We consider what his vision was and what it means in our time, showing him, in his words, to be “the trail blazer.”
Chapter 20 - Catch the Vision
“I must go the way of the world before long,” Carver said when he had fifteen years to go, “and it is so important that our young people catch the vision…. Our young people… are smart, and not all… youth is frivolous... I am interested to note that there are more creative minds in the youth of today than of old.” The world, he said, had departed far from the truth, but he believed that the pendulum was swinging back. Down through the ages, he said, men sought their own way and would not have God’s. They were like Naaman in the Old Testament, he said, who was told to go and bathe seven times in Jordan, and was offended because he thought he had as good a river, or better, in which to bathe. But when he went and obeyed the command of the Lord, his flesh came again as the flesh of a little child. “Young people,” Carver concluded, “are beginning to want the truth. The heart of mankind can never be satisfied with the husks of materialism… We are in a pitiful condition today, when it would be so easy to make this a heaven on earth.”“I got started,” he explained, “by looking at things and then looking into them… Tune in first on the spiritual side, and then the material things [will] take care of themselves…
What I have done with the peanut and the sweet potato can be done with all the things of earth… When one fully realizes that every farm, garden and orchard product will yield new, strange, and useful things to the thoroughly developed creative mind, an inexhaustible field of possibilities dawns upon us… What is true of the peanut and… the clay is true of everything, and it is all leading to that thing we call immortality—there is immortality in everything the Creator has made… This kind of thing is very simple, once you become interested and started…“Each individual,” he said, “has a contribution to make, and most of us would make it if the opportunity was afforded them... without any fear at all of the progress of other people… All of us are important if we fill the little niche well in which God the Great Creator of all things has placed us… He gives us a job, and all… we have to do to carry it out is to be faithful to that trust… [This is] a field in which all can work without clashing, indeed the greater the number of workers,… the more closely they are drawn together… I wish so much that people could lay aside their narrow prejudices, get away from self, and look at the bigger things of life that will help humanity… The white and black races must sustain and aid each other, and… working together will bring prosperity to… all of the people,… and cannot do unless such is done.”
What draws people together, he said, is that in this field, “we really walk and talk with the Great Creator; it is here that He shows His glory, majesty and power… It is in this realm,” he continued, “that… we have no room for a religion of hate, because God expresses Himself in everything He has created, hence we love it, because God is love; and man, the highest embodiment of His handiwork, naturally we should love most.” “I am just a trail blazer,” he said. “It is my job to try to mark the way. I never finish anything. I merely try to start it. Others must finish it. To complete any one of the things I have undertaken would mean stopping and concentrating on that one thing. There is still too much trail blazing to be done, too many undone things to try to do, too much of nature yet uninterpreted to stop and finish any one job. That is for others. That is their job.” In Kansas, he urged students at a high school to address their problem of surplus grain. “Chemistry,” he told them, “can solve the wheat problem for Kansas, which is one of the world’s great wheat-producing areas. Find new uses for wheat. I have been asked to do it, [but] wheat is a Kansas problem. It can be solved by the young men and women who are studying chemistry in Kansas.” Anyone who learned the ways of nature in their own locale, he said, could help solve pressing problems. “I am just an ordinary individual,” he said, “interested in the many things that have been before us at all times, and that appear in so many different ways and forms… I am no great chemist; I am no great person. I have accomplished no great deeds. I am only a trail-blazer. I have tried to point the way. I have made signs. Others, the great of earth, shall probably come along, read these signs, and do the work. I am no practical chemist. I am a dreamer who dreams, sees visions, and listens always to the still small voice. I am the trail-blazer.”
He wrote to his friend Bess Walcott, a teacher at Tuskegee, about an article she had written stating, in his paraphrase, “that it might be a curious fact that the person who was once a slave might be the means of freeing the entire South.” “The unique contribution George Carver has made in the field of science and religion,” wrote Carver’s Blue Ridge Boy Howard Kester, “is symbolical of the contribution the Negro race is destined to make in our civilization if all unequal relationships are abolished and the Negro is given every opportunity fully to develop.”
“We are just beginning to learn to live;” Carver said, “and what little I have been able to do is only by way of blazing a trail, the surface of which has only been scratched. The whole set-up in the present order and the thinking of man is going to be revolutionized.” He said he was “trying to interpret in my small way, and as fast as the Great Creator gives me light and strength, a great epoch which is destined to come.”