When I saw the title and cover of the yellowed comic book, I didn’t expect it to be thorough.
“Highlights From the Lives of 48 Famous Americans,” it blared. Along two sides with an illustration of soldiers in combat were the faces of six white Americans, several of whom were familiar.
Because the comic book looked old, I didn’t expect to see the names and faces of any African Americans on its pages. Whenever I come across history or art books from an earlier period, I always flip through them to see if any black folks are included. Most times, they are not.
So I wasn’t expecting much in historical accuracy in this book, distributed by J.C. Penney in 1947.
I opened the book to the list of “Famous Americans,” breezed right past the introduction and went immediately to the two-column list of names below it. Using my eyes as fingers, I slowly cruised down the first column from one name to the other. Past Jane Addams (social activist), P.T. Barnum (circus showman), Alexander Graham Bell (telephone inventor) and then I spotted an African American name I recognized.
George Washington Carver. I was both surprised and pleased. I found Carver’s page in the book and read the story, told in comic-book form with narrative and balloon quotes.
“George Washington Carver
1864-1943
Out of a family of toiling Negro slaves,
came a sickly child, who despite poverty
and discrimination, grew up to become
one of the world’s greatest scientists.”
The story went on to relate some of the discrimination Carver faced: He was denied entrance to a white college in Iowa in 1884 but later accepted into another white college in the state. He was hired to teach at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and taught farmers how to rotate crops by growing sweet potatoes and peanuts rather than cotton. In his laboratory, he produced hundreds of new products from sweet potatoes and peanuts. Carver became wildly famous both here and around the world. In 1939, he received the Roosevelt Memorial Award.
This was an abbreviated view of a much fuller life. The publishers were cramped for space to write about each of the 48, which they admitted were only a small fraction of the “hundreds more who are worthy to stand beside them.”
George Washington Carver was born around 1864 in Diamond, MO, where he, his mother and older brother were slaves. His father was a slave on another farm. As a baby, he and his mother were kidnapped by slave traders; he was rescued but his mother was not. He was raised by his white slave owners named Carver. He was sickly, but he was smart and enamored with nature.
He told the story in a 1922 interview about neighbors bringing their dying plants to him. “I would take their plants off to my garden and there soon have them blooming again … At this time I had never heard of botany and could scarcely read.”
As a young man, he moved about the Midwest before being accepted to Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, in 1890. He majored in art (he was a skilled artist) but later attended another Iowa college to study agriculture. When Booker T. Washington offered him a job in 1896 to head Tuskegee’s agriculture department, he took it.
Carver taught black and white farmers about crop rotation, and how to grow peanuts to improve soil that had always grown cotton. He experimented with and found other uses for sweet potatoes, peanuts, soybeans and other crops.
He became known in this country and abroad for his new farming practices and products. His most famous work was with the lowly peanut, from which he made more than 300 products including milk, soap, ink, paint and plastics. His 118 products from sweet potatoes included flour, postage stamp glue, synthetic rubber, vinegar and gasoline.
Peanut butter was not one of them. Its invention is credited to three men; the name we’re more familiar with is John Harvey Kellogg of the cereal company. In 1895, he patented the making of peanut butter from raw peanuts.
Carver filed only three patents for his products but didn’t see the need to seek others. Two were for producing paints and stains from clay: here’s the patent for one and the other. Another was for a cosmetics cream made from peanuts. All were filed in the 1920s. “I don’t want my discoveries to benefit specific favored people,” he said. “I think they should be available to all peoples.”
He was invited to speak often about his scientific work. He got the name “Peanut Man” after an appearance at a 1921 congressional hearing on a tariff on peanuts imports.
Unfortunately, very few of his products were widely used or beneficial. His crop-rotation practice, though, was perhaps his most distinguishing accomplishment.
Carver – in his own quiet way – also spoke out in favor of racial equality but didn’t challenge discrimination in any overt form. He never left Tuskegee, although he got offers from other places, and died there in 1943.
Carver deserved to be in the comic book at auction. With his stature at the time, it would have been a major slight not to have included him.
The book was said to have been produced by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby as a giveaway for J.C. Penney. One writer noted that the book may have been done exclusively by Simon.
The two are considered among the greatest comic-book duo. They partnered to produce hundreds of comic books during the 1940s and helped usher in the Golden Age of Comics. They created Captain America and other major comic heroes, and upgraded the comics in other genres.
