“Peanuts.
He did something, probably a lot of somethings, with peanuts.”
That, Gene Demby wrote on NPR’s “Code Switch” blog in 2014 was “basically the response I got when I asked people – my friends, folks on Twitter – what they knew about George Washington Carver.”
“The details were hazy,” he added. “But folks remembered that Carver was really important.”
I too grew up learning he was important. In fact, Carver was one of the mere handful of Black people I learned about when I was younger. There was Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington, who was an advocate of advancement through education and entrepreneurship rather than through challenges to Jim Crow laws. And there was Harriet Tubman, who led many runway slaves to freedom. (I can’t remember if I learned about Frederick Douglass or W.E.B. Du Bois.)
And then there was George Washington Carver, who is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp issued on January 5, 1948. I remember learning that he tried to convince Black sharecroppers in the South to grow peanuts and sweet potatoes. I think I learned he did so because these crops would replenish nutrients taken out of the soil by the cotton, the farmers’ main crop. I also remember learning that he supposedly came up with something like 300 different uses for peanuts, including – I incorrectly believed – peanut butter.
While my memory of the details wasn’t fully accurate, I generally had it right. The first Black to graduate from what is now Iowa State University, Carver taught and did research at Tuskegee from 1896 until his death in 1940. He was a leader in efforts to get farmers to restore nitrogen to their soils by alternating cotton crops with plantings of peanuts as well as sweet potatoes, soybeans and cowpeas. He published circulars with recipes that used the foods and although he spent years developing and promoting numerous products made from peanuts, none became commercially successful.
Carver “became ludicrously famous for his peanut work,” As Rachel Kaufman wrote in Smithsonian Magazine in 2019, In fact, according to Carver biographer Linda McMurry, “In the last four years of his life, his name was attached to almost everything even remotely connected with blacks, such as a ‘colored theatre’ in Norfolk, a swimming pool in Indianapolis, [and] a settlement house in Pittsburgh…Eventually it became practically impossible to enter a black community anywhere in America without being reminded of the existence of a man named George Washington Carver.”
His fame extended beyond the Black community. In 1941, Time Magazine hailed him as a “Black Leonardo” and Henry Ford said, “Professor Carver has taken Thomas Edison’s place as the world’s greatest living scientist.” After he died on January 5, 1943, Congress passed and President Roosevelt signed legislation making his birthplace a national monument-an honor previously granted only Washington and Lincoln.
And in January 1948, he became just the third Black man to appear on a stamp. He was preceded by Booker T. Washington, who was among the 35 people pictured in the Famous Americans series of 1940 and by an unnamed black man portrayed on a 1940 stamp commemorating the 75th anniversary of the 13th Amendment banning slavery with a depiction of the now-controversial statue showing Abraham Lincoln standing and holding with the Emancipation Proclamation and a newly-freed slave on his knees but about to rise.
It appears that Carver’s fame was due to three major factors. First all, he was trying to address a major problem. Second, in the 1920s, when U.S. peanut farmers were facing growing competition for lower-priced peanuts from China, Carver was, in Demby’s words, “adopted as a spokesman of sorts by the United Peanut Association of America – although not without some initial internal debate. (He may have been famous, but he was still black.)” Carver had impressed members when he spoke at their 1920 convention and based on that speech, he gave what became famous testimony to the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee which was considering imposing a tariff on imported peanuts.
Third, while he felt strongly about helping poor black sharecroppers, he never challenged Jim Crow laws and practices or responded to personal insults. In the Congressional testimony that helped make him famous, Carver didn’t speak until all of the white witnesses had spoken. Moreover, when one congressman obnoxiously asked if Carver would like some watermelon to go along with his food, Carver supposedly replied that watermelon was fine, but it was a dessert food. As Demby wrote, “Because Carver frequently talked about God and carefully cultivated an image of humility, members of different faiths claimed him as their own, or at least as a kindred spirit. Because he eschewed making political statements, he was a blank screen onto whom anyone could project his own ideologies.”
In the years since he died, Carver’s reputation has faded, in large measure because of his unwillingness to publicly challenge Jim Crow laws and practices. But, perhaps that’s unfair, because, according to Demby who wrote about asking historian Jelani Cobb if Carver’s historical import had been overstated. Cobb “seemed annoyed with the premise of the question,” wrote Demby he added that Cobb told him “‘Carver was important partly because of what he did and the context in which he did it.'”
So tonight, as I sit watching the consequential results from the amazingly close Georgia election come in and wait for whatever will happen tomorrow when what the Lincoln Project calls the “Jim Crow Caucus” will challenge the presidential election results, it seems appropriate to give at least a tip of the hat to Carver, who once wrote, “it has always been the one great ideal of my life to be of the greatest good to the greatest number of ‘my people’ possible and to this end I have been preparing myself these many years; feeling as I do that this line of education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom to our people.”
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.