Nashville History Corner

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON AND GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER

BY RIDLEY WILLS II

Two of the greatest Alabamians of the years between the Civil War and World War II are buried side by side, not in Birmingham, Mobile, Montgomery or Huntsville, but in the country town of Tuskegee at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute.

They were Booker T. Washington, founder at age 25 of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, and its leading developer, and his compatriot at the school, George Washington Carver. Both lived their adult lives in a segregated society in one of the poorest states in the Union where, between 1890 and 1915, Jim Crow laws discriminated violently against former slaves and their descendants.

Booker T. Washington, a brilliant rhetorician, was the leading voice of his race. He advocated getting along with white people and not confronting them, a controversial position. In the fall of 1896, Washington hired a brilliant graduate of Simpson College in Missouri, to come to Tuskegee to take over a newly organized Agricultural Department. This man was George Washinton Carver, whose profound knowledge of botany, agriculture and soil economy enabled him to devise ways of helping the economically submerged South to better ways of living.

Not content with mere scientific discovery for its own sake, he was passionately convinced that the results of research must be brought directly into the lives of the people. To this end, he traveled through the South in a wagon filled with scientific exhibits of all kinds and with examples of aids to further better the lives of poor Americans, particularly Black people.

On those weekend trips, he customarily met with Black farmers living way in the sticks. He urged them to quit relying on cotton as their cash crop and instead grow peanuts and sweet potatoes. He showed their wives how to pickle, can and preserve vegetables and fruits. More than one Black Alabama farmer said Professor Carver, “knows more than God does.”

President Theodore Roosevelt knew and enormously respected both Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. Both men visited Roosevelt at the White House and Roosevelt visited Tuskegee Institute. Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace was also an enormous supporter of both Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver.

At age 86, I probably will never see Tuskegee. I wish I had when I was younger and I urge you to do so. Should you go, you will also learn about the Tuskegee airmen, who proved in Italy in World War II that some Black men were expert flyers.