Established by President Roosevelt in 1943, Missouri's George Washington Carver National Monument was the first national monument ever dedicated to a Black American. Who was Carver?

Born a slave in the 1860s, Carver doggedly pursued his education in spite of being turned away time and time again due to his race. By 1896, he had earned a master's degree and become the first Black professor in the history of Iowa State University. Soon, Booker T. Washington lured Carver to chair the department of agriculture at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute. Upon arrival, he wrote to his colleagues, “I came here solely for the benefit of my people." He spent the next 47 years focused on improving the economic prospects of poor Black sharecroppers. He developed and taught methods of crop rotation and alternative cash crops that would improve the soil stripped of its nutrients by generations of cotton crops.

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