Many sides of Carver shown in AAM exhibit

March 26, 2009

He was a man so brilliant that both Henry Ford and Thomas Edison offered him six-figure income to work for them. Yet, he was so humble, he turned them down to stay at his Black college enclave.

That’s just a sliver of the man known as George Washington Carver, the prolific scientist, botanist, inventor, artist and total Renaissance man.

Although Carver’s name is synonymous among Black history figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, most people have only scratched the surface of learning and understanding the whole man.

Dallasites get their chance when the largest exhibit on Carver’s life, titled George Washington Carver: An Extraordinary Man With a Mighty Vision, comes to the African American Museum from March 27 to October 25. "It’s the most comprehensive exhibit that’s ever been done on Carver," said Dr. Harry Robinson, founder and president of the African American Museum in Fair Park. "Carver was a great American, who happened to be African American, and he was a great scientist. He was a trailblazer, way ahead of his time."

Many people can associate Carver with the peanut and his ability to develop several products from it. The exhibit goes several layers deeper, revealing entire rarely- known dimensions of Carver’s life and work, through over a hundred artifacts, videos, interactive displays and recreated scenes. It further teaches the enormous impact Carver made on the entire agricultural industry, both in the South and all of the country.

"Carver is very important to this community in that this exhibition provides information that will attempt to fill the gap in the American history story and in the history of science," Robinson said. "Carver’s work was not only with African Americans but was with farmers in general in the South."

By the time Carver started working at Tuskegee in 1896, most of the soil in the South had been stripped of its main nutrients from the constant growing of cotton, rendered totally infertile and virtually shut down the farming industry. He became the first in the South to implement the concept of rotating crops by planting peanuts, sweet potato and cow pea plants and other plants that reenriched the soil and revived the state of agriculture.

"I believe the Great Creator has put oil and ores on earth to give us a breathing spell," Carver said, according to some of his notes. "As we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms…. For we can learn to synthesize materials for every human need from the things that grow."

Carver was also considered the Father of Chemurgy, using agricultural materials to make industrial products.

"He was talking conservation long before it became en vogue and he was talking organic food long before it became popular," Robinson said.

"Carver was driven by the needs he saw around him," said Michael Dillon, chair of the Botany Department at The Field and one of the Carver exhibit’s curators. "His research was very goal oriented."

Carver’s achievements were also a major cornerstone in the building of Tuskegee Institute, founded by Washington and where Carver housed his historic laboratory from 1896 until his death in 1943. The Carver exhibit also helps know the man personally, a privilege remembered by Dewey Fitzpatrick, a student at Tuskegee in the early 1940’s and who held several conversations with Carver.

"I used to talk to him pretty often," said Fitzpatrick, now the longtime owner of Spare Rib barbeque restaurant in Greenville, 50 miles northeast of Dallas. "Oftentimes, he would come out and we and other students would engage in conversations with him. He was a phenomenal person. You could talk for days about his achievements."

Fitzpatrick recalled Carver’s friendship with automobile mogul Henry Ford, who brought Carver to Dearborn, Michigan to help stabilize one of the paints Ford was using for his cars.

"It used to be years ago, a car that was painted blue, after the sun shined on it during the summer, it would turned like a rainbow," Fitzpatrick said. "Henry Ford talked Dr. Carver into going to Dearborn to see if he could do anything to develop a stable paint that wouldn’t change its colors. Of course, he did that."

Ford went as far as to build a house for Carver. That failed to entice Carver to stay in Michigan and continue a lavish lifestyle.

"When he developed that paint, he gave up that big nice house that Ford built for him and came back to Tuskegee," Fitzpatrick recalled.

Famed inventor Thomas Edison reportedly offered Carver $100,000 a year to relocate to New Jersey and work at his headquarters. Carver declined.

"He decided money was not everything. He thought that his God-gifted talent would be used to fill a poor man’s pail," Robinson said.

Visitors will also explore an agriculture mobile school on wheels, built by Carver through the suggestion of Washington. The exhibit also reveals Carver’s other sides, as a painter and a musician.

"It would have been inspiring to anybody to have known him, whether you were agriculturally minded or not," Fitzpatrick said. "He was bound to touch you somewhere."

Perhaps most notable of all, Carver excelled at a time when overt and blatant racism was constantly slapping the face of Black America. His works almost single-handedly shattered the strongly believed myth at the time that Blacks were genetically inferior to Whites. Robinson also hopes it spurs young African Americans to pursue studies of the sciences. "I think he can inspire them," he said.