JUSTICE INITIATIVE

Learning from Rashid Nuri
About George Washington Carver  
 
 It's not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobile one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success"  George Washington Carver. 
  
January 22, 2018
 
 
George Washington Carver in 1906.
Photo: Frances Benjamin Johnston [Public domain], via  Wikimedia Commons
 
 
Below is the audio and transcription of a 2016 interview with urban farmer Rashid Nuri about George Washington Carver (c1864-1943). 
 
George Washington Carver was hugely influential in Rashid's life as he was for countless individuals in the South, the nation and the world. As Rashid notes, it was Carver who saved the South through his brilliant assessment of the damage "king" cotton was doing to southern soil. The constant year after year of cotton production was "mining" the soil and depleting it of it's natural resources and life. Rashid explains how Carver introduced the important practice of rotating crops to add nutrients back into the soil and subsequently how Carver discovered countless uses of some of these crops for the industrial world.  
 
It was Booker T. Washington who, as president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama (now Tuskegee University), wisely invited Carver to Tuskegee in 1896 to head the Tuskegee Agriculture Department. Due to his scientific accomplishments, it didn't take long for Carver's reputation to spread throughout the world. While Carver was receiving requests from the likes of Henry Ford to help in the car industry, the Russians also requested help from Carver with their cotton production, as well as others who desired access his brilliance. Nevertheless, Carver chose to stay at Tuskegee until his death in 1943.
In admiration, President Franklin Roosevelt chose to visit
George Washington Carver at Tuskegee - 1939 
 
At various meetings and conferences at Tuskegee, I have been fortunate to meet some of those who knew Carver at Tuskegee, as well as to, many times, visit the Carver Museum at Tuskegee University.  
 
We, in the South, are blessed Carver came our way and chose to stay in the South, while engaging in his brilliant scientific endeavors and simultaneously serving others through his compassionate humanity. But it is important to stress yet again that his work "saved the South" which included all farmers, both black and white, and farmers throughout the world. He taught and served us all. 
 
Below is information about Rashid Nuri's background. 
 
At the community radio station WRFG-FM in Atlanta, Georgia, I have a radio program entitled "Just Peace", that I have been producing for more than two decades. In addition, however, my professional career has been in agriculture working with Black farmers across the South. So, I decided quite a few years ago that in addition to the vast array of justice issues I cover on the show, that it was important to provide listeners with information about food. Not only about the politics of food but most importantly "how to grow it".
 
This was inspired thanks to Atlanta's organic urban farmer Rashid Nuri who created the Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture. I had realized that if there was anyone in Atlanta, the United States or virtually anywhere in the world who understood the breadth of the history, the politics of food, and about organic production altogether,  it was Rashid Nuri.
 
With a degree from Harvard University in Political Science and a masters degree in Soil Science from the University of Massachusetts, he is certainly well qualified to put it mildly. As an 'organic' farmer he said he had to unlearn virtually everything he acquired from the Soil Science degree, and I understand that as well.  
 
In addition to all of this, in the 1990s Rashid worked under Clinton's Secretary of Agriculture, Mike Espy (the first Black Secretary), as the Director of the Commodity Credit Corporation. Rashid had also lived and worked on agriculture issues in Africa and Asia for a number of years.
 
As you can see from all this impressive background, Rashid's breadth of both the knowledge and analysis of the politics and history of food is significant. We are blessed he decided to create his organization here in Atlanta. So, since 2011, I have been interviewing Rashid once a month about agriculture and also opening the phone lines for listeners to ask questions about the topic at hand or organic production techniques, etc.
 
The 2016 interview with Rashid Nuri was by me, Heather Gray. First, here is the audio of the interview with Rashid and below is an edited transcription.
 
2016 Audio of Interview with Rashid Nuri
About George Washington Carver
 
 
   
Edited Transcribed Interview - Learning from Rashid Nuri
About George Washington Carver 
 
     Carver talked to the plants? No, the plants talked to Carver. He would get up in the morning and take his walk in the fields and listen. You know we do that in our garden here. The plants will tell you what they need, when they need it.  
Rashid Nuri
     
Heather Gray - Tonight we're going to focus on George Washington Carver. Now Rashid one of your major influences or mentors in agriculture, whether you actually knew him or not, is George Washington Carver. When were you first aware of him?
 
Rashid Nuri - Oh, I was very young. Much of my life I've read biographies and history which is what I'm interested in. I remember a series of blue hard covered books, and George Washington Carver was one of those. And this was 60 years ago. So I've been aware of him for much of my life. The awareness has increased over the years.
 
I've gone through different phases of my own learning and education in agriculture. George Washington Carver is more than an icon. He's a multi-dimensional man. The levels of contributions he has made to not only America but to the world is absolutely amazing. We began to build upon the legacy that he established so many years ago.
 
