George Washington Carver

Don't measure me by how high I have climbed, but by depths from which I have come.

Carver started as a slave with his mom .His mom was kidnapped and he stayed at the Carver Plantation to learn to read and write . He later went to college and became a teacher at Iowa State University. While he was teaching there, Booker T. Washington sent him a letter asking him to teach at Tuskegee Institute. "I can't offer you money, position or fame. . . I offer you in their place work--hard, hard work--the tack of bringing a people from degradation, poverty, and waste to full manhood." He said yes.

He invented over 300 uses for peanuts, including shampoo, peanut butter (of course!), salad oil, ink, floor polish, cream, glue, finger polish, ice cream, face hand cream, milk, glycerin, oil for hair and scalp, pomade for skin, shaving cream, toilet soap, vanishment cream, dyes for cloth and leather, paints, wood stains, axle grease, charcoal from shells, cleanser for hands, diesel fuel, gasoline, illuminating oil, insecticide, insulating boards, linoleum, nitroglycerine, paper and plastics.

He added the initial "W" to his name to avoid confusion with another man named George Carver. Friends started calling him George Washington Carver, though he never used that name himself.

Carver became so well known and loved that his funeral lasted three days to allow the thousands of mourners to pay their respects.

-- by Harrison Reiser

Barely a year old when the Civil War ended, his family stayed on at the Carver plantation and he learned to read and write while still young. Life on plantations was hard, especially since many of the crops like cotton and tobacco took so much from the soil and weren't producing well after a few years.

After being denied admission to one university because of his race, he studied at Simpson College and Iowa State University, where he became a professor. He was later recruited to the new Tuskegee Institute run by Booker T. Washington. Working for almost nothing, Carver discovered over 400 uses for legumes, including peanut butter and peanut oil. Most important, though, was the crop rotation that made southern farms more productive, and helped in the recovery of the southern economy after the Civil War. He said, "It has always been the one great ideal of my life to be of the greatest good to the greatest number of my people."

-- by Robert Reiser