Booker T. Washington

Carver gets a call from Booker T. Washington to head the Agriculture Department (1896) and goes south.

As Pecos Bill, the cowboy in the fable,
straddled a cyclone, staying still astride it,
Booker T. Washington likewise was able
to grapple with the theme of “race” and ride it.
Like one who navigates a riverboat
past lurking perils, piloting with skill,
Booker T. Washington, to keep afloat
his treasured school, used all his wit and will.
He lived to build a place where blacks could gain
the knowledge needed for a livelihood.
He steeled himself against the raging rain
of hate, to labor for a greater good.
Much progress in his people’s history
has come through things begun by Booker T.

 
Returning from a lecture tour at the beginning of April 1896, Carver found a letter from Booker T. Washington, founder and Principal of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. A Normal School, from the French école normale, trained teachers; “industrial” meant a trade school. In the letter, dated 1 April, was a job offer attractive only to someone with a strong motive of serving their people. Washington promised “neither money, position, nor fame,” adding, “I offer you in their place work—hard, hard, work, the task of bringing a people from degradation, poverty and waste to full manhood.”

Less than five months before, Washington had made a sudden ascent to national prominence. His Atlanta Exposition speech in October had moved the mantle of America’s most noted black from the shoulders of Frederick Douglass, who had worn it for forty years before dying the prior February, to his. Washington had paid more than enough dues to deserve his new fame, including fourteen years of his heart and soul poured into building his school from a leaky church and shanty in the woods to an institute of national renown.
Now he had money for an Agriculture building. Looking for a department head, he had written first to I.A.C.’s President, then to Carver, who answered, “I expect to take up work amongst my people and have known and appretiated the great work you are doing. Mississippi has been negotiating with me for some time… I was ready to go this spring, but a long line of experimental work has been planned of which I will have charge, and from the educational point of view, I desire to remain here until fall.”
Alcorn had been in contact with Carver since November. When they asked James Wilson for a recommendation, he had written:
I do not want to lose Mr. Carver from our station staff... [He has done] a great deal of work among the students that has pleased me greatly... I would not hesitate to have him teach our classes... In the conservatory, the garden, the orchard, and the farm… we have nobody who is his equal… Except for the respect I owe the professors, I would say he is fully abreast of them… in cross-fertilization... and the propagation of plants… and exceeds in special lines in which he has a taste… He understands the anatomy and physiology of animals thoroughly, and the effect of different feeds...

 
I had designed that he should experiment along the line of developing our native plants, cross-fertilizing, and introducing such new plants from all over the world as would be beneficial to farmers and orchardists of Iowa... We have nobody to take his place and I would never part with a student with so much regret as George Carver...
I think he feels at home among us, but you call for him to go down there and teach agriculture and the related sciences… to the people of his own race, a people I have been taught to respect… I cannot object to his going.
It will be difficult for me to find another student who will quietly do the religious work that Mr. Carver has been doing, who will bring the same gracious influence to bear on the boys coming here from the Iowa farms, in order that they may be started in the right direction. It will be difficult, in fact, impossible, to fill his place.

These are warm words, such as I have never before spoken in favor of any young man leaving our institution, but they are all deserved. If you should conclude to take him from us I will recognize the finger of Providence and submit. With respect, James G. Wilson
Before Carver got a reply from Washington, he wrote him two more notes. The first said, “Of course I should like to stay here until fall, as then I will receive my masters’ degree, but should I get a satisfactory position I might be induced to leave before.” Then on 12 April he wrote: “Of course it has always been the one great ideal of my life to be of the greatest good to the greatest number of ‘my people’ possible and to this end I have been preparing myself for these many years; feeling as I do that this line of education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom to our people... May the Lord bless you and prosper your work.”

Carver saw a school built on shared visions and received at that moment one for the Institute, Macon County, the South and the world. He felt light, almost disembodied. Sounds through a window dimmed to make way for a sense of expansion beyond the walls, further and further outward, to watch the landscape transform. The campus’ barren rutted clay leveled and greened to emerald lawns and to robust experimental crops in which sharecroppers, visiting from the region’s windowless one-room shacks, could see their way out of bleak misery. Carver’s inner vision expanded into the countryside where those farmers lived, and he watched them awaken to the need to plow their tired, eroded fields deep, dressing them with rich muck from lowland swamps and planting legumes, building up their soil. As in a time-lapse film he watched their soil darken to rich loam crowded with vibrant vegetation and luxuriant harvest. Filthy hovels surrounded by litter transformed to cottages with walls bright with homemade whitewash, cheered by climbing roses. Cotton growing by their doors gave way to flowerbeds and vegetables that loaded their tables with strengthening food. What cotton they did grow was thick with large puffy fiber bolls. Their hungry, worn expressions turned to serene happiness in prosperous self-reliance.
What Carver called his “mighty vision” compressed his next few decades to a moment so brief that Washington may never have noticed his new employee’s map being drawn. Already, however, the vision was more real than the appearances that met his physical eyes as he left Porter Hall. He later summarized the vision as God saying to him, “Start with what you have, little man. There’s more around you than you see. As for the land—make something of it!”