George Washington Carver: Bigger than peanuts

This video is sponsored by Skillshare and this is George Washington Carver, one of the most famous agricultural and food scientists of all time and certainly the most famous in the southern United States, where I live. He was born enslaved and when he died he was hailed as one of The two bookends of his life were the work of white elites who sought to exploit Carver for their own purposes when I was in grade school. I think I learned that George Washington Carver invented peanut butter and single-handedly saved it. southern agriculture to the environmental, social and economic degradation of cotton farming none of that is true white journalists, politicians and business magnates absurdly inflated Carver's scientific achievements during his lifetime, which sounds a little benevolent, but in reality it was the worst kind of symbolism in the service of a white people.

So, in the decades after Carver's life, white historians seemed to take a little too much pleasure in debunking the myth of Carver's achievements. It's true that Carver probably wasn't a great agricultural and food scientist, but he was a great man and his legacy matters. especially for us Americans, anyone who grows things or eats. George Washington Carver was born in rural Missouri sometime in the early 1860s. We don't know for sure that this is the home of Moses Carver, the man who enslaved George, and here's the first place on this. story where things get weird when Carver was a newborn baby, his mother and sister were robbed some guys came in the night and kidnapped them and took them to Kentucky and sold them into slavery again just to make money.

Moses Carver went after them but was only able to recover a baby, George, and not his mother, so now Moses Carver and his wife Susan had George, his older brother, James, and no one to raise them, so the raised after emancipation. This former slave-owning white couple grew up in George Washington. Carver asked his own son, this provided Carver with a very different type of childhood than most of his black contemporaries experienced in the South, even when it came time to attend school, clothing that accepted black students It was eight miles away, that's very far. In the car before the car, an Arab

carver

walked there alone on foot, he was about 12 years old and when he arrived he was late, the school was closed, so he slept in a barn.

The barn turned out to be owned by a childless black couple who discovered the boy and took him in permanently. That story illustrates how incredibly dedicated Carver was to his own intellectual curiosity and at the same time how fortunate he was despite the incredible misfortune of being born who he was. , when and where he was throughout his life, so much that dedication and that luck didn't hold up, he was accepted to a university in Kansas, so when he showed up, they said: oh, wait, we didn't know you were black, you can't come here, so he tried farming and quickly turned his small plot in Kansas into a botanical garden, fruit trees, vegetables, landscaping plants, these are all paintings he later made.

He got a loan to go to a liberal arts college in northern Iowa, and when his art instructor saw these paintings of his, he said, "Hey, maybe you should." go study botany George Washington Carver became the first black student at Iowa State Agricultural College (now known as Iowa State University) and later became the first black faculty member in 1896. Carver was called by this guy, Booker T Washington, easily the most prominent African-American. leader of the era of he also born into slavery Washington founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, now Tuskegee University, a historically black university. Washington recruited Carver to head the agriculture department at Tuskegee and Tuskegee would be his base for the rest of his life.

This is Carver in his actual laboratory at Tuskegee, although of course these pictures are from long after 1937, but when he accepted this position, Carver wrote to Washington that agricultural education is, quote, the key to unlocking the golden door of freedom for our people, although I would soon discover that their students saw things differently, many saw education as a means to escape the farm and here it is essential to understand how terrible it was to be a black farmer in the southern United States. United in the early 20th century, not long ago, land leasing and sharecropping systems were practically slavery under a different name, whites still owned all the land and allowed blacks to farm it in exchange for taking large part or most of the crop, but wait, not all farmers in this part of the country primarily grow cotton.

There wasn't as much food to eat, they bought much of their food and supplies at a store, usually on credit, this store was often owned by the white owner because the cotton monoculture had horribly depleted the soil of the South. Crops often failed and sharecroppers would not be able to pay their debts to the store, essentially turning them into indentured servants of their owners. If this was not slavery, it was servitude. The way out of this for so many African Americans was to leave the land to get factory jobs in the cities and in the North to get an education and start a business George Washington Carver's great vision was to give black farmers ways to improve their lives in the earth; how, through a concept far ahead of his time, sustainability, Carver sought to encourage and empower black farmers to abandon cotton. for food crops like sweet potatoes and these

peanuts

, this is a peanut-filled cotton that depleted the soil of nitrogen.

Peanuts restored nitrogen to the soil and could be eaten, a great source of protein and fat. Carver said, hey, if you can eat more of your crop, that's less. debt you have to take on at the store to buy food and instead of going into debt at the store by buying artificial fertilizer, let me teach you about composting. The main legacy published by Carver are these newsletters aimed at black farmers in the South, the most famous of which is this one. one from 1917 that included one hundred and five peanut recipes. Now historians are unanimous about what I am going to say.

Peanut farming in the South was already booming before Carver started his work and peanut butter and peanut oil and all these things that people attributed to Carver had been invented a long time ago by other people. Few if any of his novel ideas for agricultural products were ever implemented by anyone. He didn't leave any lab notes on him. No formula. Very little that would have been considered serious scholarship even then, but. That wasn't his gift, he had the gift of words. Now I'm going to play you a little bit of George Washington Carver's real voice and prepare myself for it because his voice reportedly surprises almost everyone he's ever met in his entire life, yeah.

