and worked by himself in his laboratory.
He was known for his humility and simplicity,
wearing a tattered suit adorned by a single flower
in his lapel.
He devoted his life to helping African-American
farmers suffering the oppression of racism,
poverty and ignorance.
Peter Burchard: He used to quote this little poem
called It's Service That Measures Success.
And the gist of it was it isn't the price of the
clothes that you're wearing or the number of
servants who come at your call, it's service that
measures success.
He stated things simply and beautifully and that's
one thing that I think makes him so relevant is
that he's accessible.
George Washington Carver's long journey to worldwide
fame began in obscure circumstances.
He was born around 1864 on an isolated Missouri farm
owned by Moses Carver.
Both of his parents were slaves.
His father was crushed under the wheels of a
lumber cart around the time of George's birth.
Before George was a year old, he and his mother
Mary were abducted by lawless raiders and taken
to Arkansas where they could be resold.
Moses Carver dispatched a Union Army scout to find
and return them.
The man somehow found George desperately ill
with whooping cough, but Mary was never seen again.
Moses and Susan Carver took George and his older
half-brother Jim into their home and raised them
as their own.
Orphaned, sickly and newly freed from slavery,
George's prospects were dead.
From an early age, however, he was drawn to
nature, seen as special.
He was unusually talented at almost everything he
tried to do and he had a raging curiosity to learn
everything he could.
Lana Henry: He spoke about the time that he would
have out in nature and just enjoying the solace,
the tranquility and speaking to the Creator is
what he did.
And then he took that throughout his lifetime.
Throughout his life he then had this love of
nature, which then went into the plant life and
went into how he could take plants and break them
down chemically and create other products all of the
benefit of helping people.
Peter Burchard: He had what could be called
visions.
He said, "As a very small boy exploring the almost
virgin woods of the old Carver place, I had the
impression that someone had just been there ahead
of me.
Things were so orderly, so clean, so harmoniously
beautiful, a few years later in these same woods
I was to understand the meaning of this boyish
impression because I was practically overwhelmed
with a sense of some great presence, not only had
someone been there, someone was there.
I knew even then that it was the great spirit of
the universe.
Never since have I been without this consciousness
of God speaking to me through plants, rocks and
every other aspect of his creation."
Curtis Gregory: Being here, being in the wooded area when he
had free time where he would learn about how flowers
would grow, how trees would grow and was very
curious and would explore and would ask a lot of
questions from what I understand.
And he became known as the plant doctor when he was
in the woods here.
And I really do believe it influenced him quite a
bit.
Because George was often sick and frail, his
brother Jim helped Moses on the farm.
George helped Susan with household chores, where he
learned to sew, cook and do laundry and needlework.
Moses' influence was seen in George's relentless
work ethic, love of music and his disdain for
wastefulness.
Gary Kremer: The paradox is that this young
African-American kid grew up in a household
dominated by two rather elderly white people and
for a time he had his brother Jim with him.
But beyond his brother Jim, there is no evidence
that Carver had much contact with other
African-Americans and to me that is a very
important reality of his life.
So he is born in a state that is in great conflict,
the conflict ends but the animosities don't, and he
is born into a state that is segregated when it came
to education.
African-Americans and whites went to separate
schools.
And that would have, I think, a tremendous effect
on Carver.
There were multiple instances in Carver's life
in which he refers to himself variously as the
orphan child of a despised race.
And that has always been a very telling phrase for
me.
I think in that regard Carver had a lot of
tremendous insecurities.
Why wouldn't he?
The Carvers did their best to provide George with
some education.
But by the time he was around 12 years old his
curiosity could no longer be contained.
There was a school for blacks in Neosho, a town
eight miles away.
George set out alone and on foot to achieve an
education.
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Luther Williams: It represents powerful
psychological resiliency.
What motivates a young person 10, 12 years old,
to leave where he resides and walk eight miles to a
school?
It is not only the site from which he originated
his education, it is the site that actually
represents the initiation of what I call his path to
freedom and that is the anchor.