Heather - Amazing in what sort of way? But, first let's first talk about who he is.
 
Rashid - George Washington Carver is a shaman - a very spiritual man. He was a plant scientist trained in Iowa. And Booker T. Washington brought him to Tuskegee at the end of the 19th century and he was at Tuskegee until he died in January of 1943.
 
George Washington Carver with flower at Tuskegee Institute
 
And his impact on American agriculture and American industry, social relations, all of these were absolutely amazing. He single handedly saved the South. A lot of folks think of him only having worked with Black people because he was at Tuskegee but the impact of his contribution literally saved southern agriculture.
 
Southern agriculture was built around cotton. And cotton, at the time that he started doing his work at Tuskegee, was just about played out. The boll weevil was eating it all up. They didn't know what to do.
 
Carver came up with a solution, which was crop rotation.
 
This is simple stuff that we know now and certainly implement in our natural urban agricultural work. Some of the big farmers don't do it very much, but to a certain extent they all do.
 
The standard catechism of agriculture is that you rotate your crops and he's the one that introduced it. He introduced soybeans, sweet potatoes, and he introduced peanuts into the rotation with cotton and that brought the soil back and saved the South.
 
(Southern farmers) were mining the soil by planting the same thing over and over and the plants were weak because the soil had been mined. It's why the boll weevil got in there and spread, so they were scared about the boll weevils and didn't want to see them come back.
Carver showed them how to take care of the situation.
 
Heather - And again it was largely because when they rotated the crops it fixed nitrogen in the soil?
 
Rashid - On no, it did more than fix nitrogen. It added organic materials into the soil. It brought nutrients back into the soil by having crop rotations.
 
You know the relationship we have with plants is amazing. You've got the complexity and you've got the simplicity. Everything on the planet is dependent upon the sun. But we can't live on the sun directly. The energy through the sun is accumulated through our plants and then we eat those plants and animals and that's how we get our sun.
 
But the symbiosis that exists between the sun, the earth, the water...all of these coming together, that's what makes it work.
 
So, yeah, you fix nitrogen back into the soil, but you could add chemical nitrogen rather than through crop rotation, so its others elements that are important. Again, it's all the other elements that come into play that's important. It's the "organic" material that you need to put in the soil to make sure the soil is alive. If you put chemicals in there you're going to kill it - the soil.
 
So therefore you need to have life-giving elements added to the soil and Carver showed them how to do that through the rotation of legumes such as peanuts, sweet potatoes and soybeans.
 
Heather - So, Rashid I was reading something about Carver today that I hadn't read before about his work. With the crop rotations it so energized the soil for farmers in Alabama so that there was an excess amount of peanuts and sweet potatoes to the point that they couldn't sell all of the crops they were producing. So Carver started looking at other ways to use these crops.
 
Rashid - He looked at ways that those crops and their bi-products can be utilized. He gets credit for inventing peanut butter - he really didn't. But there are hundreds of other things that he did for using these products as in plastic and paint in so many different ways.
 
Carver also had a wagon that he would ride around in and go out to see the farmers. So, in a lot of ways, he was an extension agent and he's a hero.
 
He really was an amazing man - an amazing man.
 
And the sacrifices he made personally in order to be able to do this work...Most people don't know and are absolutely shocked to find out that first and foremost he was a eunuch. He was castrated. That's why they allowed him to go to school with white people in Iowa because he was not a threat. You know Carver was born a slave and he was educated and the only way he could be educated is if he was castrated. This is not what was uncommon at that time but the depravity of that is not discussed, as it would place a lot of guilt. So here was this great man and the sacrifice that he made for his career, his people for the world to give up his manhood. You can go research - there are only four instances where his voice was recorded and he had a tiny itty-bitty voice.
 
Many years ago I was in Los Angeles doing urban agriculture there and we did a George Washington Carver celebration over at USC - the University of Southern California - and this man came down from Marin County to be our keynote speaker. I wish I could remember his name.
 
He was working on a book about Carver and in my opinion would probably be the most comprehensive biography that would have been done because he made a point of going around and speaking to every person who's alive that had a connection to George Washington Carver. That's an immense responsibility and task. I asked him "Are you going to put in the book the fact that he was castrated?" He said he didn't know. My opinion to him and still is that you need to because if you are going to write a tome that is as well documented as what you're telling me you're going to do and do not include it - if your book is the most referenced there is and you leave that out it's going to go down as "the" history and it's going to exclude an important factor - things that people out to know about this man. I hope I put enough guilt on him that he'll put it in there. But that's something to consider.
 
Heather - I always so enjoy talking about George Washington Carver. Here's a quote from Carver that I think you use quote or part of this quote, Rashid. He said, "It's not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobile one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success" George Washington Carver.
 
