Many year ago I read a book in Marathi called "Ek hota Carver" and it moved my heart. It was a biography of Hon. Mr. George Washigton Carver which is like a light-house for a ship on high seas, at the stormy night, in the darkest hour.
I wrote here Mr. as an initial because in America, in his time it was not allowed for the black people to write Mr. before their name and whosoever did that mistake was even burnt to death for this small did.
Epitaph on the grave of this Mahatma (Person with a great soul) reads-
"He could have added fortune to fame but caring for neither he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world."
Indeed, he was the man who lived his life not only for his people and for his country but for the sake of the human being and his research uplifted every downtrodden to raise out of the slavery and establish oneself.
George Washington Carver
Born out of slavery and reared in Reconstruction, this humble man emerged to become a great benefactor to his people and his section. George Washington Carver was born into slavery during the Civil War, in the midst of bloody guerrilla warfare in Missouri . A tiny, sickly baby, he was soon orphaned, and his very survival beyond infancy was against the laws of nature.
That he, a Negro, became the first and greatest chemurgist, almost single-handedly revolutionized Southern agriculture, and received world acclaim for his contributions to agricultural chemistry was against all accepted patterns. But, seen from today's distance, possibly the most amazing facet of the life of this gentle genius is the manner in which he overcame enormous prejudices and poverty in his struggle from nameless black boy to George Washington Carver, B.S., M.S., D.Sc., Ph.D., Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London, and Director of Research and Experiment at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama -- all without a trace of bitterness, with total indifference to personal fortune, and thought only to make the world, and America in particular, a better place for all mankind.
George Washington Carver did not know the exact date of his birth, but he thought it was in January, 1864 (some evidence indicates July, 1861, but not conclusively). He knew it was sometime before slavery was abolished in Missouri , which occurred in January, 1865. (The Emancipation Proclamation freed only those slaves whose masters were "in rebellion against the United States ," which was not the case in Missouri , where slaves were finally freed by state action.)
George grew up on the farmlands of Missouri, reared by his mother until her seizure by a band of raiders; and then by Moses and Susan Carver, his mother's former owners, who had a homestead near Diamond Grove. Because the frail little boy was not required to help with the heavy farm chores, he had many free daylight hours in which to do exactly as he chose, and he chose to explore the wonders of nature. He talked to the wildflowers, asking why some of them required sunlight and some didn't, and how roots that looked exactly alike produced different-colored blossoms, and, he said many years later, the flowers answered him as best they could.
He investigated insects, tree bark, leaves, ferns, seeds, and the like and made all of them his precious playthings. He tended the roses, sweet peas, and geraniums around the Carver house, and they flourished so strikingly a visitor asked him what she might do to make her flowers prettier. "Love them" the boy answered.
Word spread around Diamond Grove that "Carver's George " had a magic way with growing things, and people began calling him the Plant Doctor. He made house calls, either prescribing remedies for ailing plants or taking them to his secret garden in the woods where he tenderly nursed them. His "magic" with growing things was largely the result of his patient testing of different combinations of sand, loam and clay as potting soil for various plants, his experimentation with different amounts of sunlight and water, and his tracking down of damaging insects and the like.
When the Carver's finest apple tree began withering, George crawled along its limbs until he found some on which colonies of codling moths had taken up residence. "Saw off those branches," he told Moses Carver , "and the tree will get well." And it did.
Occasionally, George and his older brother Jim were allowed to go with Moses to Neosho , the county seat, about eight miles from Diamond Grove. Once, to George 's surprise, he saw a line of colored children straggling into a log schoolhouse. When the door closed behind them, he crept up to it and listened. They were reciting lessons, just like the white children at Locust Grove. He peeped through a knothole. The Negro teacher was reading to the pupils just like the white teacher at Locust Grove. It was, truly, a school for Negro children. George , who was 11 at the time, knew he had to attend that school.
Back at the Carver house, the boy told Moses , Susan and Jim that he was going to move to Neosho so he could go to school. They asked him where he would sleep and how he would eat. He replied that he would find a place where he could sweep and wash clothes and do the other things Susan had taught him in exchange for his board. They did not try to stop him, and early one morning they watched him start, alone, down the dusty road toward Neosho .
He carried the best of his rock collection and a clean shirt in a bundle slung over his shoulder, and a package of food -- loaves of baked corn bread and strips of home-cured fat meat sandwiched in the middle -- under his arm. He turned once and waved a skinny arm, and then he was gone, driven by a deep yearning for the education that would help him find answers to all the questions buzzing in his mind.