That is the beginning of the incredible story that
is called Carver.
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When George arrived in Neosho, Andrew
and Mariah Watkins, a childless black couple,
agreed to take him in as long as he was willing to
help with the chores.
Even though George lived with the Watkins only a
short period of time, Mariah seemed to have made
a powerful impression on him.
She was a midwife in the community and had a great
knowledge of plants and their medicinal powers,
which appealed to George and inspired his lifelong
conviction illnesses could be cured through proper
use of plants and the products extracted from
them.
Mariah's strong faith also influenced George and she
was the first person he met who urged him to use
his genius to serve their people.
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Luther Williams: It's what
I term deeply forged spirituality, which does
not mean the same thing as religion, which I'm
arguing that a deeply forged spirituality
requires one to wear it, be cognoscente of it, be
in contact with it in all one's interactions.
And I think one of the reasons he was such an
extraordinary humanitarian is that it derived from
what I just spoke to.
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George loved people and he dedicated
his life to improving humanity's lot.
He once wrote, "I love humanity and all humanity
who is struggling to be something and somebody.
I am not interested in complexion, texture of
hair, nationality, etcetera.
I like all of God's work.
So may we continue to pray and to love each other
more and more, if possible, as time moves
on."
William Carver Lennard: That's what Jesus
Christ did, he came to serve others.
And that is what I feel that Carver did.
I think the influence and impact, the influence of
his life, like that of Christ, influenced a lot
of other people in a very positive way.
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Gary Kremer: Dreams were real to him,
dreams he perceived to be God's way of talking to
him and in that regard I think he thought he was
special, that he was imbued with qualities that
were God-given.
And I think that was a source of great strength
for him and a source of confidence.
Simon Estes: I've always said, God gives everybody
a talent and God gave George Washington Carver a
talent for science without compromising faith,
religion or God.
And I think that's what motivated him.
He was born with this mission, even when he was
a little boy, he probably didn't know when he was
five years of age that he was going to be a great
scientist and a great humanitarian, but God
instilled that in him at birth.
George's teacher in Neosho was unable to give
him the level of education that he desired.
So, when a couple stopped at the Watkins' home on
their way to Fort Scott, Kansas, he hitched a ride.
He made friends, many of them white, but he was
never far from the shadow of racism.
In Fort Scott, he witnessed the lynching of
a black man and left town immediately.
Later, he was admitted to Highland College in
Kansas, only to be turned away when officials saw
the color of his skin.
Lana Henry: Those kinds of things could drive you
into a cave, you could just back up and say, I
just can't face this.
But he didn't, he just kept driving forward and
facing the harsh realities ahead.
And it's so interesting because towards the end of
his life when he was hired to be a spokesman for
interracial cooperation and what an impact he made
on so many people that went on to impact others
and impact others and all those experiences he had,
the encounters and the racial barriers,
struggles, prejudice, and yet keeping one foot going
in front of the other.
Curtis Gregory: One thing I can appreciate from
Carver is that, as an African-American, is that
all the things that Carver went through, leaving here
and experiencing hate, and he did experience hate,
that Carver was never bitter.
And that's something that I definitely can
appreciate.
Even in our society today, which some things that
Carver went through are still very relevant today
as well, and sometimes I look on Carver's life
story as an example of how I can be a better person
as well.
Sceiva Holland: He didn't take the tragedies of
life, the disappointments of life, to define him.
And he had things happening so much, so many
things that you're like how in the world did he
even ever want to do anything, much less do
something?
Why would he want to help somebody else if he wasn't
getting some of the things that he thought he should
have?
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Hearing that Iowa might
have a college that would accept him, George went
there in 1888, landing in the town of Winterset,
where he found work at a hotel.
Visiting a local church there, he met a white
couple named John and Helen Milholland.
They treated him like family.
Years later he would say, "Mr.
and Mrs. Milholland have been my warmest and most
helpful friends."
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Paxton Williams: They did
not know that he was going to grow to become this
famous scientist or this famous educator.
