{"id":9206,"date":"2016-06-28T18:02:13","date_gmt":"2016-06-28T22:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unclerickaudios.com\/?p=9206"},"modified":"2016-06-28T18:02:13","modified_gmt":"2016-06-28T22:02:13","slug":"humble-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/2016\/06\/28\/humble-hero\/","title":{"rendered":"Humble Hero"},"content":{"rendered":"

If ever there was a humble hero, such was George Washington Carver.\u00a0 Carver was born a slave near Diamond, Missouri during the Civil War.\u00a0 His mother was stolen from her owner, Moses Carver.\u00a0 Although the baby George was taken as well, he was soon found and reclaimed.\u00a0 He never saw his mother again.<\/p>\n

Humble Hero<\/h2>\n

George was raised as a son by the Carvers.\u00a0 His foster mother, referred to by him as \u201cAunt Susan\u201d Carver taught him the basics of reading and writing.\u00a0 His consuming interest in plants led him into a deep informal study of botany.\u00a0 Neighbors, hearing of his amazing ability would bring him their sick plants for help.\u00a0 He became known in the community as the \u201cplant doctor.\u201d<\/p>\n

But educational opportunities were few for black children at that time, so young George\u2019s thirst for knowledge led him to walk ten miles to Neosho where there was a school for former slave children.\u00a0 There he met a kind lady named Aunt Mariah Watkins.\u00a0 Mariah was a former slave herself.\u00a0 She took George into her home and taught him to cook, clean and do laundry.\u00a0 He would later use those humble skills to support himself as he struggled through his education.\u00a0 She also told him his name was George Carver, not \u201cCarver\u2019s George\u201d as he had previously called himself.\u00a0 “You must learn all you can, then go back out into the world and give your learning back to the people,” she told him.\u00a0 George soon grew to love Aunt Mariah and always spoke with appreciation of her support for him and the useful skills she gave him in her home.<\/p>\n

At thirteen, George went to live with a foster family in Fort Scott, Kansas.\u00a0 His intention was to attend an academy there.\u00a0 But he witnessed the murder of a black man by a mob of whites and soon fled the town.\u00a0 After attending a series of schools and considerable study on his own,\u00a0 he finally earned his diploma at Minneapolis High School in Minneapolis, Kansas.\u00a0 He applied at several colleges before he was finally accepted to one in Highland, Kansas.\u00a0 But when he arrived and they saw that he was a Negro, he was refused admission.\u00a0 Finally, in 1890 at the approximate age of twenty-four, Carver started studying piano and art as Simpson College in Iowa.\u00a0 His art teacher noticed his skill in painting plants and flowers and encouraged him to take up the study of botany, so he began his studies at Iowa State Agricultural College in Ames Iowa in 1891.\u00a0 He was the first black student at Iowa State and would stay on as the first black faculty member.<\/p>\n

More college followed and George did research at the Iowa Experiment Station, where his work in plant pathology and mycology first brought him national reknown as a botanist.<\/p>\n

\"george_washington_carver_stamp\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1896, Carver accepted an offer from Booker T. Washington to head the Agriculture Department at the new Tuskeegee Institute, now Tuskeegee University.\u00a0 In his 47 years there, Dr. Carver cemented his reputation as one of the premier botanical scientists of the world.\u00a0 The soil of the South had been depleted by generations of cotton farming, and the boll weevil was spreading across the region and threatening to make cotton growing a near impossibility.\u00a0 So Carver went to work and developed new and unheard-of uses for such crops as peanuts and sweet potatoes, plants which enriched the soil instead of depleting it.\u00a0 He also introduced methods of crop rotation and taught generations of black students techniqes for farming for self-sufficiency.<\/p>\n

Ever the servant of the public, Carver designed a mobile classroom called the Jesup wagon to take his teaching out to the local farmers of both races.\u00a0 Though by now a world-famous scientist, Carver usually dressed in ragged clothes and spent most of his time working.\u00a0 When he was not teaching his students, he was to be found in his workshop, nicknamed by him \u201cGod\u2019s little workshop,\u201d busily doing plant experiemnts.<\/p>\n

Although often subjected to abuse because of his race and his impoverished appearance, George Washington Carver\u2019s true humility kept him from becoming bitter or vengeful.\u00a0 He nearly always declined patents on his discoveries, saying, \u201cGod gave them to me.\u00a0 How can I sell them to someone else?\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Carver\u2019s long and productive life has been an inspiration to generations of people of all races.\u00a0 Besides his profound contribution to agriculture and race relations, his humble spirit and deep desire to serve God and man stand today as an example of a worthy Christian.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If ever there was a humble hero, such was George Washington Carver.\u00a0 Carver was born a slave near Diamond, Missouri during the Civil War.\u00a0 His mother was stolen from her owner, Moses Carver.\u00a0 Although the baby George was taken as well, he was soon found and reclaimed.\u00a0 He never saw his mother again. Humble Hero […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9198,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2,4,5,6,7],"class_list":["post-9206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-story-saturday","tag-character-concepts","tag-character-stories","tag-helping-parents-raise-kids-of-character","tag-kids-blog","tag-uncle-rick-audio-club"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.characterconcepts.com\/unclerick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}