In the middle of the 19th century, the Southern plains sprouted prized cotton on vast and elegant plantations. Slaves worked the cotton fields under a relentless sun hot enough to burn their skin and pierce into their resilience. The soil was tired, and cotton crops were losing their vigor, their superiority.
George Washington Carver was born around 1864 in Diamond Grove, Missouri. The boy who wandered the Carver Plantation after the abolition of slavery would grow up to become a world-class chemist, agricultural scientist, inventor, educator, and humanitarian. He was sought after by Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Mahatma Gandhi. In 1941, Time magazine dubbed him the “black Leonardo.” He would end up as one of the most revered inventors of all time, with 300 inventions made from the peanut alone.
Carver obtained a high school education in Kansas and then enrolled in Simpson College in Iowa. Later, he transferred to Iowa State Agricultural College and obtained an undergraduate degree as well as a master’s in agricultural sciences. His graduate research drove him to focus on plant pathology. He moved to Alabama in 1896 and became Director of Research at the Tuskegee Institute.
