He didn’t invent peanut butter.

Sigh. George Washington Carver didn't invent peanut butter. He didn't invent x hundred uses for the peanut. Southern peanut farming was already on the upswing before he even began his work. He didn't save southern agriculture from the degradation of cotton farming. It's not true, and the really interesting story is why we were told these lies, instead of GWC's much more interesting life story. During his lifetime, his accomplishments were absurdly inflated by white journalists, politicians and business leaders as a form of tokenism in service of a white supremacist agenda. He was a great man, not a particularly remarkable scientist, but we should absolutely remember his story.

• He was born a slave in rural Missouri, stolen as a baby and sold AGAIN as a slave in Kentucky. His original slave owner, Moses Carver, found George and returned him to Missouri. That's right, the "Carver" in George Washington Carver was his white owner's name. Because Moses and his wife Susan were unable to recover George's mom, they decided to raise George as their own child. That gave George a very different childhood than most of his peers in late 1800's Missouri.
• He actually managed to be accepted to college in Kansas because everything "seemed white" until he actually showed up. Then he became both the first black student at Iowa State and its first black faculty member. Then at the turn of the century he moved to the Tuskegee Institute to found its Agriculture Department.
• For a century following the end of slavery, a system of tenant farming or "sharecropping" existed allowing slavery/serfdom to persist under a different name. White landowners were able to continue producing agricultural products with very low or non-existent labor costs...as long as blacks stayed on the farm. The way out of this cycle of poverty was to break the system, or at least, on an individual basis to escape it. At the time, that usually meant moving north to get a factory job, or an education, or both. Either way, leave that southern farm.
• George Washington Carver's stated mission was to help farmers remain as farmers through superior farming techniques. Today we call it "sustainability." He encouraged ditching cotton for crops that captured nitrogen from the air and returned it to the soil. His favorite options were sweet potatoes and yes, peanuts. These weren't his discoveries, but with his Tuskegee bullhorn, the man was way ahead of his time. Plus, they were both great sources of nutrition (together they are a virtually complete diet), which cotton wasn't. The more of your own crops you could eat, the less food you had to buy from the company store, the less debt you'll owe to your white landowner.
• However, at that time, those in power down south saw something else: a perfect, non-threatening (sickly and fay) exemplar of black southern sharecropping. They wanted blacks to keep working white land and, sort of tangentially, so did George Washington Carver. His national star rose after his testimony to Congress regarding instituting a peanut tariff, and that meant great fundraising opportunities for the Tuskegee Institute, as long as he kept beating the same drum. The whites had the money, and even legendary bigot Henry Ford struck up a relationship. With GWC, the white establishment found a very convenient partner. Carver advocated improving the conditions of southern blacks within a farming world of systemic disadvantage. Self-help is, by definition, advice that ignores a broader problem of oppression.
• The historian Linda McMurry once wrote, "If he had been white, [Carver] probably would have made significant contributions in mycology or hybridization and died in obscurity. Because he was black, he died famous, without making any significant scientific advances." That, in itself, is the shameful story of our last 150 years in the United States. We don't like to talk about the persistence of the stain of slavery, and it's pretty embarrassing that sustainability was staring us in the face, and we ignored it as a society for so long.