entered one of his paintings for consideration by the organizers of the Worlds Columbian Exposition (aka, “The World’s Fair) in Chicago. “Yucca and Cactus” was accepted for show. As you might suspect, plants were frequently the subject of Carver’s painting; they were a beautiful combination of his love for art, his love for the natural world, and his interest (conceived in his “plant hospital”) in the why and how of plant forms and habits. In 1896, Carver received his Master’s Degree in agriculture and bacterial botany and began teaching at Ames. He was content but had dis-ease with that content- ment, an ongoing nagging belief that he should be doing more to help his race. Then, in April of 1896, he received a letter from the African American leader, Booker T. Washington:
I cannot offer you money, position, or fame. The first two you have. The last, from the place you now occupy, you will no doubt achieve. These things I now ask you to give up. I offer you in their place work—hard, hard work—the task of bringing a people from degradation, poverty and waste to full manhood. (Elliot)
Washington
was offering Carver the opportunity to head the agricul- tural department at Tuskegee, a strug- gling and impover- ished black college in Alabama. And in that offer, according to Elliot, “God had revealed His plan for George Carver.”
In Service to His Race
As the train jostled from Ames, Iowa, to Tuskegee, Alabama, in
George Washington Carver (front and center) with staff members at the Tuskegee Institute. (Library of Congress)
October of 1896, George Washington Carver, now 35, contemplated the people he saw working in the country- side. It was harvest season, and every available hand was in the cotton fields. As the train passed, African American men, women, and children would straighten a bit, look with flat expression toward the train and then bend again into their work. Already Carver was getting a sense of slavery’s aftermath in the Deep South.
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greenwomanmagazine.com
Carver likely also contemplated the task he had agreed to undertake. He had myriad responsibilities at Tuskegee. Perhaps most obviously, he was to teach. He was also charged with making money for Tuskegee’s operating expenses by planting cash crops. Last and most importantly, he was to contribute his efforts to the over- riding goal of the school: to educate and improve the lives of African Americans. Carver held this final goal most closely.
Carver the Teacher
Farming had a tarnished reputation in the South, and many of the students who came to Tuskegee wanted to study other things. Carver knew, however, that most of his students were destined to return to the family farm. He persuaded students to enter the School of Agriculture by selling it as “agricultural science” instead of “farming.” Nevertheless, once enrolled, his students found themselves engaged in harshly familiar work. They tilled the soil, cleared land, and planted crops. But they also received a whole new perspective on the study of plants and how they grow. In fact, this perspective was not just new to his students: It was new to the field of botany.
Carver had long been frustrated by traditional teaching methods, which he perceived focused on erudite and impractical in- formation geared toward scientists rather than useful application. From Holt: “The object was to know plants, or why study it? Instead the
student was given a lot of technical terms, and when he had learned those he did not really know plants.” Carver proposed that plants be taught in like groups and that as each plant or type of plant was learned, its diseases be presented as well. He put plants “into the great family by common characteristics and subdivided into the smaller groups by distinct differences.”
In addition to teaching agriculture, botany, and
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