They just saw that he was a person who had worth.
They saw a person who had potential.
And they took the time to learn about him as an
individual and they took the time to see what they
could do to encourage that potential.
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Paxton Williams: Though we all can't be
like Carver, because I believe he had a real
genius, we could all be like the kind of people
who encouraged him and inspired him in his way,
just regular, every day people doing what they
could to learn about a fellow human being.
Helen Milholland encouraged George to apply
to Simpson College, a small Methodist school 20
miles away in Indianola, Iowa.
He was accepted and enrolled on September 9th,
1890.
Dr. Jay Simmons: Carver came here and presented
his credentials and the President, President Holms
at that time, said well of course you're welcome here
and admitted him and thus began his career at
Simpson College.
Years later, George acknowledged the warmth of
his reception at Simpson College simply saying,
"They made me believe I was a real human being."
Paxton Williams: He really found a home there.
There is a well-known story about how several of
his fellow classmates would invite him to go to
concerts and he couldn't go because he didn't have
any money.
And before long, after this was known, he would
return home to find concert tickets slid
underneath his door.
♪♪
It was not botany or chemistry that George
yearned to study at Simpson.
He wanted to be an artist, a painter, and capture the
beauty of nature.
So it was that he asked Etta Budd, the college's
art teacher, for admission to her class.
And she gave him the chance.
Dr. Jay Simmons: It's kind of interesting in that she
was new to Simpson College the same year that he came
and she was a first year faculty member in art and
he had been drawing and wanted to pursue his art
and met with her and she was reluctant actually to
let him in her art studio because he didn't present
a portfolio or any of the usual reviews that would
give her an indication of his talent.
Nonetheless, he persisted.
He was an impressive fellow and he flourished.
And she encouraged him and as he grew as an artist
she helped encourage him to become better and more
adept.
But she was concerned that if he would actually be
able to make a living doing that and realized
that he had a great interest in agriculture,
agronomy and botany and because of that encouraged
him to go up to Iowa State and enter the agricultural
program, which of course he did.
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In 1891, George transferred to the Iowa
Agricultural College and Model Farm, now Iowa State
University in Ames, Iowa, where Etta Budd's father
taught horticulture.
He remained at Iowa State for five years as its
first African-American student, earning a
Master's degree and becoming the first
African-American faculty member.
Luther Williams: I think it was a powerful
validation of his worth, his worth as seen by
others.
My view is that at that point Carver was
thereafter in charge of his own career and life.
At first, life for George at his new school wasn't
easy.
Paxton Williams: He wasn't given a room near the
other students.
He wasn't allowed to eat with the other students.
His professor Pammel gave him one of his
laboratories to live in.
And a white lady from Indianola, a friend named
Mrs. Sophia Liston, she came to visit Carver in
Ames.
She decided she was going to walk around with Carver
all around town so that people could see that he
was accepted and known in society.
And she insisted that she would eat wherever he ate.
And so whereas before he had to eat with the hired
hands or the workers, the powers that be decided he
could eat with the other students.
I'm very proud of the fact that Carver decided to
stick it out when he first got to Ames.
But I'm also proud of the fact that the people who
perhaps weren't as welcoming of him when he
first got there, they were able to learn, they were
able to grow, they were able to change.
Eventually, he was embraced by white students
and faculty members alike, who saw in him a spark of
genius.
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Dr. Wendy Wintersteen: I think that
legacy is a message to all of us today and into the
future how important it is to value diversity, to
give all individuals who choose to work hard, no
question that George Washington Carver worked
hard every day, a chance to excel and to reach
their full potential.
In Ames, George befriended James Wilson, head of the
agricultural school, who would serve as U.S.
Secretary of Agriculture for sixteen years.
His dairying professor, Henry C.
Wallace, would hold the same post in the 1920s.
And Wallace's son, Henry A.
Wallace, who frequently accompanied George on
nature walks, would serve as Agriculture Secretary
and Vice President under Franklin D.
