George Washington Carver and Lynching

            George Washington Carver, estimated to be born in 1864 in Diamond, Missouri,[1] was one of America’s most famous Black scientists and public figures from the early 20^th century, known for being one of the first Black students and professors at an historically White institution (what is today Iowa State University of Science and Technology)[2] and later in life as an agricultural innovator of peanuts and peanut farming. In his early days as a teacher and researcher, Booker T. Washington recruited him to the Tuskegee Institute, where he taught for 47 years, from 1896 until his death in 1943.[3] During his time at Tuskegee, Carver worked as head of the Agriculture Department, innovating the extension services of the “mobile classroom” to spread his work on cash crops, soil quality, etc. to local farmers.[4] Not only a scientific innovator, but also an equal rights worker, Carver often toured historically White Southern colleges with the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC).[5]

            During his ten years’ time touring the CIC—from 1923 to 1933—Carver met a Vanderbilt University student and chair of the Commission on Race of the Regional Council of the Student Y.M.C.A named Wilson L. Newman.[6] Their correspondence, cited as “an instant rapport,”[7] began in 1926 with Newman’s invitation for Carver to speak at White Southern colleges to speak “in support of interracial communication”[8]—from then on they wrote each other regularly until Carver’s death.

            The content of their letters is characterized by intimate and friendly banter, banter that can at once suggest Carver’s intense dedication to those young men who brought into the fold of his “family,”[9] or possibly a more intimate relationship (as suggested in a discussion of Carver’s possibly queerness by Carver biographer Christina Vella).[10] Calling him “Sonny Boy” throughout their correspondence, Carver often consoles Wilson for his father’s health problems; talks about their “family” and friends; discusses meeting at conferences or en route to his engagements at universities and conferences; and expresses both his missing Newman as well as jestingly promising to “spank” him throughout many of the letters, evidently in response to Newman’s failing to write back as quickly as Carver would have liked. Throughout the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library collection “Wilson L. Newman correspondence with George Washington Carver, 1926-1943,” the letters represented consist mostly of Carver’s correspondence to Newman, including those written on Tuskegee and Penol Company letterheads. In this specific letter, dated for July 18, 1930, Carver responds to a remark on lynchings that have taken place in Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Georgia. The letter reads as follows,  

July - 18 -30

My very own dear “Sonny Boy”:--

                How I wish I had you this very

minute to give you a good spanking.

just to think of you using that kind of

language and applying it to me, terrible to

think of.

    Of course you could prove most

anything by my table mates if it cast

aspersions upon me. As you know a good

strong disciplinearian [sic] is never liked.

    To be sure I remember Miss Caudill,

a beautiful and accomplished young

lady she is.

    I wish something could be found for

Mrs. Kester. Dear, I hope your Father is

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much better by this time, know just how

anxious you feel.

    Glad indeed am I to learn that your

physical condition is so good.

    Dear, I hope you can stop long enough

in Charleston to get at first hand its

historical setting; it is indeed such, I

am sure you will find it the quaintest

City you ever was in.

     I too was much depressed over the

happenings in, Texas, Okla. Ala, and Ga.

it seems as if Old Satan was loosed for a

little season and was buisy [sic] doing his

deadly work.

     The utterances of Mr. “Cole Blease” on

lynching is I think even more regretable [sic]

as it strikes at the very foundation of law and

order.

     Dear, to me it is so sad to think that you

are going so far away.

     May God ever bless and keep my precious

“Sonny Boy.”                         G.W. Carver[11]

            The bolded section of this letter (magnified in the third image) where it exists within the body of the letter presents at once a clandestine recognition of lynching as racial terror—Carver’s being “much depressed” phrased as something that is not surprising but an accepted, albeit upsetting, occurrence—as well as an interesting peek into how a prominent “race man” like Carver viewed and discussed lynching terrorism. His invocation of the term “Old Satan” pushes the discussion of lynching out of the material world. Not only does naming lynching and lynchers as the workers of “Old Satan” invoke lynching as religiously amoral and against the tenets of God himself: placing lynching and lynchers as products of “his (Satan’s) little season” seeks to place these racially violent acts as outside the realm of humanity and into a place of ethereal and religious abstraction, of the suspension of reality and outside the capability of man. In this invocation, then, not only does Carver conceive of lynching as an amoral act—he also sees it as otherworldly, capable only in the imagination of the Biblical good versus evil, God versus Satan. Too, this naming of Satan as the perpetrator hearkens to the cultural relationship of Satan to Southern Black cultures. As Zora Neale Hurston discusses in “Characteristics of Negro Expression” under the heading of “Culture Heroes,” “The Devil is next after Jack as a culture hero. He can outsmart everyone but Jack. God is absolutely no match for him. He is good-natured and full of humour. The sort of person one many count on to help out in any difficulty.”[12] How Hurston here presents Satan as a playful part of Southern Black cultures and how Carver defines Satan as an enactor of lynching violence promotes an interesting dichotomy for reading Carver’s letter. Why a “little season,” and why the wording “buisy [sic] doing his deadly work,” two phrases that seem to soften the blow of what they discuss even as they present Carver’s condemnation of lynching? Is Satan the true representative of lynching for Carver, or does he reach into a cultural and religious ether to find words to obscure the reality of the deadly, violent, and racial lynchings that happened all around him during his lifetime?

To be sure, not all of Carver’s discussions of lynching in this letter present a foray into metaphorical conceptions of its deadliness. In the second bolded paragraph, Carver mentions by name a “Mr. ‘Cole Blease,’” a man who research shows to be Coleman Livingston Blease, South Carolinian politician who was notoriously and violently anti-black as well as pro-lynching (especially in legislation that pardoned lynching when it was defined in response to the alleged rape of White women).[13] In this more tangible reference to modern-day figures that spoke about and (unfortunately) for lynching, Carver’s letter becomes a socio-historical document of the 1930s Southern climate. Most notably in Carver’s short reference to Blease is a small indictment of Blease’s purposeful and racist ill-attention to “the very foundation of law and order.” Blease, throughout his lifetime, pardoned up to 1700 criminals while governor of South Carolina, and even pardoned his Black chauffeur who was charged with speeding.[14] Not only did Blease seek to corrupt law and order (in Carver’s estimation) by promoting mob violence, he also used the corrupt system to benefit him as a White Southern politician.

            From Carver’s letter, then, comes a picture of the historical reactions and settings that lynching inhabited. Not only does Carver’s personification identify how he and others might have conceived of lynching as something outside the realm of understandable human action—demonstrated in the metaphor of “Old Satan”—but also presents a picture of the regularity and acceptance of the evils that lynching had upon the Black American psyche. Too, the recognition of a White Southern politician as a proponent of lynching in law and in word demonstrates the cultural acceptance and pervasiveness White Southerners helped lynching to achieve.