George Washington Carver: An Uncommon Life

George Washington Carver: An Uncommon Life

PBS (2020)

Film Review

This is an intriguing documentary about the highly controversial African American George Washington Carver. The latter has come under heavy criticism from anti-Jim Crow activists (starting with W.E.B Dubois 1868-1963) for his failure to challenge the institution of racism.

I should note that two of the corporate financial interests that sponsored the making of this film (DuPont and Alliance Energy) have appalling record when it comes to acknowledging any kind of racial or social justice. Thus I suspect the history they portray may be somewhat “sanitized.”

I  myself knew almost nothing about Carver’s life prior to watching this film. Born into slavery in 1864, Carver and his mother were illegally abducted when he was only a few months old and resold to an Arkansas plantation owner. The family’s former slave master Moses Carver traveled to Arkansas to retrieve the family.

Because George Washington’s mother had disappeared, Moses and his wife raised him and his older brother as their own children. The brother helped Moses around the farm, and George Washington, who was sickly, stayed in the house and learned cooking, knitting, sewing, and other womanly skills.

At 12, a Black family adopted him to enable him to attend a black school eight miles away. His adoptive mother was a midwife and folk healer.

After high school, he applied to Simpson College in Indianola Ohio to study painting. Concerned Carver couldn’t make a living as an artist, his art teacher encouraged him to transfer to Iowa State  Agricultural College. After completing his bachelor’s and master’s degree, he became the first African American on the faculty of Iowa State University. While there, he became close friends with three successive US Secretaries of Agriculture, including Henry Wallace, who served as Vice President under Roosevelt.

In 1896 Booker T Washington (also attacked by DuBois for being an accommodationist) invited him to start a department of agriculture at Tuskegee University in Alabama. Despite a substantial pay cut, Carver, hoping to improve the miserable lives of Alabama’s black sharecroppers, accepted.

In addition to working in his chemistry lab and teaching classes, Carver assisted thousands of Black sharecropper to improve their yields. Because only 1/5 of 5 million sharecroppers owned their on land, sharecropping and tenant farming were essentially an extension of slavery. (See Sharecropping: The Hidden History)

The biggest contribution Carver made was to teach sharecroppers to diversity away from cotton, which was depleting their soil. He also taught them to replenish their soil with organic fertilizers and with crop rotation involving legumes and sweet potatoes. He particularly encouraged them to grow peanuts, a legume with extremely high nutritional value.

During his lifetime, Carver discovered 300 products farmers could make from peanuts, including peanut butter.

Never marrying, Carver (who counted Henry Ford, FDR and Edison among his circle of friends) lived alone in a dorm room and rarely socialized.

 

 

 

 

Sharecropping: The Hidden History

And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – James, Agee, Walker Evans and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South

By Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson

Random House (1990)

Book Review

This book is meant as a sequel to James Agee’s 1941 classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In the original, Agee and Evans documented – though photos and biographical narrative – the profound poverty of white and black sharecroppers in the Cotton Belt. The sequel also provides historical background about the invention of the Cotton Gin* in 1794,  which first made cotton a viable crop in the southern US, and of cotton picking machines, gradually introduced in the 1950s, which ultimately put nine million sharecroppers out of work.

Between 1985-88, Maharidge and Williams revisited the same families that Agee and Evans had interviewed, compiling a coherent account of significant life events befalling children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the original subjects. Sacramento Bee journalist Dale Marahidge, also provides a detailed analysis of various sharecropping schemes that were deliberately designed set up to keep families in debt. Typically the landlord advanced credit, based on a crop-lien agreement, and charged so high interest (as much as 200%) that families became virtual slaves when they couldn’t pay it. The end result was excruciating poverty, extreme malnutrition and chronic illnesses associated with malnutrition (mainly hookworm and pellagra**).

Despite contributing approximately one billion annually to the global economy, most tenant cotton farmers ended up owing money to the landlord. Maharidge maintains that without slavery and the sharecropping system that replaced it, there would have been no way the South could have produced cotton economically.

The book finishes by exploring develops that would end cotton cultivation in the Cotton Belt. In addition to the total mechanization of cotton farming that occurred after World War II, Maharidge blames the invention of and other synthetics, competition with other countries for cotton export markets and depletion of Cotton Belt soil due to the slash and burn mentality of large landholders.

At present, nearly all US cotton cultivation occurs in Texas and California and is totally mechanized. White tenant farmers displaced by the death of King Cotton could find work in southern factories that sprang up in the fifties and sixties. Owing to racial discrimination they faced from factory owners, former black tenant farmers mainly migrated to northern cities. Many, however, failed to find work, even after five years and longer.

Maharidge subscribes to the role played by massive unemployment of former black sharecroppers in triggering the early sixties civil rights movement.

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*The cotton gin is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, allowing for much greater productivity than manual cotton separation.

**Hookworm is an intestinal parasite and pellagra is a deficiency disease stemming from absence of Vitamin B3 in the diet.