Roosevelt.
Dr. Wendy Wintersteen: On Sundays, George Washington
Carver would be invited over to the Wallace home
for dinner and afterwards George Washington Carver
and Henry A.
Wallace would go for walks and they would study
nature, look at plants, talk about what George
Washington Carver was studying at Iowa State
University.
And, interestingly so, George Washington Carver's
undergraduate thesis was on plant hybridization.
And here he was talking to Henry A.
Wallace who had founded Pioneer Hybrid based on
plant hybridization.
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George planned to obtain a doctorate at Iowa
State and the school wanted very much to keep
him on its faculty in what could have been a
contented life of academic distinction.
Then, in 1896, a letter arrived that would change
everything.
"I cannot offer you money, position or fame", it
said.
"The first two you have.
The last, from the place you now occupy, you will
no doubt achieve.
These things I now ask you to give up.
I offer you in their place work, hard, hard work, the
task of bringing a people from degradation, poverty
and waste to full manhood." It was signed by
Booker T.
Washington, the principal of an industrial and
teacher training institute for black students in
Tuskegee, Alabama.
Dr. Charlotte Morris: We talk about the Tuskegee
experience around here and everyone, everyone talks
about it but no one can just come out and explain
exactly what it is.
We all know that there is something about that
Tuskegee experience that keeps you here and keeps
you with the desire to want to do more.
It may be the grounds of Booker T.
Washington.
It may be George Washington Carver.
Because those were two great men who walked the
grounds of Tuskegee and so it's an honor and a
privilege actually to come behind them and do
something substantial for the university.
Booker T.
Washington was determined to make Tuskegee a leading
educational institution in the South, and his most
pressing need was to establish an agriculture
department.
But to establish such a department, Washington
recognized that he needed a black man with an
advanced degree in agriculture.
And in all the country there was only one such
man, George Washington Carver.
To lure Carver to Tuskegee, Washington
offered him an annual salary of $1,000 plus
living quarters.
Despite Washington's warning of hard, hard
work, Carver replied to him.
"It has always been one ideal of my life to be the
greatest good to the greatest number of my
people possible.
And to this end I have been preparing myself for
these many years, feeling as I do that this line of
education is the key to unlock the golden door of
freedom to our people." He would remain there until
his death 47 years later.
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Dyann Robinson: Booker T.
and Carver believed that people needed to be taught
not only how to live but to live beautifully and
live well and to make beautiful things out of
everything that was functional.
So I think that that's important, that kind of
contribution to learning that they gave and that
legacy is what made a whole two or three
generations back feel that they could do anything.
We had these brilliant doctors, brilliant
scholars up on campus because they had a place
to be geniuses, to show their genius in this
little cocoon, some little protective sphere.
And it started with Booker T.
and this school.
He made a place, a space for people to excel.
Carver was part of that.
Carver had never been in the Deep South.
Almost everything about Alabama's system of
agriculture, with its heavy reliance on cotton
and its system of tenant farming called
sharecropping, appalled him.
Shirley Baxter: When he first came on the train
here to Tuskegee, he talked about seeing all
the poor sharecroppers' homes and thinking, wow,
they could do better, and he knew that he could help
them do better.
And he spent pretty much that whole career here
doing work that was going to influence and help
those local farmers improve the quality of
their lives.
In addition to being administrator of the
agriculture department and two experimental farms,
Washington expected Carver to teach a full load of
classes, serve on the institute's executive
committee, oversee the beautification of the
campus, serve temporarily as its veterinarian and
establish an outreach program for poor black
farmers in the surrounding area.
Dana Chandler: Washington had one vision for Carver
and Carver had another vision for himself.
It was tumultuous at times, but I think and I
know that they both had mutual respect for each
other.
Carver began his teaching in an old shack with no
facilities.
In order to establish some sort of laboratory, he had
to root through junk heaps to find usable bottles and
other items.
Dr. Walter Hill: Why in the heck did he come to
Tuskegee?