The purpose of scientific training is the good tree and whenever you find the truth, you will find the fire, you will know the truth, then the truth will set you free, so yeah, what happened to that? Well, historian Lyndon McMurray speculates that the development of his vocal cords was affected by various ailments. As a child, he was sickly and even as an adult, he was hunched over. He shuffled his feet when he walked. He was that guy with that voice from a band. peanut industry sent to speak to the US Congress in 1921. He was there to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee in favor of a bill that would impose tariffs on imported

peanuts

, thus strengthening American peanut producers and mines.

This is right in the era of Jim Crow. He starts the story by bringing out all these interesting peanut-based snacks. that he has come up with and a congressman on the committee makes a racist joke the congressman says do you want a watermelon to go with that? The idea that all black people love watermelon was a widespread racist stereotype of the time he was a northern congressman by John Q Tilson of Connecticut, as we can see in the transcript, Carver does not let this racist joke faze him, only He says, of course, if you want to defect, watermelon is great, but you know we can get along pretty well without dessert.

The recent war has taught us that he is talking about sugar rationing during World War I and then proceeds to dazzle this committee by talking about how peanuts and sweet potatoes together make up this practically complete diet and how we have barely tapped into the potential of these crops George Washington Carver became a celebrity almost overnight reporters hungry for a story wrote ridiculously unsourced articles saying he was solely responsible for the peanut boom and that he He was a wizard at chemistry and all kinds of things. Not true, some historians have noted that Carver did little to correct the record as his legend grew, but we know from comments Carver made to a student of his named John Sutton that he felt a lot of pressure to maintain the legend since the Institute.

Tuskegee. he was using it as fundraising fodder. White elites like Henry Ford formed friendships with Carver people who had an interest in maintaining America's racist social order. In Carver they had found a very convenient friend who was sure that he wanted to improve the conditions of blacks, but through agriculture. White elites liked the idea of ​​keeping blacks on the farms and they liked that the

carver

s' rhetoric of empowerment was about self-help and not about overthrowing systems of oppression. Many historians have also noted that Carver's unimposing physical presence and high-pitched voice made him easily threatening. he threatened whites and Carver himself was an accommodationist on issues of racist public policy and social mores.

There are documented cases of Carver dining with white people and voluntarily getting up and eating alone in another room. His boss, Booker T. Washington, had caused a national scandal. in 1901, just sitting down to lunch with President Theodore Roosevelt and Carver said that he never wanted to cause such a fuss, that he didn't want to make waves, he just wanted to talk about agriculture and his philosophy of himself. -improvement and Christianity very devoted to him. I will now quote a 1976 article by historian Barry McIntosh simply adding that McIntosh uses the word black as a noun rather than an adjective.

Using it as a noun is generally considered quite offensive today. because it reduces a human being and all of their complexities to this single aspect of who they are, however, this use of the word as a noun was very common in the language at the time, so here we go, the Carver myth was proclaimed and accepted more widely in white society by lavishing praise on a token black they could deny or atone for prejudice against blacks as a class; The presence of a successful black in the South could serve as testimony that the Southern social order was not oppressive to blacks per se and, by extension, that those who did not succeed were themselves to blame.

Now implicit in McIntosh is probably a precise observation there is the assumption that Carver had no merit as a scientist who proved everything let me leave you with a slightly contrasting view on that topic this is from historian Linda McMurray, who writes in her book, if Carver had been White, he would probably he would have made significant contributions to my ecology or hybridization and would have died in obscurity because he was black. He famously died without making any significant scientific advances; In other words, his identity diverted him from the lab to the spotlight, but think about what he did there.

He got large numbers of people thinking, perhaps for the first time, about sustainable agriculture and living and eating in harmony with nature. Surely that achievement is equal to anything I could have achieved in a lab now. I guess I've become known for making a smooth, clever, cheesy transition into my sponsor's message right now, it doesn't seem right to me this time, so I'm just going to direct you to this creative intended to be a curated list of courses taught by black people. artists available right now on Skillshare, the sponsor of this skill sharing video, is an online learning community where you can learn all kinds of creative and business skills, from illustration and animation to this amazing essay writing class taught by Roxane gay in this infomercial now in this In this class I will talk about how to write a good essay by having a good idea and making sure you do the necessary research, having a sense of purpose in your writing and, most importantly, how to see both in words writing from the principle. personal and outward-looking to make sure people can relate to your story no matter what Skillshare is much more than just a one-way video lecture or tutorialYouTube messy, these are carefully constructed classes with logical flow projects for you to do and a community where you can get feedback if you want to learn how to do almost anything, this is a great and incredibly affordable option, unlimited access to all of these classes are less than $10 a month with an annual membership and the first thousand of you can get a free two-month trial of Skillshare premium by hitting my link in the description.

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