Rashid - It's more than a quote I use sometimes. If you get an email from me that last line is on every email I send out and I firmly believe that - "It's simply service that measures success." I so believe that. Most people who know me know that when I leave you or you leave me I going to tell you "let me know if there's anything I can do to help." Because I think that is being of service. Being of service is what you're supposed to do.
 
Heather - I also want to ask you about the spiritual connection George Washington Carver had with plants. And I want to read this quote from something today I was reading about Carver.
 
"The degree of Carver's impact extends beyond his agricultural contributions, encompassing his service to help others obtain a higher quality of life. Carver contributed to the economic improvement of the Southern farmer by offering alternative crops beneficial to them and their land....
Though Carver prides his success on service, his environmental contributions were substantial. He conscientiously utilized bio-based products and industrial products made from renewable resources rather than those made from scarce or non-renewable resources. Environmentally, his contributions were viewed by some as an agricultural revolution (Stanley 1996; Holt 1943). He was an extraordinary man who recognized the natural relationships of living things, both plants and people.
He was a deeply religious man who treasured the world of nature and saw himself as a vehicle by which the secrets of nature could be understood and harnessed for the good of mankind. That was his mission in life, and his reward for performing this mission was the simple knowledge that he was performing well God's will." (Kremer 1987, 17)
Rashid - Amen!
 
Heather - But it is also said, Rashid, that he talked with plants.
 
Rashid - You never had that experience?
 
Heather - I haven't but my sister has.
 
Rashid - We live in a world that is so reductionist and we don't understand the whole. Organic, to me, means "whole." Human beings on the earth today - we are disconnected from the soil, disconnected from the natural world. We feel we are superior to the natural world and thus attempt to conquer nature instead of being in harmony and in tune with nature. The plants and the animals - all of them form a community that existed long before we got here and they'll be here long after we're gone.
 
All those folks who say that they're concerned about climate change and how we're going to destroy the earth? I'm not worried about that at all. I'm really not. Cause the planet has been here and it's been strong for gazillions of years. Mankind has only been here for 15 minutes. And the real problem is that if we don't take care of the environment around us, it may kill us. It's the human beings that are going to have the problem, not mother earth. Mother earth has been here and it's going to be able to continue.
 
So, if we understand the relationships between the plants and the earth and the sun and the water, we would have much more of a greater respect for what's around us and our connections and inner actions with it.
 
Carver talked to the plants? No, the plants talked to Carver. He would get up in the morning and take his walk in the fields and listen. You know we do that in our garden here. The plants will tell you what they need, when they need it. And all you have to do is pay attention, open your eyes, open all of your being to be able to receive the information that's coming in. Plants have a way of communicating with each other. This is why natural urban agriculture works.
 
We don't have to worry about the pesticides and the chemicals out there because those plants will take care of themselves. If some kind of disease gets in there through the micro-rise of the fungi, that's under the soil web, they are able to communicate and say "Whoa, something's coming to get us, let's gird up." So they get ready and protect themselves. So they might have some sacrifice and that happens in any war. You're going to have some casualties. But what you have to do is to protect the community and the plants are able to do that.
 
You get out into the woods? Man, you're going to have different kinds of trees - hardwoods and evergreens that are there. One part of the year they switch back and forth, feeding each other and they do - they literally talk.
 
The most important part of the garden is around on the edges, because you may turn that soil over in the middle and that's why you want to minimize how much you turn that soil because you don't want to go in there with big tillers because that's like putting everything into a blender. You're breaking up all the life that's there.
 
If you look at our garden we have semi-permanent beds. There are only four feet wide. So that the micro-rise - the little white fine fungus - they can communicate with each other. If I've got a big huge field that I've been spinning over and understand how the life starts around the edges, the wider that field is, the harder it will be for those things to communicate. That's why if you go out to those big chemical farms - those large commercial farms - those soils are dead. You can't find an earthworm, a mealy bug, a roly-poly, a centipede...nothing is in that soil that's going to bring life to it. So that's why it becomes a chemistry set. You add the chemicals to make those plants grow and they add the chemical nitrogen in it.
 
We owe that particular science, that reductionist science, to a man named Dr. Justus Von Liebig - that's a hell of a name! Justus Von Liebig who, back in the 1850s, discovered a couple of things. He's the man who came up with vitamins, vital amino acids, he broke that down and he able to isolate what are the principle elements and he called it the "law of the minimum". What are the minimum things that you need to make the plants grow? That discovery enabled him to come up with the whole concept of N, P & K - nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) to make things grow or appear to grow. But what comes out of there is steroid, plastic food. That's what you see in the grocery store. They have no taste. And you want to add hybridization to that list of steroid food such as GMO's. You then have with food that is worthless. It's really rough.
 
Heather - Not necessarily good for us either!
 