Where he came where people were jealous of him,
clearly the resources he obtained were less, came
to a hostile environment both politically,
socially.
Despite all of that why did he come?
You look and read the history and it comes down,
to serve my people.
That is the most fundamental piece that I
want to share from my vantage point of 40 years
in here because taking on that task, that's the most
daunting task.
Just a few years out from slavery, a decade or so
out from slavery, and right into the heart of
the beast.
Now the only way you could do this is you have to be
a warrior, you have to have courage, you have to
be dauntless.
You have to be so mission oriented.
And he had to suffer the indignities that a black
person had to suffer during that time and yet
he continued on his journey.
That's the real power, that's the real spirit
within.
Edie Powell: I think after a while you can get very
frustrated and do something else.
But he didn't and that is I think his own core of he
never wavered from what his own commitment was in
the very beginning.
When Carver arrived in the South, there were roughly
five million black farmers there.
Only about one-fifth of them owned any land.
Almost all of them shared a common problem,
overreliance on cotton as the region's main cash
crop, together with the sharecropper system used
to produce it, which depleted the soil and kept
tenant farmers in a permanent state of
impoverishment.
Improving the practice of Southern agriculture and
the lot of poor farmers became Carver's chief
concern.
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Gary Kremer: I think that
Carver quickly recognized, whatever preconceptions he
had about the South when he went down there, he
quickly recognized the enormity of the challenges
he faced.
And so I think he concluded very quickly
that he had to come up with some practical ways
that would improve the lives of mostly the tenant
farmers and the sharecroppers who were
living in the South.
And he tried to impact their lives in tangible,
specific ways that would help them on a day-to-day
basis.
Carver began urging farmers to rotate crops
and to use organic fertilizers.
He preached the value of planting soil-restoring
crops such as peanuts, sweet potatoes, black-eyed
peas and soybeans.
Mark Hersey: He adapts it to the circumstance and
develops a very different version of what scientific
agriculture should be, one that emphasizes ecological
thinking to a degree that very few, maybe no other
progressive era endeavors did.
In the late 1930s he looks back over his career and
says, my work is that of conservation.
And what did he mean by that?
What would change about the way we understand
America's conservation tradition if we took him
seriously, if we look at his work as a part of that
broader American tradition of conservation?
He issued bulletins that uneducated farmers could
understand, explaining how these soil-restoring crops
should be grown and what they could be used for.
He devised a traveling demonstration wagon called
the Jesup wagon and traveled dusty roads to
teach small groups of farmers how to improve
their lives.
"Start where you are with what you have," he would
say.
"Make something of it.
Never be satisfied."
Luther Williams: He
demonstrated in a prophetic manner two major
current problems, the need for sustainability and
conservation.
♪♪
Everywhere Carver went, he had this innate ability to
connect with people of all creeds, cultures and
colors.
He had an effect on those he met, as they had an
effect on him.
They learned from one another.
The community of Tuskegee was no different.
Frank Godden: He wanted to know everything about me,
my background, my mother, my father, my sisters and
brothers.
And from that time we got to be very good friends.
Dyann Robinson: He liked fat back and my daddy
would, that was his specialty.
And his friend, Mr. Parker, Felton Parker,
was a baker but he also was a barber and he used
to cut Carver's hair.
And so Mr. Parker and my dad were both proud of
knowing Carver and being able to do a little
something for him.
They respected him, oh yes.
My dad was so proud that he took fat back to
Carver.
Melonese Robinson: He had to have his dinner at
twelve o'clock.
If it was not there he would not eat it.
But one day a mother came in preeclampsia, she was
pregnant.
Well, he didn't get his dinner at twelve noon that
day.
He got it at one o'clock.
I told him why I was late.
I said, a mother came in preeclampsia, she was in a
coma and Dr. Mitchell called us to the operating
room and that's why your dinner is late.
"Well, I would not be in the world if it had not
been for a female, my mother." He ate his
dinner.
Sceiva Holland: She always said that Dr. Carver was
such a gentle person, so kind, so caring.
