DR. GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER

Look at that flower on his lapel. He never went anywhere without one.

This is Dr. George Washington Carver (c. 1864 - 1943), born a slàvè, d!ed as one of the greatest scientists in American history  and yet today most people only think "peanuts."

He was so much more than peanuts.

The boy they called the Plant Doctor:

He was born in Diamond, Missouri, during slàvêry. His mother was stôléñ by râiders when he was a baby. He never knew her. He never knew his father. Raised by his white former slávé-owners, Moses and Susan Carver, as their own child.

As a boy, he couldn't go to white schools. He walked 8 miles to a Black school. Then was rejected from college because he was Black. He taught himself botany by talking to plants.

White America called him "The Black Leonardo" . TIME Magazine gave him that name in 1941  because like Leonardo da Vinci, he saw art in science and science in art.

In 1896, Booker T. Washington bègged him to come to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to teach pôōr Black farmers. Carver went.

What he found was disàstèr: For 100 years, Southern soil had been rãpëd by cotton. Cotton, cotton, cotton  until the land was dèäd. Pôōr Black and white farmers were stàrvíñg because nothing would grow.

Carver told them: Stop fightîñg the soil. Hèal it.

He was the first real environmentalist in America:

(1).  Crop Rotation: He taught them to plant peanuts, sweet potatoes, and cowpeas , crops that put nitrogen BACK into the soil. While everyone said "plant more cotton," Carver said "plant something that hèàls the ground." Today we call this regenerative agriculture.

(2).  300 Uses for the Peanut, 100 for the Sweet Potato: Farmers said, "If we plant peanuts, who will bûy them?" So Carver invented the market. In his tiny lab, he invented peanut milk, peanut paper, peanut soap, peanut ink, peanut shampoo, peanut oil, and sweet potato flour, molasses, vinegar, dye. Not because he wanted to be ríçh , he NEVER patented most of them. He wanted pôōr farmers to have something to sell.

(3).  The Jesup Wagon: He put a classroom on a mule wagon and rode from farm to farm teaching illiteràte sharécropper how to farm better. The first mobile extension school in America.

He was offered $100,000 a year by Thomas Edison and Henry Ford , fortunes then. He said no. "My people need me," he said. He stayed at Tuskegee for $125 a month.

When he dîêd in 1943, President Roosevelt built a monument for him , the first national monument for a Black man in America.

So why don't we know him?

Because America loves to remember Black athletes and entertainers. It forgets the Black man who saved the Southern soil, who warned about environmental çöllapsé 50 years before it became fashionable, who believed that "No books are in a library like the books of nature."

He once said: "I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in."

That flower on his suit? He picked it every morning. Because a man who started life with nothing never stopped believing beauty was free.

Don't just call him the peanut man.

Call him the Father of Sustainable Agriculture. The Black Leonardo. The Slávé who taught America how to farm.

That's #BlackExcellence.

Offu Aya Ebirigor