SU exhibit sheds light on Carver
Best known for his work popularizing the farming of peanuts and sweet potatoes, George Washington Carver also spent much of his career researching the fungi that prey upon those and other crops.
Indeed, over the course of his life, Carver collected more than 6,000 such specimens, a few of them named after him.
Three practitioners of this botanical field – plant pathology and mycology – spent an hour Tuesday afternoon in the Smith-Brown Memorial Union at Southern University remembering Carver’s less known contributions to their field and his continuing legacy to African Americans in general. They spoke at an annual academic conference at Southern dealing with global food security and plant biodiversity.
Herman Warren, professor emeritus in plant pathology at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Va., said he entered the field years ago in part because of Carver.
“I had read a lot of information about him, and I thought that this is someone whom I would like to be,” Warren said.
“Now, I’m a long way from being George Washington Carver,” he added.
Lafayette Frederick, professor emeritus in plant pathology at Howard University in Washington, D.C., actually knew Carver a bit.
Frederick studied botany at Tuskegee University in Alabama. Carver was still doing research but was no longer teaching at the historically black college during those final years. Carver died in January 1943 during Frederick’s senior year.
Frederick remembers seeing an old man off in the distance down a hillside, dressed in an old hat and a grey sweater, looking at wood. Carver, as it turns out, was examining the effects of paint weathering on wood, but Frederick said he did not know what was happening.
“I didn’t know who he was,” Frederick recalled. “I thought he was one of the grounds people.”
Daniel Scott, a professor of plant pathology at Southern, said he was able to persuade the U.S. Department of Agriculture to share archival papers of Carver’s from a USDA mycology and plant disease survey from 1932 to 1943 in which Carver participated. As part of that survey, Carver collected more than 1,000 fungi specimens.
Some of those papers, many of them in Carver’s elegant handwritten script, were on display in the student union.
Warren and Frederick also talked generally about Carver’s career, including his often poetic writings about plants. Frederick read from a homespun WWII-era pamphlet Carver had composed on which he pointed out that the fungi found in home gardens, or weeds as he often called them, were often ones people could eat.
Warren and Frederick said they hoped that highlighting Carver’s background in plant pathology might persuade more young people to pursue their chosen field. They said that they and others are trying to get children, even in elementary schools, to start thinking about the subject.
Lyn Hakeem, a social worker seeking her master’s degree at Southern, said any child has the capacity to be like Carver. She said gardens grown at schools are a good way to introduce children to science and the wider world.
“I think children are born naturally curious, naturally scientists, because the first thing they want to do is play in the dirt in the yard and bring things to their mom, to say, ‘What is this?’ ” Hakeem said.