George Washington Carver (c.1864–1943) was an American botanist and educator. He started his life as a slave and ended it as a world-renowned agricultural chemist. Carver was embraced as a powerful symbol of African American success and racial justice.
Born in Diamond Grove, Missouri, Carver did not remember his parents. His father was killed accidentally before Carver’s birth. Slave thieves kidnapped his mother shortly after he was born. His mother’s former owners, Moses and Susan Carver, raised Carver and his elder brother on their small self-sufficient farm.
After 15 years of wandering around Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa looking for education while employed in a laundry, as a cook, and as a homesteader, Carver earned a bachelor’s degree in agriculture in 1894. He was hired as a botany assistant to pursue postgraduate work focusing on mycology (the study of fungi) and plant cross-fertilization. After receiving a master of agriculture degree in 1896, he accepted an offer from the educationist Booker T. Washington to work at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute as the director of agricultural research.
For the next forty-six years, Carver devoted himself to helping a lot of African American farmers by teaching the importance of soil improvement and crop diversification—new crops were essential to replenish soil impoverished by the routine growth of cotton and tobacco. He deliberated about the debt problems of small-scale farmers and landless sharecroppers. He discovered hundreds of uses for the peanut, the sweet potato, and soybeans—he encouraged their production, and, in doing so, helped transform Southern agriculture.
Carver’s substantial work as an agricultural researcher and educator was muddled by the legend of the “peanut wizard” that he was ascribed to. Americans, especially in the South, found Carver’s rise from slavery and his personality appealing.
Carver was frugal and donated all his life savings to create a foundation for research at Tuskegee. He never married and instead “adopted” many Tuskegee students as his “children” and provided them with educational loans and assistance.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by George Washington Carver
Ninety-nine percent of all failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.
—George Washington Carver
When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.
—George Washington Carver
Topics: Action, Life, Kindness, Virtue, Excellence, Goodness, Fame
Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people they give up their secrets also—if you love them enough.
—George Washington Carver
Topics: Love
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.
—George Washington Carver
There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation—veneer isn’t worth anything.
—George Washington Carver
Topics: Achievement
Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.
—George Washington Carver
Topics: Gardening, Nature
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.
—George Washington Carver
Topics: God, Nature
Where there is no vision, there is no hope.
—George Washington Carver
Topics: Vision, Hope
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Luther Burbank American Botanist
Paul Vixie American Scientist
Eliezer Yudkowsky American Scientist
Ralph Bunche American Political Scientist
Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
Frederick Banting Canadian Medical Scientist
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg German Philosopher, Physicist
Bill Joy American Computer Engineer
Thomas Edison American Inventor
Rosa Parks American Civil Rights Leader