George Washington Carver Essay

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George Washington Carver was a famous American botanist and inventor. The date of his birth is unknown, but he was born into slavery in Diamond, Missouri. He died on January 5th, 1943 in Tuskegee, Alabama. He went to Iowa State University through 1994-1996. Having an art teacher see his talent for painting flowers and plants inspired him to study botany at Iowa State Agricultural College. There he earned a bachelor’s degree in agricultural science in 1894 and a Master of Science degree in 1896. Carver was the first African American student to graduate and was appointed to the Iowa state faculty as an assistant botanist for the Experiment Station in 1896. Carver worked out over 100 products using one major crop which was the peanut including …show more content…

He went to different schools before getting his diploma Minneapolis High School in Minneapolis, Kansas. He was accepted into Highland college in Highland Kansas, but was denied admittance once college administrators found out that he was African American. Instead of going to class, he lived in a farm house. He worked out biological experiments and put together a biological collection. Biological collections are like Zoological and Cryogenic and a combination of any biological material type specimens. Carver spent 30 years going through 3 states and working at odd jobs to obtain a basic education. As a kid, he took walks in the woods and loved to study plants. When he was little, he was always known as Carver's George. When he started school, he went by George Carver. He added the W in the middle telling his friends it stood for Washington. Back when Carver was a slave, Moses Carver bought George's parents for $700. Moses and his wife treated George and James like their own children. When he was one week old, he was kidnapped with his mom and sister by raiders. Carver believed peanuts could fight …show more content…

From 1923-1933, he toured white southern colleges for the commission on interracial cooperation. He had many awards like the Spingarn medal for the NAACP in 1923, a Roosevelt medal for distinguished service to science in 1939, the Thomas Edison Foundation award in 1942, inducted into the Hall of fame for Great Americans in 1973, and National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1990. In his experiments with peanuts, he was more interested in them as a cheap source of protein that didn't empty the soil as much as cotton did. The peanuts had nitrate-producing legumes and the cotton too all nutrients from the soil. It caused the soil to stay fresh each planting season. He let people on a farm take the peanuts and use them as a source of food for their livestock. Carver was not a fan of politics but was involved in government research and their programs. His research and his experiments helped to improve the quality of life for a lot of farming families. Peanuts were never recognized as a crop in 1896 when he went to Tuskegee. They became one of the six leading crops throughout the U.S. In the south, it was the second cash crop after cotton by 1940. In 1942, government allotted over 5,000,000 acres of peanuts to farmers. He was Tuskegee's unofficial spokesman and a speaker at black and white civic groups, colleges, churches, and state fairs. He played piano at fund-raising events for different schools. He

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