Inside Iowa State: Iowa State University

INSIDE IOWA STATE
February 1, 2002

Carver to receive Iowa's highest citizenship award

by Steve Sullivan
George Washington Carver, the son of slaves who became one of the world's most revered scientists, will receive the Iowa Award at a ceremony on campus Wednesday, Feb. 13. The Iowa Award is the state's highest citizen award. Carver was Iowa State's first African American student and faculty member.

The ceremony, part of a series of campus events, will be at 11 a.m. in the Memorial Union Sun Room. Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack will present the Iowa Award medal to Ronke Lattemore Tapp, an ISU Carver Scholar who earned a Ph.D. from ISU in December. Tapp then will present the medal to William Jackson, superintendent of the Diamond, Mo., Carver National Monument, where the medal will be on display. The ceremony and other events are open to the public.

Speaking at the ceremony will be Vilsack; Iowa State president Gregory Geoffroy; Jerry Schwertfeger, mayor of Winterset; Kevin LaGree, Simpson College president; and Dondra Bailey, Tuskegee University graduate and a graduate student at Iowa State. The Simpson College Madrigal Singers will perform and a reception will follow in the South Ballroom.

ISU graduate Paxton Williams will perform his one-person play, Listening to the Still Small Voice: The Story of George Washington Carver, at 2 p.m. in the Sun Room. A panel discussion about Carver's legacy will follow at 3:20 p.m. Carver's work resulted in the creation of 325 products from peanuts, more than 100 products from sweet potatoes and hundreds more from a dozen other plants native to the South. He carried the ISU extension concept to the South and created "movable schools," bringing practical agricultural knowledge to farmers.

Carver received many honors during his life and after his death in 1943. He was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1977 and inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1990. In 1994, Iowa State awarded him a Doctor of Humane Letters.

Other Iowa Staters who received the Iowa Award are Carrie Chapman Catt, suffragist and alumna, and John Vincent Atanasoff, who invented the first electronic digital computer while on the faculty.