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:: Inside
"At Iowa State, George spent many hours poised
over plant specimens or walking through the woods, discovering
that 'each created thing is an indispensable factor
in the great whole, and one in which no other factor
will fit exactly as well.' Doing his classwork with
the used pencil stubs given to him by friends, and subsisting
on leftovers from the school cafeteria, George studied
incessantly, earning a Master's Degree in five years.
By 1896, he had acquired a reputation as the best plant
breeder at Iowa and knew that his position on the permanent
faculty of the University was guaranteed"
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:: More profiles
Albert Schweitzer
Marie Sklodowska Curie
Dag Hammarskjold
Thomas Merton
Dorothy Day
Simon Bolivar
Maria Montessori
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At Simpson College, George continued
to suffer the hardships to which he had grown accustomed.
He lived in an abandoned shack, given to him by the President
of the College, and salvaged a stove from the dump to
cook his meals, which he would eat while sitting on an
old crate. Yet the other students of the college, all
of whom were white, looked up to George as a model of
humor and kindness, visiting him and asking advice on
matters both academic and personal. He accepted the indignities
of racial prejudice without responding with bitterness,
and would later be remembered for little acts of selflessness
like crossing to the other side of the street so his white
woman friends would not have to greet him publicly. These
incidents caused George much grief, and he bore them with
quiet resignation.
At Simpson College, George dived into art with a passion,
and he showed an undeniable brilliance in his painting.
He would continue to paint throughout his long life, exhibiting
his artwork in both the North and the South, and more
than one close friend received an original painting as
a treasured gift. But despite his love for art, which
he called a means to lift "souls beyond the sordid things
of life," George Washington Carver felt unable to commit
his life to it. He felt that he could neither earn his
living at it, nor really satisfy himself through art alone.
Seeking a more practical degree in agricultural science,
he transferred to the Iowa Agricultural College at Ames
in 1891.
At Iowa State, George spent many hours poised over plant
specimens or walking through the woods, discovering that
"each created thing is an indispensable factor in the
great whole, and one in which no other factor will fit
exactly as well." Doing his classwork with the used pencil
stubs given to him by friends, and subsisting on leftovers
from the school cafeteria, George studied incessantly,
earning a Master's Degree in five years. By 1896, he had
acquired a reputation as the best plant breeder at Iowa
and knew that his position on the permanent faculty of
the University was guaranteed.
But George Carver could not choose for himself the life
of a cloistered University professor. In 1896, Booker
T. Washington asked him to join the faculty of the Tuskegee
Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama,
an all-black college established with the aim of educating
the blacks of the South so they could leave the endless
cycle of ignorance and poverty. George felt that this
was the opportunity to serve his people for which he had
been preparing his entire life.
Booker T. Washington, the son of a mulatto slave and a
white man, had worked himself through school as a coal
miner and later as a janitor, and in his early twenties
had begun to work with the Virginia-based Hampton Institute
as a teacher of vocational education to colored Americans.
He had founded Tuskegee in 1881, at the age of 24, on
the conviction that the integration of blacks into a dominant
white society depended on their ability to become a competitive
economic force. He felt that the capacity of blacks to
"endure wrong, to withstand temptations, to economize,
to acquire and use skill" could be honed through diligent
mental and manual work.
At Tuskegee, George quickly confronted the awesome responsibilities
that his office would entail. In charge of directing the
Institute's Experiment Station, administering the farm's
livestock, maintaining the landscaping of the school grounds,
teaching and supervising courses, and performing all of
the tasks required as Department head, George often found
himself stretched to the limit of his endurance. He quickly
discovered that other faculty members did not share his
enthusiasm for his way of doing things, and he entered
into heated battles with at least one other administrator
who refused to obey his orders. He suffered immensely
from these encounters, which injured his sense of pride
and held up his work. Yet he pursued his responsibilities
with vigor, refusing to give in to the despair to which
he could easily have fallen prey.
As a researcher, George tried to find economical ways
for the "man lowerest down" to improve the quality of
his life. The typical "black belt" farmer had only his
land and his labor with which to work, and George concentrated
on reducing the farmers' economic dependence on store-bought
goods by finding alternatives to flour, sugar, starch,
coffee, milk, and other household goods. He developed
hundreds of recipes for the peanut, sweet potato, and
cowpea, from which the poor farmer could derive the essential
nutrients he required, and he found ways to convert common
soil into whitewashes and woodstains which could work
wonders on the walls of a house. He also developed more
efficient methods of crop cultivation and experimented
with breeding strains of cotton which resisted the devastation
of the Southern boll weevil.
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