HEROES: Servant of the Lord

Near Joplin last week, the state of Missouri and the U.S. Government established the first national monument ever dedicated to a U.S. Negro: a 210-acre memorial to George Washington Carver, who was born a slave and became one of the foremost of American agricultural scientists. Even as an old man, benign and toothless, white-cropped Scientist Carver never stopped his inspired puttering in the laboratory he developed at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute.

Carver had one great objective: to free the South from industrial bondage to the North. With tools originally assembled from scrapheap oddments, he developed more than 300 synthetic products from peanuts, including cheese, soap, flour and linoleum, and more than 100 products from the sweet potato. “I go into the laboratory,” he once said, “and God tells me what to do.”