He is typically honored for his achievements, success, and brilliance in the laboratory at the then-named Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. He conducted notable experiments and developed inventions using peanuts, soybeans, and sweet potatoes, agricultural products that grew plentifully around campus. But this hyper cultural focus on just one aspect of Carver’s expansive life and career has had the unintended effect of obscuring the breadth of his legacy.
In addition to the technical aspects of crop production, Carver emphasized the importance of food security and sovereignty for family farms. He believed that agricultural education could serve as a pathway toward freedom for Black folks, especially those in the rural South.
He worked to grow the benefits and resources of his institution from the boundaries of a college campus to the communities from which his students came. His commitment to ensuring that his work in the lab, on the farm, and in the kitchen were useful and accessible to Black sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and landowners extended throughout the Alabama Black Belt, and it is this commitment that defines his activist background. It is that legacy that the National Black Food and Justice Alliance extends through its publication of this inaugural issue of the Land, Food, and Freedom Journal.
Carver majored in botany at the State Agricultural College at Ames (which later became Iowa State University in 1959). He was the first Black student to attend. He graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in agriculture science in 1894 and with a Master of Science in 1896. As Carver’s biographer notes, at the time he was the “only Black man in the country who had graduate training in ‘scientific agriculture.’” In addition to learning to identify and treat plant diseases, he specialized in plant cross-fertilization, plant grafting, and crop production, emphasizing soil management. He learned that cover crops like peanuts and soybeans played a role restoring nitrogen, which healed the soil from the ravages of monocropping cotton and other cash crops popularized by plantation slavery.
Carver then became Iowa State’s first Black faculty member. He published widely in peer-reviewed journals and won national recognition for his scholarship. His inventions provided medical, nutritional, and other resources using plants. His scholarship established household uses of plant products such as “adhesives, axle grease [wheel lubricant], bleach, buttermilk, chili sauce, fuel briquettes, ink, instant coffee, linoleum, mayonnaise, meat tenderizer, metal polish, paper, plastic, pavement, shaving cream, shoe polish, synthetic rubber, talcum powder, and wood stain.”
In 1881, Booker T. Washington founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, now known as Tuskegee University, to educate Black land workers. Located in Tuskegee, Alabama, the school predominantly served students from the Alabama Black Belt. Washington recruited Carver to join Tuskegee’s administration, to advance the school’s mission of promoting Black self-sufficiency and community empowerment through agriculture.
[Carver] expanded the university’s boundaries by CENTERING THE NEEDS OF BLACK LAND WORKERS.
Washington’s employment offer letter to Carver acknowledged the limitations of the opportunity. He wrote humbly and honestly. He described the student population on campus, his vision for the institution, and its lack of resources. His letter states, “Tuskegee Institute seeks to provide education—a means for survival to those who attend. Our students are poor, often starving. They travel miles of torn roads, across years of poverty. We teach them to read and write, but words cannot fill stomachs. They need to learn how to plant and harvest crops.”
Washington could not have anticipated Carver’s enthusiastic response:
Carver arrived on the Tuskegee campus and was appointed the director of the Tuskegee Agricultural Experiment Station in 1897. In this capacity, he developed the School of Agriculture and ran the experiment station’s ten-acre farm. He was a leader in land conservation, plant breeding, plant disease and bacteriology, medicinal herbs, dietary recommendations, and known at the time as chemurgy—finding uses for agricultural products in manufacturing. He dedicated himself to the scientific work that would help develop and disseminate means by which sharecroppers or tenant farmers could profit enough to purchase land, feed their families, and achieve economic autonomy. Agriculture, in his view, was a strategy of self-sufficiency and sustainability. He explained why farmers might need scholarly work:
He believed that the purpose of education should be both abstract and concrete, theoretical and practical:
A major criticism of colleges and universities is their isolation from the communities that surround them. Academic disciplines use specific language in their publications, limiting accessibility and creating distance between fields and people outside academia.
Carver, in contrast, assumed primary responsibility for outreach activities to Black land workers in the region. The Agricultural Experiment Station had an open-door policy encouraging farmers to seek help with questions that arose in their work, and many mailed in or delivered plants and soil samples for analysis and advice. He understood that answering these questions was essential to the health and well-being of the farmer, their family, and their communities.
Carver included Black farmers in the research process to identify the questions that concerned them. He then returned with his findings and demonstrated how to put them into practice with the available resources. That relationship wasn’t one-sided. Farmers asked questions and reported the results to confirm or refute his recommendations. This reciprocal feedback process required a commitment to a common language that the farmer and the professor understood.
