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Continuing #BlackHistoryMonth 
is scientist George Washington Carver, one of my fave Americans if for no other reason his pioneering work with peanuts.
Carver was born in MO into slavery sometime in the early 1860s; we don't exactly when. He was stollen along with a sisters &
is scientist George Washington Carver, one of my fave Americans if for no other reason his pioneering work with peanuts. Carver was born in MO into slavery sometime in the early 1860s; we don't exactly when. He was stollen along with a sisters &
his mother & resold in KY. His MO owners went after him & relocated him, but not his mother & sister. After emancipation during the civil war his former owners raised Carver as their own child. He went to black schools in KS & tried to enter college but was denied b/c of his race
He homesteaded 17 acres successfully, borrowed money & became the first black student at Iowa State where he earned a BS & then a MS in Agriculture in 1896. He became Iowa State's first black faculty member specializing in Botany. Booker T. Washington then lured him to the
Tuskegee Institute to run the Ag Dept. For the next 47 years Carver worked tirelessly to improve the lot of poor southern farmers encouraging them to rotate crops & introduce sweet potatoes & peanuts to replenish soil depleted of nitrogen through repeated cotton plantings.
His bulletins were much anticipated one of which contained 105 recipes for peanuts. Carver found 300 different uses for peanuts/peanut oil in his career. By the 1920s he was one of the most famous black Americans in the world advising both Roosevelt presidents & Coolidge. He
testified before Congress about the need for protective tariffs on peanuts which became law with the Fordney-McCumber tariff of 1922. He worked until the day he died in 1943 & left his entire fortune ($1 mil in 2021 dollars) to Tuskegee. He is buried next Booker T. Washington.
