George Washington Carver picked his middle initial at random to fix a mail mix-up
Born enslaved in Missouri and kidnapped as a baby, Carver became Iowa State's first Black student and a scientist Time magazine called a Black Leonardo. Even his famous name was improvised: he added a W to avoid confusion with another George Carver, and when asked if it stood for Washington, he said why not.
Carver was born in the early 1860s on the Missouri farm of Moses Carver; his exact birth date was never recorded. When he was about a week old, raiders from Arkansas seized him with his mother and sister and sold them in Kentucky. A man hired by Moses Carver recovered only the infant. After slavery ended, Moses and Susan Carver raised George and his brother as their own, and Susan taught him to read and write.
Barred from the local public school, he walked 10 miles to a school for Black children in Neosho, where a woman named Mariah Watkins urged him to learn all he could and give it back to the people. Highland University in Kansas accepted him and then turned him away because of his race. He homesteaded, hand-ploughing 17 acres, before studying art and piano at Simpson College in Iowa. His teacher Etta Budd saw his talent for painting plants and pushed him toward botany at Iowa State, where he arrived in 1891, earned a master's in 1896, and became its first Black faculty member. He never held an earned doctorate, and called the title doctor a misnomer.
In 1896 Booker T. Washington recruited him to lead agriculture at the Tuskegee Institute, where he stayed 47 years. He wanted poor farmers exhausted by cotton to rotate in crops such as peanuts and sweet potatoes, feeding their families while restoring the soil. The station issued more than forty practical bulletins, many with recipes, and his Jesup wagon, a classroom on wheels, took lessons directly to farms.
He was a brilliant researcher but a poor administrator. His above-average salary and private rooms irritated colleagues, a 1904 committee said his poultry yield reports were exaggerated, and he repeatedly offered to resign; each time Washington smoothed things over. His fungus collections are held in herbaria worldwide, and one species, Metasphaeria carveri, bears his name.
Source: George Washington Carver
