George Washington Carver: An Important Black American

George Washington Carver came into this world as a slave somewhere near Diamond, Missouri. Fast forwarding a about a decade he decided to leave his birth place to explore the Midwest, making a buck to fund his education. Carver did what he could importing knowledge where ever he can, finally graduating for a high in Minneapolis, sometime in 1885.

In that same year, he passed the entrance exam at an institution called Highland College located in northwestern Kansas. But unfortunately for Carver he was prevented from attending when school officials found out he was African American. Going on in 1891 Carver attended Iowa State College of Agricultural and Mechanical Arts in Ames. Which is now named Iowa State University. In 1894 he got his Bachelor of Science degree, Carver became the first African American to graduate form the college.

Afterward, after him graduating I mean he was given a position as an assistant botanist at the institution he graduated from. As he educated he worked on his masters degree. He studied fungus diseases and chemical classification of plants. In 1896 he received his maters degree, that same year an American educator named Booker T. Washington invited him to uphold the position of director of agricultural research at Tuskegee Institute, where he stayed for the rest of his days.

A career at Tuskegee Institute

During his tenure at Tuskegee Institute, Carver developed over 300 uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes, soybeans, and the byproducts of these crops. From peanuts he synthesized axle grease, soap, ink, flour, plastics, a coffee substitute, and more than 200 other useful products. From sweet potatoes he derived 118 products, including molasses, vinegar, and rubber, and from soybeans he extracted an oil with many uses. Partly as a result of Carver's research, peanut cultivation in the Southern states quadrupled from 1899 to 1943. By planting peanuts and sweet potatoes in addition to cotton, farmers were able to enrich their soil and were no longer economically dependent upon the success or failure of only one kind of crop.

Uninterested in business, Carver preferred that others commercialize the results of his experiments. Of his many inventions, Carver patented only three. Carver's primary goal was to help impoverished blacks. In 1940 he donated his savings to the establishment of the George Washington Carver Foundation at Tuskegee Institute to provide scholarships in the natural sciences. (www.Encarta.msn.com, page 2 of 4)

There at Tuskegee Carver developed his crop rotation method, in which really revolutionized the southern agriculture. He taught the farmers to change the soil - depleting cotton crops with soil enriching crops.

George Washington Carver was the recipient for numerous prestigious awards for his great achievements. In 1916 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts of Great Britain. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored people, (NAACP). Which awarded George Washington Carver the Springarn Medal in 1923.

Twenty years later the United States Congress established the George Washington Carver National Monument near his birth place of Diamond, Missouri, on the farm where he was born.

Quotes from George Washington Carver

"It is the styles of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobile one drives, nor the amounts of money one has in the bank. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success, said George Washington Carver."

"Look about you. Take hold of the things that are here. Let them talk to you. You learn to talk to them, said George Washington Craver."

George Washington Carver was a man of many various accomplishment. He was honored in the field he sought out of.........

- 1923 received the Spingarn Medal given every year by the NAACP.
- 1928 bestowed an honorary doctorate
- An honorary member of the Royal Society of Arts in London, England.
- 1939 received the Roosevelt medal for restoring southern agriculture.
- July 14th, 1943 U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt honored Carver with a national monument dedicated to his accomplishments.

This dedication in Missouri was preserved as a park, and this park was the 1st designated national monument to an African American in the United States.

"He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither, he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world." - Epitaph on the grave of George Washington Carver.