A00008 - George Washington Carver, Peanut Prophet and Agricultural Scientist

George Washington Carver,  (b. 1861?, near Diamond Grove, Missouri, — d. January 5, 1943, Tuskegee, Alabama), American agricultural chemist, agronomist, and experimenter whose development of new products derived from peanuts (groundnuts), sweet potatoes, and soybeans helped revolutionize the agricultural economy of the South. For most of his career he taught and conducted research at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Carver was born into slavery, the son of a slave woman named Mary, owned by Moses Carver. During the American Civil War, the Carver farm was raided, and infant George and his mother were kidnapped and taken to Arkansas to be sold. Moses Carver was eventually able to track down young George but was unable to find Mary. Frail and sick, the motherless child was returned to his master’s home and nursed back to health. With the complete abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, George was no longer a slave. Nevertheless, he remained on the Carver plantation until he was about 10 or 12 years old, when he left to acquire an education. He spent some time wandering about, working with his hands and developing his keen interest in plants and animals. He learned to draw, and later in life he devoted considerable time to painting flowers, plants, and landscapes.

By both books and experience, George acquired a fragmentary education while doing whatever work came to hand in order to subsist. He supported himself by varied occupations that included general household worker, hotel cook, laundryman, farm laborer, and homesteader. In his late 20s, he managed to obtain a high school education in Minneapolis, Kansas, while working as a farmhand. After a university in Kansas refused to admit him because he was black, Carver matriculated at Simpson College, Indianola, Iowa, where he studied piano and art, subsequently transferring to Iowa State Agricultural College (Ames, Iowa), where he received a bachelor’s degree in agricultural science in 1894 and a master of science degree in 1896.

Carver left Iowa for Alabama in the fall of 1896 to direct the newly organized department of agriculture at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, a school headed by noted black American educator Booker T. Washington. At Tuskegee, Washington was trying to improve the lot of African Americans through education and the acquisition of useful skills rather than through political agitation. Washington stressed conciliation, compromise, and economic development as the paths for black advancement in American society. Despite many offers elsewhere, Carver would remain at Tuskegee for the rest of his life.

After becoming the institute’s director of agricultural research in 1896, Carver devoted his time to research projects aimed at helping Southern agriculture, demonstrating ways in which farmers could improve their economic situation. He conducted experiments in soil management and crop production and directed an experimental farm. At this time agriculture in the Deep South was in steep decline because the unremitting single-crop cultivation of cotton had left the soil of many fields exhausted and worthless, and erosion had then taken its toll on areas that could no longer sustain any plant cover. As a remedy, Carver urged Southern farmers to plant peanuts (Arachis hypogaea) and soybeans (Glycine max). As members of the legume family (Fabaceae), these plants could restore nitrogen to the soil while also providing the protein so badly needed in the diet of many Southerners. Carver found that Alabama’s soils were particularly well-suited to growing peanuts and sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas), but when the state’s farmers began cultivating these crops instead of cotton, they found little demand for them on the market. In response to this problem, Carver set about enlarging the commercial possibilities of the peanut and sweet potato through a long and ingenious program of laboratory research. He ultimately developed 300 derivative products from peanuts—among them milk, flour, ink, dyes, plastics, wood stains, soap, linoleum, medicinal oils, and cosmetics — and 118 from sweet potatoes, including flour, vinegar, molasses, ink, a synthetic rubber, and postage stamp glue.

In 1914, at a time when the boll weevil had almost ruined cotton growers, Carver revealed his experiments to the public, and increasing numbers of the South’s farmers began to turn to peanuts, sweet potatoes, and their derivatives for income. Much exhausted land was renewed, and the South became a major new supplier of agricultural products. When Carver arrived at Tuskegee in 1896, the peanut had not even been recognized as a crop, but within the next half century it became one of the six leading crops throughout the United States and, in the South, the second cash crop (after cotton) by 1940. In 1942 the U.S. government allotted 2,023,428 hectares (5,000,000 acres) of peanuts to farmers. Carver’s efforts had finally helped liberate the South from its excessive dependence on cotton.

Among Carver’s many honors were his election to Britain’s Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (London) in 1916 and his receipt of the Spingarn Medal in 1923. Late in his career he declined an invitation to work for Thomas A. Edison at a salary of more than $100,000 a year. Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Franklin D. Roosevelt visited him, and his friends included Henry Ford and Mohandas K. Gandhi. Foreign governments requested his counsel on agricultural matters: Joseph Stalin, for example, in 1931 invited him to superintend cotton plantations in southern Russia and to make a tour of the Soviet Union, but Carver refused.

In 1940 Carver donated his life savings to the establishment of the Carver Research Foundation at Tuskegee for continuing research in agriculture. During World War II, he worked to replace the textile dyes formerly imported from Europe, and in all he produced dyes of 500 different shades.

