George Washington Carver: A Agricultural Revolutionary

Dr. George Washington Carver stands out as one of the truly great men of his time. Carver was born to slave parents in 1860 in Diamond Grove, MO. He went on to nearly single-handedly revolutionize Southern agriculture.

He had a small laboratory on the Tuskegee Institute campus. From here he developed many new ideas, crop technologies and products. Carver is most famous for developing crop-rotation methods that conserved nutrients in the soil. For instance, he found that if cotton and peanuts were alternated as crops, the soil did not become depleted. Soon, his experiments produced large surpluses of peanuts from which he developed 325 different uses for the peanuts from printer’s ink to cooking oils.

Carver also experimented with sweet potatoes and pecans in his crop rotation research and found they also left nutrients in the soil. From the soybean, Carver derived flour, breakfast food and milk.

Carver died in 1943 and was buried next to Booker T. Washington on Tuskegee Institute grounds. Carver’s birthplace was declared a national monument in 1953.

—    Adapted from The Black Collegian and the National Inventors Hall of Fame websites

 

Ida B. Wells: From Slave to Suffragette

 Ida B. Wells was born a slave. She spent only the first six months of her life enslaved, but she would fight for the rights of freed blacks and for justice for all for the rest of her life. Wells was born in Holly Springs, MS, in 1862. When her parents died of yellow fever in 1878, she raised her six siblings.

When Wells was 22, she boarded a first-class car on a train on the way to her first teaching job. The railroad was operating under “separate but equal laws,” so Wells was asked to move to another car and she refused. She filed a lawsuit and won, but the decision was reversed three years later by Tennessee’s Supreme Court.

Wells began to write for black newspapers while she was a teacher. She eventually became a full-time journalist and was part owner of a small newspaper in Memphis called Free Speech and Headlight. While working at this paper she began a campaign against lynching that would last her entire life.

Wells lost three good friends to lynchings in 1892. She attacked the practice editorially. She was disgusted that something so terrible had become public spectacle. She began to investigate false accusations of rape against black men that were used to justify their lynchings. When she wrote that some of the cases might have been white women who preferred black men, her offices were burned.

Wells spent the rest of her life working on social issues. She organized the first suffrage club for black women and established the first kindergarten in a black neighborhood. She died in 1931.

— Adapted from the Just the Arti-facts