By Rashad Bell, Nuala Caomhanach
Feb 20 2020
“One reason I never patent my products is that if I did, it would take so much time I would get nothing else done. But mainly I don't want any discoveries to benefit specific favored persons. I think they should be available to all peoples." —George Washington Carver
The peanut is a legume, not a nut. Legumes are flowering plants that bear seeds in pods and have round growths on their roots called nodules, and form a symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria housed in the nodules. Synonymous with the peanut plant is George Washington Carver. Carver’s legacy, however, is complex and cannot be reduced to a single plant. Born into enslavement in 1866 in Missouri, he would become the most prominent African-American and enigmatic agricultural scientists in the United States. He was a Black scientist who attended white schools and who was friends with some of the most powerful men in America.
So why the peanut? In Reconstruction Era America, African-Americans struggled to make a living across the rural South. Cotton was king (or so the old saying went), but cotton robbed the soil of all its vital nutrients, especially nitrogen. As an agriculturalist, Carver developed hundreds of products using soybeans, peanut, and sweet potato to enable poor Black farmers to revitalize soils depleted of nutrients. Much of his reputation came after he was adopted as a spokesperson by the United Peanut Association of America — although not without some initial internal conflict (he may have been famous, but he was still black). In 1921, Carver went to Washington D.C. on the association's behalf to lobby for a tariff on foreign peanuts. He was supposed to give a brief talk but Carver dazzled members of Congress so much that the tariff was eventually passed. That incident turned Carver into a major national celebrity.
Carver was not politically inclined, but he was one of America's most famous people at a time when African-Americans were all but absent from mainstream American life. Carver’s celebrity did not prevent him from being misrepresented in the public eye for diverse political agendas. On the one hand, for Black Americans Carver was proof of the value of education. On the other hand, many white Americans argued that Carver was proof that Black people could prosper without actively changing the underlying social structure. Carver, as a scientist and artist, remained focused on enabling Black Americans to succeed.
