It’s Black History Month, but will Kentucky’s kids learn much about Black history?
February is Black History Month, and we are observing the event with some thoughts about an important African-American scientist – George Washington Carver.
Carver’s is a unique American success story. It’s estimated that he was born to slave parents in Missouri in 1864 before the Civil War ended. A year later, he became free as just another dirt-poor Black child in the war-impoverished South.
In addition, Carver faced some challenging medical issues.
Nevertheless, Carver became an educated man, among other things becoming the first of his race to attend Iowa State Agricultural College (now Iowa State) in 1894. He continued at this school to earn a Master of Science Degree in 1896. He was the first Black faculty member at Iowa State, as well.
In 1896, Carver moved on to what was then the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, (today’s Tuskegee University), where he headed the agricultural department for many years while making many interesting discoveries and providing modern farming techniques to the farmers of the South.
Among other things, Carver is today recognized for his efforts to move the South forward from over-dependence on cotton as a cash crop. His retraining of farmers to make better use of the soil was important to the South’s redevelopment after the Civil War. He understood that heavy cotton farming depleted the soil of necessary nutrients, and he developed crop rotation methods using peanuts, sweet potatoes and soybeans to replenish farmland.
When markets for peanuts and sweet potatoes proved weak, Carver conducted considerable research to find how peanuts and sweet potatoes could be used as the raw materials for other useful products like flour, ink, dyes, plastics and more.
As a consequence, while the peanut wasn’t even considered an American cash crop in 1896, by the time World War II started it was one of the six leading crops in the nation.
By the time of his death, Carver was well-recognized as an important American. One indication of this is after his death in 1943, though World War II was raging and consuming huge amounts of American resources, materials were still provided to honor Carver with a monument in Missouri.
But, here’s a note of irony. Though unquestionably an important man of science and agricultural development, there’s no guarantee that any Kentucky students will ever learn anything about George Washington Carver. The current Kentucky Academic Standards for Social Studies and even the current draft of a proposed replacement never mention his name. No other major inventors such as Samuel F. B. Morse (telegraphy), Alexander Graham Bell (telephones), Thomas Edison (motion pictures and the light bulb among many others), and the Wright Brothers (powered airplanes) are mentioned, either. That isn’t the history lesson I think Kentucky’s students deserve, not about either Black or white American inventors.
Data collected from multiple sources using Bing and Google.