Going green in black history
ST. LOUIS - In this celebratory month of black history, the Missouri History Museum shines a comprehensive light on relatively little-studied scientist George Washington Carver.
A Southwest Missouri native born into slavery in 1864 on a sprawling farm, Carver became a forefather of sustainable products and seized upon the idea of crop rotation. He did not invent peanut butter, which surprises most people.
"What he did was popularize peanut growing in the South," said Shoenberg curator Anne Woodhouse, with the Missouri History Museum, who oversees the museum's Carver exhibit running through March 1. "He recognized peanut butter was nutritious and peanuts could be grown in the South."
Growing up on a farm endeared nature to Carver. Poor health prevented Carver from toiling in fields; with the abolishment of slavery and help from his former owners, he became free from atrocities associated with the time of slavery. Within the first year of Carver's life, he was enslaved, kidnapped, found and freed.
Slave raiders kidnapped Carver and his mother, Mary, from their owners' farm when George was a sick, frail infant. The kidnappers abandoned the boy, who they considered a liability, and his owners, Moses and Susan Carver, found and rescued him. After abolition, the Carvers adopted George and his brother, James. The brothers never saw their mother again.
While Jim was healthy, strong and worked in fields, sickly George learned housecrafts such as embroidery, rug hooking and tat work from Susan Carver, who also taught Carver the basics of reading and writing. George enjoyed handicrafts, and he also became a painter of botany before he became a scientist of botany. These skills helped Carver later in life as an educator when he taught male and female farm-dwellers how to improve their lives and surroundings.
Instead of being bitter about the situation of blacks at the time, Carver was a humanitarian whose primary goal was, as he put it, "to help the farmer and fill the poor man's empty dinner pail," regardless of skin color. While he did not farm, per se, Carver spent a lot of time outside as a child collecting rocks, observing nature and creating a "secret garden."
"I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast," Carver later wrote. "I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life - but there was no one to tell me."
In his unquenchable thirst for knowledge, Carver left home at age 13, with the Carvers' blessings, to seek an education. For primary education, Carver attended a school for blacks in Neosho, Mo. Later, a school of higher education accepted Carver as a student, sight unseen, but when Carver showed up for enrollment, he was rejected because he was black. Hurt but undeterred, Carver continued seeking knowledge and was accepted to Simpson College in Iowa, then to Iowa State University in Ames, and finally to a research and teaching position at Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, a private, historically black university located in Tuskegee, Ala.
"Carver realized he would do more for humanity with botany from a scientific point of view rather than painting flowers," Woodhouse said.
The Carver exhibit shows, however, that Carver continued to illustrate nature in art throughout his life, as depicted in a portrait of an adult Carver holding a paintbrush in front of one of his paintings.
One of the ideas that Carver cultivated was crop rotation - a practice long known to other cultures but not used in the South, where cotton was king. Carver understood that cotton had depleted the soil of the nitrogen that plants need in order to grow. He knew that legumes, such as peanuts and peas, had a symbiotic relationship with bacteria that could take inert nitrogen molecules from the atmosphere and convert them into a form that plants could use.
It was the desire to make these alternative crops more useful to farmers and others that led to Carver's famous work with peanuts, cow peas or black-eyed peas, and sweet potatoes.
Further advancing science, Carver's ideas on conservation were ahead of their time.
"I believe the Great Creator has put oil and ores on this earth to give us a breathing spell," he said. "As we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms. For we can learn to synthesize materials for every human need from the things that grow."
Carver blazed a trail for the development of products from plants, a field known at the time as "chemurgy," a word Carver coined, Woodhouse said.
Carver worked on biofuels with Henry Ford, and made plant-based massage oil for polio victims. With Carver's death at age 78 in 1943, the interest in plant products also ceased, only to be rediscovered at the end of the 20th century.
"The most important gift Carver gave to people wasn't any particular product," said Michael Dillon, chairman of the Botany Department at Chicago's Field Museum and one of the curators for the Carver exhibit, organized by the Field Museum. "It was the gift of self-worth. Carver crossed racial and class boundaries. He gave of himself so others could become educated, self-sufficient and proud."
Admission to the George Washington Carver exhibit is $10 for adults; $8 for seniors/students/groups; and $6 for children ages 6 through 12. Children 5 years old and younger are admitted free. Group reservations with a minimum of 10 people are available by calling (314) 361-9017 or (800) 916-8212. Visit www.mohistory.org for more information.