http://ozarkspub.vo.llnwd.net/o37/KSMU/audio/mp3/americanle_8073.mp3
Almost every schoolchild knows the name George Washington Carver and most folks could tell you he was a legendary pioneer of science. But few know of his early life that began here in southwest Missouri. For KSMU’s local history series, Sense of Place, reporter Emma Wilson interviews the author of a new biography about him.
In 1864, the Ozarks was being torn apart by the Civil War. Loyalties were divided and vigilantism was rampant as official conflict between the North and South was drawing to a close in this region. During this unsure time, George Washington Carver was born into slavery on the farm of Moses Carver in Diamond, Missouri. The violence of the times hit Carver hard and early.
“As an infant, Carver and his mother were kidnapped by Bushwhackers.”
That’s Gary Kremer, the executive director of the Missouri Historical Society. He says that the landowner, Moses Carver, hired someone to look for them.
“And the person he hired was able to retrieve George but not the mother. So he brought back this, by then, sickly infant child, probably suffering from whooping cough, back to Missouri. So George never saw his mother again. He referred to himself as ‘the orphan child of a despised race.’”
From that point forward, George and his older brother were raised by Moses and Susan Carver.
“All the evidence indicates that he had a reasonably happy childhood. But he lived at a time and in a place where Missouri was racially segregated. He could not go to white schools. So as an adolescent, he left the Carver farm and walked to Neosho, Missouri.”
In Neosho, Carver enrolled in a black school but, Kremer says, there was almost no regulation regarding the qualification of African American teachers and Carver likely knew about as much as the teacher did.
“He had learned to read and write in the home of Susan and Moses Carver so he goes to Neosho to seek an education but he stays a relatively short time, probably months, maybe even a year."
His wanderlust and search of an education eventually took him to Iowa where he originally went to college to become an artist. He changed course and, in 1896, became the only African American with a master’s degree in agriculture at that time. Soon after, he was hired to lead the Agriculture department at the new Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. There he was to do the research that would make him famous and the work that improved the farms and lives of countless poor southern farmers. That was teaching farmers to diversify and rotate their crops and to never waste anything. Kremer says it is likely that Carver brought in knowledge of the type of subsistence farming and conservation he learned in the Ozarks to his work at Tuskegee.
“The agricultural economy was dominated by the one crop of cotton and Carver encouraged African American farmers in the south to diversify agriculture. And essentially, he tried to teach them the same lessons, I would argue, that he learned on the Moses Carver farm.”
Gary Kremer recently wrote George Washington Carver: A Biography, which will hit bookshelves sometime this month.
For KSMU’s Sense of Place, I’m Emma Wilson.