The Peanut Wizard
..., 24). So Carver, who knew of the Southern farmers troubles, decided it was his duty to help them. Using the research he had done in the previous years, Carver was able to figure out how to solve the problem with the Southern soil. Carver had worked all his life to give himself a good education. He lived in many towns and finally graduated after many years of schooling received a bachelors degree in science from Iowa State, as the first African American (Halvorsen, 22). After graduation he devoted much of his time to researching and it was during those years that he discovered the solution for the farmers of the South. The problem was that because the farmers only planted cotton for so many years the soil became dry. After the Civil War, many of the large plantations, that the slaves had been enslaved in, were divided. Each of the former slaves were given forty acres of land and a mule as a “fresh start as a freed man or women,” (Halvorsen, 25). And since slaves were rarely given an education they did not know of the problems with the soil. They tried the best they could but nothing could be done. So in 1896, when Carver was invited to join the staff in the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he created a department that would teach the local farmers agriculture (www.Princeton.edu). In those classes, Carver taught about many agricultural things. He found that rather than just telling the students how to do things, demonstrating was a better way of learning, so he often took the students outside to perform the techniques that he taught about farming (Halvorsen, 31). Carver was very helpful to the farmers of the South. He taught them ways to improve their soil. And how to make things out of everyday products, rather than buying the expensive appliances, that most of them could not afford. This helped Southern farmer recover from their hardships and learn new things such as crop rotation, and to grow other things in their farms such as vegetables so that it could provide them with food and if there was a surplus they could sell it. He worked endlessly to better the lives of others, wh...