Many scientists thought of Carver more as a concoctionist than as a contributor to scientific knowledge. Many of his fellow African Americans were critical of what they regarded as his subservience. Certainly, this small, mild, soft-spoken, innately modest man, eccentric in dress and mannerism, seemed unbelievably heedless of the conventional pleasures and rewards of this life. But these qualities endeared Carver to many European Americans, who were almost invariably charmed by his humble demeanor and his quiet work in self-imposed segregation at Tuskegee. As a result of his accommodation to the mores of the South, European Americans came to regard him with a sort of patronizing adulation.

Carver thus increasingly came to stand for much of white America as a kind of saintly and comfortable symbol of the intellectual achievements of African Americans. Carver was evidently uninterested in the role his image played in the racial politics of the time. His great desire in later life was simply to serve humanity; and his work, which began for the sake of the poorest of the African American sharecroppers, paved the way for a better life for the entire South. His efforts brought about a significant advance in agricultural training in an era when agriculture was the largest single occupation of Americans, and he extended Tuskegee’s influence throughout the South by encouraging improved farm methods, crop diversification, and soil conservation.

A00007 - James Douglas, African Canadian Governor of Vancouver Island

James Douglas,  (b. August 15, 1803, Demerara, British Guiana — d. August 2, 1877, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada), Canadian statesman known as “the father of British Columbia.” He became its first governor when it was a newly formed wilderness colony.

James Douglas was born in 1803 in Demerara (later part of British Guiana, now Guyana) to John Douglas, a Scottish planter and merchant from Glasgow, who was in business with three of his brothers. His mother was Martha Ann Telfer, also known as "a Miss Richie." She was a Creole of mixed race from Barbados. The couple had three children together: Alexander, born 1801 or 1802; James, born 1803, and Cecilia, born 1812, but never formally married. Telfer was classified as free coloured, which in that time and place meant a free person of mixed African and European ancestry. James Douglas and his siblings thus were all mixed race. However, James appeared majority European. In 1812 John Douglas returned to Scotland with his children, putting James into school at Lanark to be schooled. He married Jessie Hamilton in Scotland in 1819, and had more children with her, making a second family. James went to school or was tutored by a French Huguenot in Chester, England, where he learned to speak and write in fluent French, which helped him in North America.

Douglas joined the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821 and rose to become senior member of the board, in charge of operations west of the Rocky Mountains. After the establishment of the southwestern boundary with the United States,he moved the company’s headquarters from Oregon to Vancouver Island in 1849. As governor (1851–64) of Vancouver Island when gold was discovered on the Fraser River in 1858, he extended his authority to the mainland in order to preserve Britain’s foothold on the Pacific in the face of an influx of settlers from the United States. His action was approved by the British government, which then created the colony of British Columbia. Douglas became its governor in 1858 after severing his connection with the Hudson’s Bay Company. He was knighted in 1863 and retired in 1864.

A00006 - Daniel Hale Williams, 19th Century Surgeon Who Performed Heart Surgery

Daniel Hale Williams,  (b. January 18, 1858, Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania — d. August 4, 1931, Idlewild, Michigan), American physician and founder of Provident Hospital in Chicago, credited with the first successful heart surgery.

Williams graduated from Chicago Medical College in 1883. He served as surgeon for the South Side Dispensary (1884–92) and physician for the Protestant Orphan Asylum (1884–93). In response to the lack of opportunity for African Americans in the medical professions, he founded (in 1891) the nation’s first interracial hospital, Provident, to provide training for black interns and the first school for black nurses in the United States. He was a surgeon at Provident (1892–93, 1898–1912) and surgeon in chief of Freedmen’s Hospital, Washington, D.C. (1894–98), where he established another school for African American nurses.

It was at Provident Hospital that Williams performed daring heart surgery on July 10, 1893. Although contemporary medical opinion disapproved of surgical treatment of heart wounds, Williams opened the patient’s thoracic cavity without aid of blood transfusions or modern anesthetics and antibiotics. During the surgery he examined the heart, sutured a wound of the pericardium (the sac surrounding the heart), and closed the chest. The patient lived at least 20 years following the surgery. Williams’ procedure is cited as the first recorded repair of the pericardium; some sources, however, cite a similar operation performed by H.C. Dalton of St. Louis in 1891.

Williams later served on the staffs of Cook County Hospital (1903–09) and St. Luke’s Hospital (1912–31), both in Chicago. From 1899 he was professor of clinical surgery at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, and was a member of the Illinois State Board of Health (1889–91). He published several articles on surgery in medical journals. Williams became the only African American charter member of the American College of Surgeons in 1913.