George 's courage wavered after he got to the county seat, and he wandered up and down the streets until dark without speaking to anyone. Then, exhausted, he crawled into the loft of a barn near the schoolhouse, nestled down into the hay and fell asleep. At dawn the next morning, he ventured from the loft and crawled atop the woodpile in the yard behind a neat frame house next door to the school. The yard was grassy and had flowers in it, and that, to George , made it a good place to wait for the schoolhouse to be opened.
Suddenly, the back door of the house opened and a Negro woman came into the yard. She asked the big-eyed, frightened boy who he was and where he had come from. He stammered that he was Carver's George and he had come from the Moses Carver farm to Neosho to go to school so that he could find out what made snow and hail, and whether the color of a flower could be changed by changing the seed.
The woman, Mariah Watkins , told him she doubted if he could find out those things in Neosho , or even in Joplin or Kansas City , but that she had a feeling he would learn them somewhere. She had him scrub at the pump, and then took him inside and served him breakfast along with her husband, Andrew .
Mariah was a midwife and washerwoman, and Andrew was a hard-working odd-jobs man. They were a religious couple, well thought of in the county seat. They told George they had no children and that he could stay with them and go to school if he'd work. Overjoyed, the boy began listing all the household chores the Carvers had taught him to do. "That's fine," Mariah interrupted.
"You call us Aunt Mariah and Uncle Andrew , and listen now, don't ever again say your name is Carver's George . It's George Carver . Now run to school, and come back at noon for a bit of lunch."
With his keen, retentive mind and restless curiosity, little George was soon making faster progress than any of the other seventy-five pupils packed in Neosho's Lincoln School for Colored Children. And he was the happiest. He didn't join in the rough-and-tumble play in the schoolyard, but he was blissfully satisfied sitting alone in a corner, drawing pictures on his slate, while the other youngsters played. At home, he had a reader or speller propped in front of him even while he scrubbed cloths or washed dishes. He became expert at ironing -- even though he read while doing that, too.
By the end of 1876, George Carver had learned everything the teacher at the Lincoln School knew and everything in the books available to the school, and the teacher gave him a certificate of merit saying just about that. The 13-year-old boy faced the sad fact that, to continue his education, he would have to leave his happy life with Aunt Mariah and Uncle Andrew and his warm association with brother Jim , who had also moved to Neosho . He heard some neighborhood Negroes say they were going to move to Fort Scott , Kansas , a comparatively large town about seventy-five miles from Neosho. He offered to tend the mules along the way if they would let him ride in their wagon, and they agreed.
George Carver nearly starved before he found a job in Fort Scott . When he did find one, as a cook in a private residence, it did not leave him time to attend school. He lived in a tiny room under the back steps of the house, and saved every penny of his meager wages. As soon as he thought he had enough to carry him through a term of school, he quit the job as a cook. He rented a lean-to behind the stagecoach depot for a dollar a week, and enrolled at a big brick school which taught subjects he had never even heard of before. He allowed himself a dollar a week for food and bought almost nothing else. He studied by candlelight far into each night, and he read every book, pamphlet, and newspaper he could acquire.
By the end of the term he was penniless. He worked all summer washing and ironing bed linen for the hotel and doing laundry for businessmen and ranchers who came and went by stagecoach. By fall, he had enough money saved to go back to school.
It was a lonely life, and George was sometimes the object of cruelty and prejudice. After his schoolbooks were taken from him and destroyed by two white boys, he had to finish a school term without textbooks. He wrote long afterward, "Sunshine was profusely intermingled with shadows, such as are naturally cast on a defenseless orphan . . ." and they went on to tell that many people were kind to him and that he began to make friends over his laundry tub and bar of soap.
During George's second year in Fort Scott, he worked a few hours a day for a colored blacksmith, sweeping the stable and grooming and delivering newly shod horses. Late one afternoon, returning to his room from the blacksmith shop, he watched in horror as a Negro man was dragged from the jail and lynched.
During the night, the troubled boy bundled up his few belongings and fled from Fort Scott , never to return.
During the next several years, George moved through the Western country, always managing to attend school. In the spring of 1885, by which time he was nearly six feet tall and had given himself the middle name of Washington, the proud young man graduated from Minneapolis, Kansas High School. He immediately applied for admission to Highland College , a small Presbyterian school in northeast Kansas , and was accepted for the semester beginning September 20,1885 . He spent the summer in Kansas City learning shorthand and typing, and working to accumulate a few dollars to tide him over at college until he could find employment.
On September 20, George arrived at Highland and presented himself to the principal, the Reverend Duncan Brown , D.D. , who had signed his admission acceptance. Dr. Brown shook his head, "There has been a mistake. You didn't tell me you were Negro. Highland College does not take Negroes."