And I said, well mama, how do you figure that?
She said, well he would stop, he would talk, he
would take time.
Thousands of letters from the famous and unknown
flooded Carver's modest office at the Tuskegee
Institute.
Peter Burchard: People would write him about
problems with their farms and their crops and almost
anything.
He seemed to be able to answer any question in the
universe.
He wrote more than 25,000 letters in his life.
Well, he would receive all these letters, six or
eight or ten, and he would read them at night, go to
sleep and he believed that the problems were worked
out while he was asleep in his subconscious.
And it seemed to work because his letters are
full of insightful answers.
Ken Quinn: When I visited Tuskegee University I had
the remarkable opportunity to stay in George
Washington Carver's suite.
And I realized how long he was there, half a century.
And I think of how many students he interacted
with and influenced and how many of those who were
involved in the extension work all throughout the
South as part of reaching out to all the black
farming families.
When you think about all those years, all those
people, I don't know if that gets highlighted to
the extent that it should.
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Most agreed that Carver was a
gifted teacher, whether in the classroom or in the
field, who instilled a sense of wonder and
curiosity in his students.
Gary Kramer: I interviewed a number of his former
students.
Admittedly they were quite elderly.
But they had a great admiration for him as a
teacher.
I don't think he was a conventional teacher who
stood before class and lectured.
One former student of his described him to me as
being like Socrates.
He said he would never tell you anything, he
would force you to work for answers yourself.
And I think that is why students found him so
challenging and interesting.
And there's abundant evidence that he spent
enormous amounts of time with students and that
even after students left he maintained
correspondences with them.
And a lot of these letters, and I've read
many of them, are addressed to him as Dear
Daddy, Dear Father, Dear Dad.
And he would often sign these letters as Your
Father.
He never married and never had children.
I think his students were his surrogate children in
that regard.
Melonese Robinson: Just a simple individual, wasn't
hard to talk to, just as kind and nice.
You would think he would, being a genius, you would
think he would kind of be a little standoffish, a
little selfish, not kind and not polite.
He just acted like a real human being.
Frank Godden: You must get an education and you must
do this and you must do that.
And he really affected my life greatly.
At administration and faculty politics, Carver
was less adept.
Booker T.
Washington, perhaps the nation's most influential
black man in the early years of the 20th century,
was increasingly away from the campus.
Carver found himself embroiled in bitter
rivalries that eventually would cost him the
chairmanship of the agriculture department.
Gary Kremer: Carver expected total deference.
He didn't expect anybody to question his decisions
or his actions.
And so as a consequence of that I think they clashed.
Dana Chandler: Carver quit Tuskegee several times, he
sent in his resignation.
It never was accepted.
(laughs)
But Carver believed in the work at
Tuskegee to the point that when he died he left his
entire fortune to Tuskegee.
♪♪
He stayed, in large part, because of his
loyalty to his adopted region and its struggling
farmers, and to the hundreds of earnest
students, his "children", who idolized him.
As his tenure at Tuskegee approached two decades,
George Washington Carver was well-known and
respected throughout the South and among
agriculturalists in other areas of the country.
Then, in late 1915, an event took place that put
Carver on the path to international stardom.
Booker T.
Washington unexpectedly died.
Peter Burchard: They had a new president.
Washington had only called himself the Principal.
He had never said he was the President.
But the new person, Robert Russo Moton, called
himself the President.
He was very good but things changed a lot for
Carver as soon as Moton took over.
Carver was starting to want to withdraw into his
laboratory a little bit more.
And he pretty much told the new president that he
was going to do that.
He didn't really ask.
And he went along with it.
So, suddenly Carver was able to control his own
destiny.
Within a year he had been elected to the board of
the National Agricultural Society and became the
first black man to be elected a fellow in
Britain's Royal Society for the Encouragement of
the Arts.
Yet, few of Carver's inventions ever found wide
use, and only three ideas were patented, two for
paint produced from clays and one for cosmetics,
leading some to question Carver's scientific
legacy.