He moved beyond the theoretical framework often associated with the research process, and applied his findings to show the use of various ag-related technologies. Carver expanded the university’s boundaries by centering the needs of Black land workers.He advocated for their access to his findings, and many of his laboratory experiments were rooted in improving their lives and the environmental sustainability of their work.
Carver anchors his research questions in the community’s concerns, questions, and needs and reports his findings in multiple ways to reach farmers. His craft in service to the Black community reflected his dedication to close the distance between academic disciplines and communities. The origins of his research questions were rooted in the concerns of land workers. They exemplified what we now call community engagement. The application of his findings, or solutions, was centered around what under-resourced farmers had access to. He developed methods for farmers to increase their production of achievable and environmentally sustainable crops. He emphasized the importance of garden plots and created recipes, including foraged edibles and plant medicinals, demonstrating his commitment to the farmer family and, by extension, the health and well-being of the Alabama Black Belt community. Written materials comprised two forms of outreach pamphlets and bulletins for small farmers and the moveable school.
The first of Carver’s bulletins appeared in 1898, and Tuskegee published them annually for the rest of his life, offering a range of practical advice for farmers—touching on the fields, the barn, and the kitchen. The average issue was 10 to 15 pages and included photographs and Carver’s plant drawings with advice on the production of farm and kitchen crops. Articles addressed production concerns related to climate, soil fertility and remediation, crop rotation and diversification, and the dangers of mono-cropping. Recurring sections included guidance on how to decorate the home with native ornamental plants and the use of plant-based materials for clays, stains, and paints. He featured recipes and instructions on food preservation, such as canning, pickling, and curing, and selecting and preparing wild edibles.
The Agriculture Experiment Station staff, such as the farm manager, horticulturist, market gardener, dairy head, librarian, and livestock manager, penned articles for Carver’s bulletins. This publication deliberately spoke to local farmers in the Black Belt, in contrast to publications by other schools of agriculture and the USDA that were written for agriculture educators. His staff occasionally reprinted (with attribution) such articles if Carver felt they were pertinent and comprehensible to his audience. Thus, he bridged the gap between educators and farmers. Tuskegee’s head of horticulture, F.H. Cordoza, spelled out this intention in his contribution to the 1906 issue. He wrote, “This bulletin is written primarily for the colored farmers of Macon County and the state [of Alabama] generally, and is meant to be not technical, but in the simple language for the average farmers to understand and put into practice.”
In 1899, it was already clear how popular and valuable these publications had become. Carver stated that demand for access to previously published bulletins had exhausted the number printed and that reprinting would begin. Tuskegee University maintains a complete compilation of Carver’s bulletins, in a digital archive accessible online.
In 1906, with Washington’s endorsement, Carver designed the moveable school: a classroom on wheels. It carried select farm equipment, hand-drawn charts for farm operations, lectures on self-sufficient agricultural practices, and a list of specific crops and their preferred soil. The moveable school staff offered onsite demonstrations at farms. They taught best practices and strategies to maximize crop production while preserving soil health for the long term. In the vehicle, Ag Extension staff traveled and offered lectures on nutrition and recipe demonstrations. By 1930, the moveable school expanded its offerings by including a nurse, an agricultural and home demonstration agent, and an architect. They also showcased educational films outside schools, churches, and other venues like state fairs and on-farm locations.
The moveable school was so successful in centering community members as the focus in the transfer of knowledge, its example was adopted by the USDA and served as the foundation of what we know as agricultural extension.
Carver’s objectives were as simple as they were revolutionary. “The primary idea in all of my work was to help the farmer and fill the poor man’s empty dinner pail,” he wrote. “My idea is to help the ‘man farthest down.’ This is why I have made every process just as simple as I could to put it within his reach.” He based his scholarship upon the needs of the surrounding communities of Black laborers, landowners and their families. He theoretically derived research questions much as other scholars did, but his were rooted in the experiences of the land workers who sought to improve their lot in life.
The Land, Food, and Freedom Journal continues George Washington Carver’s legacy as an activist, artist, grower, and scholar. Some eighty-one years after his passing, this publication is an updated version of his bulletins and pamphlets. It picks up where The Bulletin left off as a space for Black farmers, artists, activists, and academics to share ideas about community health and wellness, using both education and agriculture to “unlock the golden door of freedom to our people.”
Peer reviewers: LaDonna Redmond, Dr. Ashley Gripper