Rashid - My opinion, and I think the science will bear this out even more in the future, is that the human body has not evolved to the place where it can metabolize these de-natured foods. And that's a problem.
 
So back to Carver. Yeah, Carver would listen to those plants. They would tell him what to do. What would work. Because he was spiritual. He opened himself. He allowed himself to commune with nature. And if you use the language of communing with nature you're communing with God. Being with those plants is a meditative form. It's a whole other realm if you let yourself go and try to establish that connection that you have with the plants and the soil.
 
Heather - You had asked me and I said I hadn't talked with plants. So what is your experience with communing with plants Rashid? Can you expound upon that any further?
 
Rashid - Well, I can tell you about a rose garden - 30,000 rose bushes and I saw rose petals out there. Every morning I'd get out around sun rise and I'd go out and cut roses and there were little people out there running around in the middle of garden. I don't know how deep you want to get into this. Whatever is the intelligence that has created this sphere in which we live - God, Allah, etc. - that energy that permeates throughout gaia - mother earth - is there. And I think it's up to us to tune into it.
 
The creation is magnificent. Look at the intelligence. Did you ever look at the pictures from the Hubble telescope to see all those galaxies and millions of stars millions of light years away in the universe - I don't know if it's expanding or contracting - whichever way it's going - it's huge. There's so much out there. For those who have a solipsist orientation, and think the world revolves around the planet earth, are fools, in my opinion. There's so much out here that we should be aware of and try to find our connection to it. It comes down to where each of us stand and how we conduct ourselves in relationship to all of this creation that is around us. You can't miss it.
 
Heather - I was talking about my sister talking with plants. So my sister's name is Grace and she is, in fact, full of grace. In any case, she has told me that at times when she's talked with plants she's seen the leaves move.
 
Rashid - Oh yeah. We look at a plant. We look at vegetation and we think they're just sitting there. They ain't doing nothing. If you put it on slow motion camera and speed it up and watch and see how they move, how they react.... Michael Pollan wrote a wonderful article about the intelligence of plants that was in the New Yorker magazine last year. I keep a copy on my desk and send it out to whoever is interested.
 
You know that character Flash - in that comic book character, Flash is zooming around so that you can hardly see him move. Well, that's how we are to the plants. Humans are zooming around them.
 
But the plants are very much alive and conscious. There's the "secret life of plants" - several books have been written about that subject. You cut them they feel and you can see them react when they're cut. Our emotional responses affect the plants that are around us. The plants also affect us. The aromas - all of the fragrances that we use in aromatherapy come from plants. Look at the effect that they have on us in the concentration that they're used. So you can see that if you take the time to look at, and study, you will see plants react.
 
Heather - Now, I want to mention something about this. There is a farmer I heard of in Saskatchewan in Canada. So his crop would have been huge, probably a mono-crop production - probably wheat or oats. But what he found was that in order to enhance the production of his crop he would get these loud speakers that he would put around the field and he would play Beethoven or Bach or something. And apparently it had a profound effect on these plants. Does that make sense to you Rashid?
 
Rashid - Oh, absolutely. Music is the healing force of the universe. Anywhere you go in the creation you're going to have music, you're going to hear sounds. So yeah, if you get the right vibration...and if you also understand from physics, everything has a vibration. So if you play music that has the same frequencies as those plants you're going to be effective.
 
Heather - How do you know the frequencies of plants?
 
Rashid - Intuitive. Here's a way to look at it. You like music. Isn't there some music that you find soothing, it helps you to spur your creativity, it calms you, relaxes you. And there's other music that excites you. And then there's some dissonance out there that will just drive you crazy. It's all the same. Part of the problem is we try to separate ourselves from plants and animals and see ourselves as so much different from them when in fact they have higher senses than we do.
 
Heather - That's interesting.
 
Rashid - I think so - that's my opinion.
 
Heather - When you're talking about the reductionist mentality toward plants how do you define that?
 
Rashid - You know I talked about Von Liebig. When he can reduce the plant needs down to nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium - that's reductionist. And it's isolated certain elements and it's not correct. When they started using ammonium phosphate and the nitrate out in the field as fertilizer that's reductionist. That was gunpowder they're using. So the war manufacturers say, "Well, we've made good money during the war, now what can we do to keep our plants running?" And they put that gunpowder out into the fields. That's reductionist. I could go on and on.
 
Let me say also that right now the leaves are falling off the trees and don't take those leaves and put them in some bags so that the trash man gets it. Collect those leaves and put them in your backyard and compost them so you can put them back into soil to grow your food next Spring. This is a leaf collection time.
 
And I'm so happy these leaves are falling down, that gives us material. When you're working on a farm you always want to have water and material around if you're going to grow food the way we do.
 
Heather - Thank you so much again, Rashid!
 

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