George Washington Carver

Who was George Washington Carver?

George Washington Carver was born into slavery in Diamond, Missouri, around 1864 and rose to become one of America's most beloved scientists, botanists, and teachers. For nearly five decades he led the agriculture program at Tuskegee Institute, where he urged poor Southern farmers — many of them recently freed or the children of the enslaved — to restore their boll-weevil-ravaged soil by rotating cotton with peanuts and sweet potatoes.

What made Carver extraordinary was not only the laboratory but the pulpit-like gentleness of his teaching. He published plain-spoken bulletins for the farmer, the teacher, and the housewife alike, and he became famous worldwide for finding hundreds of practical uses for the peanut. He refused to patent most of his discoveries, believing knowledge that fed people should belong to everyone.