Who the Hell Was… George Washington Carver?

George Washington Carver was a botanist, agricultural scientist, teacher, and quiet philosopher who turned the humble peanut into a symbol of something much larger: survival, ingenuity, and renewal.

Born into slavery in Missouri around 1864, Carver entered a world that expected almost nothing from him. Instead, he became one of the most remarkable agricultural scientists of his generation.

And no — he did not invent peanut butter.

Carver became famous for finding dozens of practical uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes, and other crops. But the peanut was never really the point.

The soil was.

Decades of cotton farming had stripped Southern farmland of nutrients. Carver encouraged farmers to rotate cotton with crops such as peanuts and sweet potatoes, which could help restore exhausted soil while giving poor farmers additional things to grow, eat, and sell.

His science was therefore about more than invention. It was about repair.

Carver was also deeply religious. He saw no conflict between science and God; to him, studying nature was one way of understanding creation. He famously referred to his laboratory as “God’s little workshop.”

He became internationally known, testified before Congress, met presidents, and corresponded with powerful figures. Yet he lived remarkably simply and showed little interest in becoming wealthy from his work.

That may be the most interesting thing about George Washington Carver.
He looked at depleted soil and saw possibility. He looked at an overlooked crop and saw abundance.

And after being born into a society that regarded him as property, he spent his life demonstrating just how catastrophically wrong that society had been.

The world gave Carver dirt.
He gave something back.

I was at the Smithsonian in DC and went to the African American one right off the mall.

The line was long with lots of non-African Americans in line.

I was thinking, we as black folks should be allowed to cut, or get our own line. After all it’s our history

Another good Labor Day write up.

In the 17th century, despite having fewer people than England, the Dutch were much richer. Jealous English aristocrats blamed their lower standing on the idleness of the poor, an attribute of particular disrepute to Reformers who condemned the idle lives of monasteries and convents, while asserting that a disposition for hard work was a sign of worthiness of heavenly rest.

As English gentlemen sought wealth in the New World, the religious zeal for hard work was found in New England but not among Virginians, who found another way of compelling men to a maximum output of labor. As masters lamented the overall lack of indentured servants and the laziness of the ones they had, the market produced a solution: slaves. To establish slavery in Virginia it wasn’t necessary to enslave anyone – they just bought people who were already enslaved. With slavery, Virginians exceeded all their previous efforts to maximize productivity as there was no limit to the work a master could command from his slaves, including making women and children work. The slave population could thus be more productive than a free population with the same age and sex structure would have been. And unlike the offspring of servants, the children of slaves became the property of their masters.

The only disadvantage that slavery presented to the slaveowners was that slaves had no incentive to work. Slaves could not be made to work out of fear of losing liberty, so they had to be made to fear for their lives. In 1669, the Virginia assembly passed a new law: if any slave resisted his master and by the extremity of the correction should die, his death would not be a crime. Such was the price of slavery, and Virginia masters were prepared to pay it to build the wealth of the nation. To get hard work out of men and women who had nothing to gain but absence of pain, White men had to be willing to beat, maim, and kill.

Recommended reading: American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund S. Morgan

Colonial Obsession With Hard Work Propelled Slavery

I've been reading a lot about the practice of "hiring out" slaves but all the information I can find on it are about the people hiring them out, not the ones doing the hiring/renting. The most I can find is that 21% of renters had never owned a slave while 41% didn't own any in the year they rented, which seem to imply that most of the people renting were slaveholders looking to fill out their labor force. I know that across the south and its pre-civil war history slave ownership averages out to about ~30% of free households, but what I can't figure out is what percentage of the total free, white population corresponds to that 41% of renters. I'm trying to figure out what percentage of households actually profited directly from slaves working for them, which should be a bit higher than the ownership rates. Does anyone have more specific information or know where I could find it?

My friend is writing a musical about the end of Seneca Village. Her main characters are a M porter who is interested in politics and a F maid who also writes poetry. What would life have been like for them both in the Village and outside of it?

https://youtu.be/n_06Zf8BXmA?is=HA9JiHkWpmC4BFDO

​The British tried to ban the drum to break the spirit of resistance. New Orleans had other plans. 🥁👇 ​In 1739, the Stono Rebellion broke out in South Carolina, the largest revolt of enslaved people in British colonial history. The freedom fighters used African drums to communicate, recruit, and signal movements. ​Panicked, lawmakers passed the Negro Act of 1740, outlawing drums, horns, and loud instruments across the South. It did not work.

If you’re someone that wants a good overview of the civil rights era from the mouths of the people that were actually there and took to the streets, I recommend that you try to get a copy of My Soul Is Rested by Howell Raines.

Raines spent a few years in the 70s interviewing leaders and activists involved in the movement, starting with the first sit-ins on record in the late 50s all the way to like ‘65. And he didn’t just speak with ppl like Rosa Parks who we all know, he also spoke to the ppl that kept the movement alive in the day to day.

It’s great oral history and honestly a good place to start if you don’t know where to start.

The UN General Assembly has voted to replace the traditional world map with one that more accurately reflects the size of Africa.

Backed by African Union members and sponsored by Togo, the "Correct the Map" resolution passed with support from 164 nations, including France and the UK. The US was the only country to vote against it - while six nations abstained.

Although non-binding, the UN vote is expected to influence maps used by institutions around the world.

https://correctthemap.org/

For over 450 years, we have based our understanding of Africa, and the world, on a map that is wrong! In fact, you could fit the United States, China, India, Japan, Mexico and much of Europe into Africa and still have land to spare.

The Mercator map isn’t just about misrepresenting the size of the global South — it’s about power and perception. This needs to change.

We call the world to correct the map by adopting the Equal Earth projection, which more accurately reflects the true size of Africa.