Please continue your reading to page: http://www.nps.gov/archive/gwca/expanded/gwc_tour_03.htm
Other links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Carver
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa041897.htm
http://www.tuskegee.edu/Global/story.asp?S=1107203
http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/carver.htm
I wrote here Mr. as an initial because in America, in his time it was not allowed for the black people to write Mr. before their name and whosoever did that mistake was even burnt to death for this small did.
Epitaph on the grave of this Mahatma (Person with a great soul) reads-
"He could have added fortune to fame but caring for neither he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world."
Indeed, he was the man who lived his life not only for his people and for his country but for the sake of the human being and his research uplifted every downtrodden to raise out of the slavery and establish oneself.
George Washington Carver
Born out of slavery and reared in Reconstruction, this humble man emerged to become a great benefactor to his people and his section. George Washington Carver was born into slavery during the Civil War, in the midst of bloody guerrilla warfare in Missouri . A tiny, sickly baby, he was soon orphaned, and his very survival beyond infancy was against the laws of nature.
That he, a Negro, became the first and greatest chemurgist, almost single-handedly revolutionized Southern agriculture, and received world acclaim for his contributions to agricultural chemistry was against all accepted patterns. But, seen from today's distance, possibly the most amazing facet of the life of this gentle genius is the manner in which he overcame enormous prejudices and poverty in his struggle from nameless black boy to George Washington Carver, B.S., M.S., D.Sc., Ph.D., Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London, and Director of Research and Experiment at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama -- all without a trace of bitterness, with total indifference to personal fortune, and thought only to make the world, and America in particular, a better place for all mankind.
George Washington Carver did not know the exact date of his birth, but he thought it was in January, 1864 (some evidence indicates July, 1861, but not conclusively). He knew it was sometime before slavery was abolished in Missouri , which occurred in January, 1865. (The Emancipation Proclamation freed only those slaves whose masters were "in rebellion against the United States ," which was not the case in Missouri , where slaves were finally freed by state action.)
George grew up on the farmlands of Missouri, reared by his mother until her seizure by a band of raiders; and then by Moses and Susan Carver, his mother's former owners, who had a homestead near Diamond Grove. Because the frail little boy was not required to help with the heavy farm chores, he had many free daylight hours in which to do exactly as he chose, and he chose to explore the wonders of nature. He talked to the wildflowers, asking why some of them required sunlight and some didn't, and how roots that looked exactly alike produced different-colored blossoms, and, he said many years later, the flowers answered him as best they could.
He investigated insects, tree bark, leaves, ferns, seeds, and the like and made all of them his precious playthings. He tended the roses, sweet peas, and geraniums around the Carver house, and they flourished so strikingly a visitor asked him what she might do to make her flowers prettier. "Love them" the boy answered.
Word spread around Diamond Grove that "Carver's George " had a magic way with growing things, and people began calling him the Plant Doctor. He made house calls, either prescribing remedies for ailing plants or taking them to his secret garden in the woods where he tenderly nursed them. His "magic" with growing things was largely the result of his patient testing of different combinations of sand, loam and clay as potting soil for various plants, his experimentation with different amounts of sunlight and water, and his tracking down of damaging insects and the like.
When the Carver's finest apple tree began withering, George crawled along its limbs until he found some on which colonies of codling moths had taken up residence. "Saw off those branches," he told Moses Carver , "and the tree will get well." And it did.
Occasionally, George and his older brother Jim were allowed to go with Moses to Neosho , the county seat, about eight miles from Diamond Grove. Once, to George 's surprise, he saw a line of colored children straggling into a log schoolhouse. When the door closed behind them, he crept up to it and listened. They were reciting lessons, just like the white children at Locust Grove. He peeped through a knothole. The Negro teacher was reading to the pupils just like the white teacher at Locust Grove. It was, truly, a school for Negro children. George , who was 11 at the time, knew he had to attend that school.
Back at the Carver house, the boy told Moses , Susan and Jim that he was going to move to Neosho so he could go to school. They asked him where he would sleep and how he would eat. He replied that he would find a place where he could sweep and wash clothes and do the other things Susan had taught him in exchange for his board. They did not try to stop him, and early one morning they watched him start, alone, down the dusty road toward Neosho .
He carried the best of his rock collection and a clean shirt in a bundle slung over his shoulder, and a package of food -- loaves of baked corn bread and strips of home-cured fat meat sandwiched in the middle -- under his arm. He turned once and waved a skinny arm, and then he was gone, driven by a deep yearning for the education that would help him find answers to all the questions buzzing in his mind.
George 's courage wavered after he got to the county seat, and he wandered up and down the streets until dark without speaking to anyone. Then, exhausted, he crawled into the loft of a barn near the schoolhouse, nestled down into the hay and fell asleep. At dawn the next morning, he ventured from the loft and crawled atop the woodpile in the yard behind a neat frame house next door to the school. The yard was grassy and had flowers in it, and that, to George , made it a good place to wait for the schoolhouse to be opened.
