In honor of Black History Month, here are few profiles of contributors to history of African descent:
George Washington
Date: Thu, 1872-11-07, on this date we recall the birth of George Washington in 1817. He was an African-American farmer, businessman and the founder of the town of Centralia, Washington.
Born a slave in Virginia, George Washington escaped and was raised by a white family in Missouri. Unable to attend school, he was tutored and eventually ran a sawmill in St. Joseph, MO. He struggled under the racial restrictions of that slave-holding state, and in 1850 joined a wagon train on the Oregon Trail. After reaching the northwest, George Washington again entered the lumber business and established a homestead on the Chehalis River. But his farm lay in the path of the Northern Pacific Railroad.
He and the company came to terms and with the settlement he received, Washington planned a new town in 1872. He called it Centerville, and he laid out 2,000 lots, setting aside sites for parks and churches. The town thrived, though the name was changed to Centralia.
George Washington spent the rest of his life there as an honored citizen. When he died in 1905, the town, 30 miles south of Olympia, shut down for a day of mourning. George Washington Park (named after him) is in the heart of Centralia, at Pearl St. and Harrison St.
George R. Carruthers
As a 9-year-old in 1948, George R. Carruthers (pdf) became interested in astronomy from reading books on the subject and science fiction comics. After earning a doctorate in aeronautical engineering in 1964, he went to work for NASA, where he headed the team that invented the ultraviolet camera spectrograph. The camera traveled to the moon with Apollo 16 in 1972. From the moon, researchers were able to study Earth’s atmosphere.
Thanks to Tanisha and Bryan Jones and their daughter Sinai for compiling these profiles from the following sources:
1) The Encyclopedia of African-American Heritage, by Susan Altman
2) The Roots website, theroots.com
3) Famous Black Inventors website, black-inventor.com