SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – George Washington Carver made significant efforts during his career to help poor people in the Deep South, but for one Shreveport man Carver was more than a college professor at a faraway school. For Luther M. Jones, Carver was a mentor, pen pal, psychologist, financial advisor, and architect.
And the letters exchanged between these two men show how difficult it was to start a farmer’s union in the post-Civil War American South.
Here’s the story.
Letters from Archives of Tuskegee University
On Oct. 1, 1904, Luther M. Jones wrote to Professor George Washington Carver at Tuskegee University. Jones wrote from Hinds County, Mississippi and in his letter to the professor, he explained a mighty dream.
“We are trying to publish a colored farm paper under the style of The Luther’s Farm Union, which will be especially devoted to farming and representing Farmer, Church, (and) Industrial school, being the official organ of The American Farmers Union,” wrote Jones.
Then Jones asked Carver, a leading professor of agriculture, to please send editorials to The Luther’s Farm Union publication.
Imagine getting fan mail from people you don’t know. Then imagine you’re a professor at Tuskegee University in 1904, and you’ve just received a letter from a stranger begging for your help.
That’s what happened to Carver.
We know about the series of letters exchanged between Jones and Carver because of the George Washington Carver files at the Archives Department of Tuskegee University. The Carver files are filled with letters from people who didn’t know Carver personally but asked for his help because they knew Carver was trying to lift up his people.
But Luther M. Jones’ request for Carver to send him articles for a publication was a little abnormal, not because Carver didn’t write articles–but because Luther was talking about his dream of starting an agricultural publication in the Deep South.
And Luther was very serious about his dream.
On June 16, 1904, only a few months before Jones first wrote to Carver, The Weekly Clairion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, published that Luther M. Jones, R.D. Moress, N.R. Rials, A.B. Hales, Charles Herton, A. R. Tillman, F.P. Smith, St. L. Jones, and H.C. Warfield were stockholders of American Farmers Union. The Weekly Clarion-Ledger announced that the purpose of the union was to encourage more industry and economy among farmers.
Luther and th other stockholders believed that through farm exhibits, education, and farmers’ newspapers the rural farmers of America could be encouraged. The union intended to establish a library or libraries for the benefit of its members. The shareholders also wanted to open industrial schools for youth.
Why was Jones writing Carver?
The idea of a farmers’ union is a relatively new concept. They came about by the late 1800s, during a time when rural farmers were becoming increasingly agitated.
Here’s why.
Cities were booming. Americans were shifting their homes to urban areas. Farmers couldn’t finance their farms adequately, and crops couldn’t be shipped to urban marketplaces.
And so farmers in rural areas began to rebel. Farmers began to understand they could make little to no progress as individuals, but as a collective group they could potentially have clout.
This was the beginning of the agrarian populist movement.
Jones asked Carver for help with a farmers’ union publication because Professor George Washington Carver was one of the first Black students in the world to graduate from an agricultural university. Carver was also one of the world’s first college-education Christian missionaries, as Carver was guided by faith and his work at Tuskegee University helped countless poverty-stricken Southerners.
We also know that Carver was one of the world’s first college-educated agricultural missionaries because he attended what is now Iowa State University and was in charge of missionary work at the YMCA in Ames.
Carver never married and had no children, so his Bible is still kept at Tuskegee University. His intention as an educator was to “improve the lot of the man farthest down.”
To Carver, many of the men furthest down were poor Southerners only one generation out of slavery.
Carver even served on the first board of the educational institution that would become Grambling University.
And it was absolutely in Carver’s character to spend much of his spare time helping people who couldn’t afford to hire his services, including a farmer’s union (conference) in Claiborne and Webster Parishes in Northwest Louisiana.
Carver in Claiborne Parish, Louisiana
“Let us put into practice those commandments of our Creator,” Carvertold those who gathered in Homer, Louisiana, to hear him speak in early Apr. 1908, four years after he received Luther’s first letter.
Carver was in Homer, Louisiana, to help start a farmer’s conference for poor farmers. The point was to teach farmers to believe in themselves, organize, and easily rejuvenate soil that had been stripped by more than 100 years of monoculture cotton plantations.
“Now, in the first place, as farmers, we should not be ashamed of our occupation,” Carver stated before Claiborne and Webster Parish farmers. He explained that people tend to think of farmers as men with wide hats, dirty boots, and soiled pants, “with manners awkward, uncouth and ludicrous, and he himself of very limited intelligence.”
ButCarversaid that idea of a farmer was all wrong.
“We should put away this mistaken notion, brace ourselves up, and show to all that we esteem our occupation an honorable one. We should also learn that it is all erroneous and false to say or think that being a farmer requires little or no intelligence. Indeed, on the contrary, it requires the highest intelligence and the highest type of intelligence to be a farmer.”