Frank Godden: He had a probing mind of developing
things and he didn't care anything about money.
The auditor was on him all the time to cash his
checks.
Dr. Walter Hill: One way to look at Carver's works
is just to think about him being the integrator of
research and extension and coming up with the
multiple uses of peanuts, of ways of dealing with
the boll weevil, crop rotations, which some
people may say that's not science because it's not
basic.
But it is real in terms of applying sciences that are
going to serve society.
There is a real role for applied research.
It does not have to justify itself.
Dana Chandler: That has always been a puzzle to me
is that people have claimed that Carver wasn't
a good scientist or wasn't a scientist because they
never could find any of his works to prove it.
Well, we have those works.
They dispel any of that.
They are replete with any numbers of calculations,
observations, he uses the scientific method over and
over again.
That alone should settle the issue.
Edie Powell: I think in everything he did he said
he was searching for the truth, that's what science
is about.
So, I think he was true to himself and he never
wavered from what he really believed.
Carver came to prominence around 1920 for his work
with peanuts, which eventually led to his
creation of over 300 products from the plant.
Peter Burchard: He said that one time a woman came
and said, Mr. Carver, I planted all these peanuts,
and now what am I going to do with them?
And he said, I had a sort of stupid look on my face
and I said, well I'll think about it.
And he went back to his laboratory and that is the
famous story of when he sat out in the woods and
said, Mr. Creator, asked him what he should do.
And the Creator said, well what do you want?
And he said, I want to know all about nature,
something very broad.
And the Creator said, that's far too big a
question for you, little man, you must narrow it
down, increase the intent and decrease the extent.
And Carver said, well how about knowing about the
peanut.
And he said that the Creator said, well that's
a little bit more your size but it's still
infinite.
So, Carver set to work and created hundreds of
products out of the peanut and this was a
demonstration, this was to say, look what you can do.
His peanut work intrigued people and so became the
main feature of his public persona.
Sometimes, his message of planting soil building
crops got lost in all the attention he received on
that one phase of his work.
♪♪
And there were other factors working
against the world hearing his message.
Mark Hersey: It's ultimately the political
economy of the South that causes Carver's campaign
to fail and this is because no matter how good
his ideas were, and his ideas were very good, they
were very ecologically sound and they could make
a difference and I would argue that in some ways
they did make a difference.
So there were maybe 150 or so black farmers who owned
their own land in Macon County in 1896 when Carver
shows up.
There are more than 500 by World War I, which is
basically when Carver's campaign, at least as a
protracted effort, comes to a close.
Now that is not all due to Carver's work, but
Carver's campaign contributed to this
growth.
But ultimately the deeply entrenched racism of the
Jim Crow South meant that Carver's plan had little
hope of working in the long-term.
♪♪
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Carver
gained ever-increasing fame.
He was offered jobs by well-known individuals.
The inventor, Thomas Edison, offered him a
$100,000 salary to come work in his lab in New
Jersey.
But he turned it down to stay among his people.
He befriended leaders from around the world.
In 1937, Carver met business mogul Henry Ford
in Dearborn, Michigan at a meeting of pioneers in the
chemurgy movement, a branch of applied
chemistry that was concerned with preparing
industrial products from agricultural raw
materials.
Over the next few years, Ford and Carver visited
each other back and forth and remained in close
contact.
Peter Burchard: Henry Ford picked Carver's brain at
every opportunity he could get.
Ford had a big plantation in Ways, Georgia.
He actually built a school on the property and called
it the George Washington Carver school, had Carver
come over and dedicate it and whenever they met they
would walk around and Ford would just keep feeding
Carver with questions one after the other to try to find
out how to use certain crops.
Frank Godden: The last time Henry Ford visited
him, he was in Dorothy Hall and he was living on
the second floor.
And it was difficult going up and down those stairs.
And Henry Ford called on Montgomery to get an
elevator company to come out and he put an elevator
in Dorothy Hall from the first floor to the second
floor for Dr. Carver.
