George Washington Carver
After devoting his life to helping fellow African Americans through education, George Washington Carver died on January 5, 1943, at Tuskegee, Alabama. Carver was born the son of a slave woman in the early 1860s, went to college in Iowa and then headed to Alabama in 1896. There, at the Tuskegee Institute, Carver served as an agricultural chemist, experimenter, teacher and administrator, working to improve life for African Americans in the rural South by teaching them better agricultural skills. One of the farming methods Carver devised, using peanut and soybean crops to enrich soil depleted by cotton crops, revolutionized Southern farming. Carver became somewhat of a benevolent example of the potential of black intellectuals. He was well-respected by people such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, Josef Stalin and Thomas Edison, whose offer of a job for more than $100 a year Carver refused. Carver worked at Tuskegee until his death.

Image: Library of Congress

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