02.05.2021 | GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER (1864 - 1943)
George Washington Carver, The Black History Monthiest Of Them All
February 11, 20143:46 PM ET | Gene Demby
Peanuts.
He did something, probably a lot of somethings, with peanuts.
That's basically the response I got when I asked people — my friends, folks on Twitter — what they knew about about George Washington Carver.
The details were hazy, but folks remembered that Carver was really important.
Oh, and something about Tuskegee! Wait, did he invent the peanut?
They half-remembered writing book reports about him in elementary school. And then a lot of them sheepishly acknowledged their ignorance.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should say here that I shared the same vague grasp about Carver's accomplishments, despite the fact that my high school is named after the guy. To me, he was the peanut dude.
Carver is, in a lot of ways, the Black History Monthiest of all of our Black History Month mainstays. All of the other folks who would be in your black history flashcard set — Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman — had discrete achievements that can be easily recalled; they get name-dropped throughout the year. But Carver is pretty much a February-only kind of deal. There's no Civil Rights Act he can be credited with helping to formalize, no foundational political theories he espoused, no popular innovation that he developed.
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