Henry Ford thought a lot of Dr. Carver.
♪♪
♪♪
To African-Americans, Carver
had become living proof of a black man who had
overcome great difficulty and achieved greatness.
Simon Estes: I have experienced a lot of
discrimination that he experienced and I admired
him because of the obstacles with which he
was confronted.
And he did all of this with grace, with
determination, with courage, never bitterness.
So he was a great model for me to try to
exemplify.
Dyann Robinson: He was trying to bring this whole
group of people up from nothing.
♪♪
To many Southern whites, Carver showed the
brilliance and the heart that wordlessly challenged
the system of sharp segregation.
To those working for racial harmony, he
exemplified their ideal.
Carver subscribed to Booker T.
Washington's views, which held that blacks should
attain an economic foothold before trying to
tear down social and political barriers.
They had their critics.
African-American scholar W.E.B.
DuBois, the first black person to earn a Ph.D.
from Harvard University, condemned what he
described as their unwillingness to challenge
white racism.
Gary Kremer: I think it is very complicated.
Both men were born into slavery, DuBois was not.
And I think they simply tried to do the best they
could with the understanding that they
had at the time.
Carver has been criticized for being an
accomodationist.
One historian, Louis Harlan, in a book about
Booker T., described Carver as "outbookering
Booker".
I think that's unfair to both men.
I think that Carver struggled with this all of
his life.
And we're still struggling with it today.
Luther Williams: I think Carver's, if you want to
call it such, revolutionary disposition
was creativity, was discovery, not activism in
the social political context.
Could he have done more in that regard?
Yes.
But I think he was made differently.
♪♪
In 1938, when Carver was 74, he was
diagnosed with pernicious anemia and was
hospitalized for almost a year.
As soon as he could, he returned to experiments in
his laboratory, preparing his legacy in the Carver
Museum at Tuskegee and establishing the George
Washington Carver Foundation to carry on his
work with needy farmers.
♪♪
George Washington Carver died January 5,
1943 at around age 78 and is buried on the Tuskegee
campus near Booker T.
Washington.
"He could have added fortune to fame," his
epitaph reads, "but caring for neither he found
happiness and honor in being helpful to the
world."
♪♪
Frank Godden: I was in the
desert in North Africa.
Edward R.
Murrow, the distinguished announcer, broadcasting
from London.
He said, Dr. George Washington Carver, the
distinguished scientist from America, died today.
It was sad, it was very sad news to me.
And so, that was the last of Dr. Carver.
♪♪
Seventy five years after his death, the world
still looks to Carver for inspiration.
Students continue to report on his life and
thousands of people still visit the places that
honor him.
His is a legacy that defies time.
♪♪
Peter Burchard: In 1941 he opened all of his
artwork to the public.
He put on a big exhibition and there had been nothing
up to that time, all of his works from Simpson
College and a few since then.
People were stunned that the fact that this great
agricultural expert chemist, botanist,
etcetera, etcetera was also an artist.
A good friend of his who was working, writing
articles, she asked him that question, Bess
Walcott.
She said, how have you been able to do many
things?
And he said, would it surprise you if I told you
I have only been doing one thing?
And he said, Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the
English poet, was working at the same job and he
picked up a little plant, tiny plant in his hand
with the roots still on it and soil clinging to the
roots and he quoted Tennyson, "Flower in the
crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies.
I hold you here root and all in my hand.
Little flower, but if I could understand what you
are root and all and all in all I should know what
God and man is." And this really was the core of
Carver's thinking.
He said Tennyson was seeking truth.
That's what the artist is seeking, that's what the
scientist is seeking and that is what I have been
doing all of my life.
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
Funding for George Washington Carver: An
Uncommon Life is brought to you by --
♪♪
Wherever your
operation takes you or who you share it with we'll be
where we've been all along, with you from the
word go.
♪♪
The Wallace Genetic Foundation.
♪♪
The Alliant Energy Foundation.
♪♪
And by the Des Moines Community
Playhouse.
♪♪
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