Suddenly, the back door of the house opened and a Negro woman came into the yard. She asked the big-eyed, frightened boy who he was and where he had come from. He stammered that he was Carver's George and he had come from the Moses Carver farm to Neosho to go to school so that he could find out what made snow and hail, and whether the color of a flower could be changed by changing the seed.
The woman, Mariah Watkins , told him she doubted if he could find out those things in Neosho , or even in Joplin or Kansas City , but that she had a feeling he would learn them somewhere. She had him scrub at the pump, and then took him inside and served him breakfast along with her husband, Andrew .
Mariah was a midwife and washerwoman, and Andrew was a hard-working odd-jobs man. They were a religious couple, well thought of in the county seat. They told George they had no children and that he could stay with them and go to school if he'd work. Overjoyed, the boy began listing all the household chores the Carvers had taught him to do. "That's fine," Mariah interrupted.
"You call us Aunt Mariah and Uncle Andrew , and listen now, don't ever again say your name is Carver's George . It's George Carver . Now run to school, and come back at noon for a bit of lunch."
With his keen, retentive mind and restless curiosity, little George was soon making faster progress than any of the other seventy-five pupils packed in Neosho's Lincoln School for Colored Children. And he was the happiest. He didn't join in the rough-and-tumble play in the schoolyard, but he was blissfully satisfied sitting alone in a corner, drawing pictures on his slate, while the other youngsters played. At home, he had a reader or speller propped in front of him even while he scrubbed cloths or washed dishes. He became expert at ironing -- even though he read while doing that, too.
By the end of 1876, George Carver had learned everything the teacher at the Lincoln School knew and everything in the books available to the school, and the teacher gave him a certificate of merit saying just about that. The 13-year-old boy faced the sad fact that, to continue his education, he would have to leave his happy life with Aunt Mariah and Uncle Andrew and his warm association with brother Jim , who had also moved to Neosho . He heard some neighborhood Negroes say they were going to move to Fort Scott , Kansas , a comparatively large town about seventy-five miles from Neosho. He offered to tend the mules along the way if they would let him ride in their wagon, and they agreed.
George Carver nearly starved before he found a job in Fort Scott . When he did find one, as a cook in a private residence, it did not leave him time to attend school. He lived in a tiny room under the back steps of the house, and saved every penny of his meager wages. As soon as he thought he had enough to carry him through a term of school, he quit the job as a cook. He rented a lean-to behind the stagecoach depot for a dollar a week, and enrolled at a big brick school which taught subjects he had never even heard of before. He allowed himself a dollar a week for food and bought almost nothing else. He studied by candlelight far into each night, and he read every book, pamphlet, and newspaper he could acquire.
By the end of the term he was penniless. He worked all summer washing and ironing bed linen for the hotel and doing laundry for businessmen and ranchers who came and went by stagecoach. By fall, he had enough money saved to go back to school.
It was a lonely life, and George was sometimes the object of cruelty and prejudice. After his schoolbooks were taken from him and destroyed by two white boys, he had to finish a school term without textbooks. He wrote long afterward, "Sunshine was profusely intermingled with shadows, such as are naturally cast on a defenseless orphan . . ." and they went on to tell that many people were kind to him and that he began to make friends over his laundry tub and bar of soap.
During George's second year in Fort Scott, he worked a few hours a day for a colored blacksmith, sweeping the stable and grooming and delivering newly shod horses. Late one afternoon, returning to his room from the blacksmith shop, he watched in horror as a Negro man was dragged from the jail and lynched.
During the night, the troubled boy bundled up his few belongings and fled from Fort Scott , never to return.
During the next several years, George moved through the Western country, always managing to attend school. In the spring of 1885, by which time he was nearly six feet tall and had given himself the middle name of Washington, the proud young man graduated from Minneapolis, Kansas High School. He immediately applied for admission to Highland College , a small Presbyterian school in northeast Kansas , and was accepted for the semester beginning September 20,1885 . He spent the summer in Kansas City learning shorthand and typing, and working to accumulate a few dollars to tide him over at college until he could find employment.
On September 20, George arrived at Highland and presented himself to the principal, the Reverend Duncan Brown , D.D. , who had signed his admission acceptance. Dr. Brown shook his head, "There has been a mistake. You didn't tell me you were Negro. Highland College does not take Negroes."
Please continue your reading to page: http://www.nps.gov/archive/gwca/expanded/gwc_tour_03.htm
Other links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Carver
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa041897.htm
http://www.tuskegee.edu/Global/story.asp?S=1107203
http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/carver.htm
Original post : America's Ambedkar
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