In 1942, the US Office of War Information assigned Arthur Rothstein to visit the Tuskegee Institute. Many of Rothstein’s images—including this one—were soon published in the OWI publication, “Negroes and the War” that promoted President Roosevelt’s belief that Black soldiers and citizens were making vital contributions to the war effort. Rothstein photographed trainees in the Reserve Officer Training Corps, and research programs in the Institute’s illustrious botany program that had been directed for more than four decades by “Dr. G.W. Carver, Grand Old Man of the plant sciences.”

Born into slavery in the 1860s, Carver had become a renowned educator and the best-known Black scientist in America. He was devoted to innovative research and the dissemination of farming practices that restored land depleted by cotton cultivation. Carver identified alternative crops that restored nitrogen to the soil when planted in rotation with cotton. His tireless research identified hundreds of practical uses and markets for these nitrogen-fixing plants, thereby helping to rescue countless farms from ruinous decline.