George Washington Carver

Carver was born enslaved in Missouri in the last months of the institution, and as an infant he was stolen by raiders and ransomed back; his mother was never found. He was refused admission by one college when it discovered he was Black, and became the first Black student and later the first Black faculty member at Iowa State. He turned down a well-paid post to go to Tuskegee, where Booker T. Washington offered him a laboratory that did not yet exist.

His real subject was exhausted land. Decades of cotton had stripped the southern soil, and Carver taught farmers to restore it with peanuts, sweet potatoes and cowpeas — then, faced with crops nobody would buy, spent years devising uses for them and publishing the results in free bulletins written for people who might read slowly. He never patented the great majority of his work, saying that God had not charged him for it. He is buried beside Washington on the campus where he taught for forty-seven years; his epitaph says he could have added fortune to fame but cared for neither.