At the conference that was held in Homer, Carver said farmers must acquire “mastery over all the wonderful and powerful and puzzling forces of nature.” By the end of Carver’s first visit to Homer, Mr. Wimball (the Agent of the State Agricultural Department for Claiborne Parish) askedCarverto return to Homer and lecture the white people who were eager to work with the brilliant scientist.
Wimball promised to secure the courthouse and an audience ifCarverwould return.
The Shreveport Times wanted access to Carver’s wisdom, too. The newspaper approached Carver at least twice about writing for their publication.
“Dear Sir–acting on the suggestion of Sec. Wilson of the Department of Agriculture, we beg to request that you place the (?) of our publication on your mailing list for your monthly bulletins,” wrote W. S. Ingram of The Shreveport Times in 1904. “Our weekly paper is strictly an agricultural one and has an extensive circulation in north Louisiana, south Texas, and eastern Arkansas, and we are extremely anxious that tour readers should get the benefit of the valuable information contained in your monthly bulletins.”
More letters from Luther to Carver
By May of 1905, less than a year after Luther Jones wrote Carver from Mississippi and about a year after The Shreveport Times asked Carver to write for their publication, Luther M. Jones wrote to the busy professor again.
But this time, he wasn’t writing from Mississippi. He was writing from 500 Crockett Street in Shreveport.
Jones said he was asked to leave his house by a party of 60 white men on Aug. 13, 1904. Jones also said he kept working until Dec. 5, when he realized the farmer’s union would do no good there in Mississippi.
But Jones also wrote that he believed in time, men would see the good work and come into the light of the American Farmers Union.
“My Dear Prof. Carver,” Jones began. “I guess when you receive these few broken sentences, you will be surprised to receive and read the contents. I have no just cause why I should not have written to you before now; only any business was partly torn up and (the) place in such a way until I thought to let time dissolve the matter.”
Jones told Carver that after he left, the white farmers organized a union called the Farmers Union.”
In a farmers’ meeting, Jones learned that “the white union held was said by a white man that Luther started this work regardless of who carried it out.”
Jones moved to Shreveport. There he found a job at a dairy and signed on to work for E. M. Hayes farm, arriving in Shreveport from Mississippi on Dec. 7, 1904.
Jones began work the next day.
“Mr. Hayes gave me house, wood, and $7.50 per week,” Jones wrote to Carver. “I milk from 17 to 21 cows and feed 63 cows, twice daily. But now I am getting $8.50 per week, my income is $12.25 per week. I have bought a house in Greenwood, Alabama, at Tuskegee, on block no. 10… I paid $60 cash for lot no five and paying $5 a month on lot no. 6. until paid for.”
Then Jones went on to describe yet another of his dreams.
“Here is a plan of a house that I would like to have build,” Jones wrote to Carver. “Please tell me how much lumber and how many shingles will it take to cover it and how much paint will it take to paint it… I want you to take this plan and plan out a nice neat made house with the expenses as possible for me.”
Jones described the colors and details he wanted on the house, including a front door that was one-half glass. He wanted to know how much it would cost to have the house built.
Did Carver help Jones with the house build? We don’t know because we cannot see Carver’s replies to Jones. But what we see in the Carver files is a letter from Carver to Booker T. Washington years later. Carver was recommending the work of a Tuskegee student named Luther Jones.
As the years passed, Carver continually shared agricultural advancements from the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute’s Experiment Station in Tuskegee, Alabama. His first agricultural station bulletin (no. 1) was printed in 1898 and was written with the subject “Feeding Acorns.”
“In this beautiful Southland of ours, with so many natural resources, and the repeated failures of the North, East, and West to supply the ever-increasing demand for pork, dairy products, etc., has led us to turn much of our attention in this direction… The great quantity of acorns produced in our oak forests, which have been hitherto practically a waste product, forms the subject of this bulletin.”
He performed experiments and wrote about growing sweet potatoes in the South, and his third published experiment was on the use of chemical fertilizers in the growing of cotton.
One of Carver’s most famous experiments was “How to Build Up Worn Out Soils,” published in 1905.
Carver wasn’t just the “man who did something with peanuts.” He was adept at teaching poor southern farmers of all skin tones how to turn well-worn soil into highly productive fields. Rosenwald schools across the South used his teachings, and northwest Louisiana became home to one of the nation’s most extraordinary distributions of Rosenwald schools. He helped countless poor farmers in the United States begin and participate in farmers’ unions.
Carver died on Jan. 5, 1943 while working with Henry Ford to develop biofuel from a plant native to the American South. He was more than 100 years ahead of his time.
After Albert Einstein died, Henry Ford said that George Washington Carver was the smartest man in the world.
If you ever have the chance to visit the George Washington Carver National Monument in Missouri, do so. Carver was a truly remarkable man and the advice he left behind for all of humanity in the early 1900s still applies to mankind today.
