Black History Month celebrates African Americans in agriculture

By By Steve Strong / area horticulture extension agent
Feb. 25, 2004
February is a month of national recognition and celebration of the African American culture.
Black history month is a special time for pausing to reflect on the many contributions that African Americans have made in helping to create the greatest free nation on earth, a country with its foundations deeply rooted in agriculture.
Among the first noted individuals is Booker T. Washington, a controversial figure who began life as a Virginia slave in 1856, and later rose to become the founder of the now famous Tuskegee University.
Like many black men in post-Civil War America he struggled to obtain an education during a time when it was not allowed, an in spite of opposition from both races, managed to develop a model institution that promoted practical education along with a newfound respectability for the humble profession of farming.
Of course Washington did not accomplish this feat alone. He sought the support and expertise of other like-minded optimists who shared his understanding of the economic importance of agriculture, and of private land ownership for black Americans. Two of these most famous figures followed Washington to Alabama to help further the quest he began in 1881, none other than George Washington Carver and Thomas Campbell.
Carver became director of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in 1896, with an agricultural degree from Iowa State A &M, and a desire to fulfill what he described to Washington as, "God's plan for me all along."
One of America's great naturalists, Carver channeled his childhood curiosity to "know every strange stone, flower, insect, bird, or beast" into a fine-tuned program of agricultural production and experimentation.
Carver began his pioneering work with peanuts, and soon discovered that the nitrogen-fixing properties of this legume plant had the natural ability to rebuild soil nutrition in fields where cotton and other crops had depleted it. He basically invented the original system of "crop rotation" that is still prevalent in today's modern farming practices, and also helped introduce sweet potatoes and soybeans as alternative crops for producers (at that time, 85 percent of blacks living in the south were farmers).
About the same time as Carver was becoming revered as the "Peanut Man" in the early 1900s, the notorious Boll Weevil was wiping out cotton crops across Texas and the entire southeast.
In desperation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture began the first demonstration farm program to help growers find solutions (a system patterned after Carver's work and directed by Seaman Knapp, father of the modern day Cooperative Extension Service).
Thomas Campbell now enters the picture, a 16-year-old Georgia youth who had come to Tuskegee to study under Dr. Carver, and who was to become the first black field agent ever appointed by the U.S.D.A. on Nov. 10, 1906.
Campbell was officially the first ever "County Agent," supplied with a mobile farm school on wheels known as the Jessup Wagon, hired to show farmers new "how-to" hands on farm practices rather than relying on the traditional speech making methods used previously.
Thanks to the Never-Say-Die attitude of pioneers like Washington, Carver and Campbell, there is still a vibrant Extension Service system existing in each state to this day and I for one, am grateful. Even the temporary stumbling block of a group of angry peanut farmers with no place to sell their over-supply of peanut crops in the 1930s did not defeat Carver.
Instead, Carver locked himself in his lab for a week, and later emerged with more than 300 innovative uses for the crop, not to mention 175 from sweet potato and 75 from pecans.
Just like Paul Harvey always says, now you know the rest of the story.